Lorraine Mehve R. McLees posted in the HBO forum the other day, just to clarify a couple of comments people were making on the Official Xbox Magazine cover art. The work is, indeed, hers-- but she was so tired after finishing it that she forgot to sign it.
Gaming Age's Marcus Lai has summed up his reaction to the Halo 2 demo shown by MS at E3 thusly: Halo 2 Rocks.
We've never known Marcus to be wrong before. But then again, we don't know Marcus. So don't take our word for it.
Mnemesis over at Bungie Sightings has posted his impressions from the Halo 2 demonstration at MS' E3 press conference. He seemed pretty impressed, especially with some of the new wrinkles the sequel is sporting:
There are other stories on the PC held by MS at E3 (everybody with us so far?) at HomeLAN Fed, TeamXbox and Eurogamer.
Reuters has reported that Microsoft's Home and Entertainment division, which produces the Xbox and contains developers like Bungie Studios and others that make games for it, lost $190 million USD in Q3 2002, which ended on March 31. This compares to a loss of $97 M in the same quarter the year before. Quarterly revnue was nearly cut in half, dropping from $943 M to $493 M.
BusinessWeek Online has a story where author Andrew Bunnie Huang claims to have pre-sold over 400 copies of his controversial, as-yet-to-be-published title Hacking the Xbox: an Introduction to Reverse Engineering . Huang is self-publishing the volume on May 27.
In the Reuters Technology section on Yahoo News, there's a story summarizing the events of Microsoft's press conference at E3, and it does, of course, mention the Halo 2 demonstration.
Not to be outdone, IGN also has some new Halo 2 stuff up-- thanks to Louis Wu at HBO, where we noticed the news. Their full trailer footage, like GameSpot's, are for paying subscribers only, but they have some free teaser clips.
gamer90 over at Subnova pointed out some recent Halo 2 items at GameSpot, including two new trailers, six new screenshots, and a new preview article. Enjoy.
A PlayStation emulator called PCSX has been ported to the Xbox, allowing owners of modchipped Xboxes to play PSX games that have been ripped to their Xbox hard drives. The story is at Slashdot.
Raptorv22 wrote in to let us know that the first Halo 2 clan (at least that we knew of) has now opened its doors: the 67th Raptors. Go take a look.
In the forums at HBO and Subnova lately, there's been much attention paid to a special easter egg put in a Halo level by Jaime Case Griesemer for the benefit of his long-time significant other, Meg Pallor Sagi. It has come to be known as The Megg .
Some may remember the questions raised when Halo was first announced for the Xbox, specifically with regards to how chatting would work in Internet play. This, of course, turned out to be a non-issue when Halo shipped without any officially supported Internet play.
However, at the time, there were those of the opinion that any shooter was best played with a mouse and a keyboard, and that having a keyboard gave the added advantage of allowing text chat.
OK, since we hardly ever update around here these days, maybe this will slip by and no one will notice. Maybe not.
Anyway, this has to be about the strangest Halo reference we've ever seen. And before anybody complains, the text and images in this story we're about to link to are of a decidedly sexual, some might say odd-- nature. So be forewarned.
