A Game By Any Other Name
Matt Soell dropped into our forum just to clarify one point: Combat Evolved was, in fact, a marketing catchphrase for Halo and not actually part of the title:
Death by intelligence.
Halo A Hit At Necrowombicon
Ok, perhaps hit is a bit of an exaggeration. But it was played at the recent Penny Arcade convention, despite the authors' earlier expressions of acrimony towards Bungie's first Xbox title, not to mention the Xbox itself.
Magazines To Preview Halo 2 In October
Harry Al-Shakarchi and Griffon , via Louis Wu at HBO, respectively gave warning that PC Gamer in the US and Edge Magazine in the UK will be doing previews of Halo 2. Edge has a teaser graphic up.
New Movie From Team Overkill
Team Overkill, a talented Halo-abusing team, has released a new video called Causing A Ruckus. Some charming antics in it - worth watching. We've mirrored it.
More HNC Coverage
Also seen on HBO: tourney writeups by 909 (Plano, Texas) at HBO and Matt Soell (Washington) at Bungie.net. Thanks Louis Wu.
Halo 2 Trailer Shown At Renton HNC Event
Cino posted in the HBO forum that a Bungie representative showed up there and showed the Halo 2 trailer. And guess what? It turned out to be true, as Matt Soell confirmed:
IGN Posts Xbox Live FAQ
Xbox.ign.com has put up an FAQ page about MS' upcoming Xbox Live online gaming service. One of the most amusting parts of the page is a graphic with a red arrow pointing to the Xbox's ethernet port that is labeled Xbox Live Goes Here . Just in case you weren't sure.
There is one interesting quote about pricing:
Vector40 Posts IMAX Halo Drama
Vector40 recently traveled to San Jose for a videogame tournament to be played on an IMAX dome (well, at least the finals) and Halo was one of the included games. While our good friend didn't make it into the finals, he did have quite a dramatic run, and it makes a great read. His description of the final match is particularly entertaining:
Bungie.net Posts HNC Regional Schedules
Louis Wu at HBO gave us the heads-up that Yeroen at Bungie.net has posted the schedule for the Halo National Championship regionals. It's got the name, address, and phone number of each location hosting a regional along with the start time.
Aquaduct Updated
Aquaduct, the superior Xbox tunneling app for Mac OS X, has been updated to beta 3 today. The changes since beta 2 include:
GamesFirst Looks At Second Halo
As seen on Voodoo Extreme, GamesFirst has put up a preview of Halo 2. Basically the same information as everyone else, and the same screen shots, but we mention it here for completeness.
Okay, what DO we know about Phoenix?
There have been a few stories on the Internet with tidbits about Phoenix, although the accuracy of all of them cannot be guaranteed.
On June 28, 2000 we posted this story about a GameSpot item referring to Bungie's Phoenix project. Since then it has been made part of their paid archives, so we can't see the entire article.
The part we quoted stated that:
Will Phoenix support multiplayer?
There is at the moment no specific information on whether or not Phoenix will support multiplayer modes, and if so, whether over LAN, Internet, or both.
However, in the recent history of Bungie games only one has released without some multiplayer functionality (Oni) and this was not the original intent.
Also, Microsoft's Xbox Live service launches later this fall, so if Phoenix is released sometime after that it could, conceivably, be supported on it.
What platforms will Phoenix be released for?
It is expected that Phoenix will be released for the Xbox. It is unknown whether it will be released for any other platforms.
What kind of game is Phoenix?
Since it was first referred to as fantasy siege in an erroneous quote of Ed Fries, it has been assumed that Phoenix is a realtime strategy game with some kind of medieval theme, an inheritor of Bungie's Myth series (although not direct, as Take Two now owns those rights).