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Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |  |
Halo 2 is in the House
Last week, the Mountain Dew/Halo 2 contest ended, and a few teams got email that they'd won. Two of these teams showed up at Bungie headquarters last Saturday, and now one of the participants has written up his experience. 3 solid hours of Halo 2 netplay on Zanzibar is definitely enough to get a feel for what the game is like - and they liked. Lots and lots of details - some of these came out from folks who played at E3, but face it, it's much harder to nail down details when you've only got 10-15 minutes to play. Lots of stuff, like sniper recoil or shorter melee range, point out tweaks that Bungie has added to make gameplay more balanced; folks who've gotten fat exploiting the old status quo will probably be unhappy, but for the average player, the game just got better. Check it out! Thanks to JNewt for the heads-up. (Louis Wu 17:52:04 UTC) (permalink)
Hi-Res Screenies, collected
Halo Zone has posted a collection of ultra-hi-res screenshots; while most have been available from other sources (the 1920x1080 screen grabs from the Halo ad are new), they haven't all been in one place before. If you want multi-thousand-pixel Halo 2 goodness, and you couldn't be bothered to scour the web for these... visit Halo Zone, and grab them all in one place! Update: Eep - apparently this site attempts to install a suite of spyware when viewing, including Bargain Buddy and Internet Optimizer. If you're viewing it on a Windows box, beware. Sorry about this. Thanks to P78 for the heads-up. Update 2: Problem fixed - ads removed. There should be no more trouble, according to Funkmon. (Thanks, Funkmon!) (Louis Wu 09:55:07 UTC) (permalink)
Halo CE No Leading Patch in Testing
NiTrOuSoXiDe has released a no-leading patch for Halo CE; it's currently in beta-testing. To be used, both the server and the client need to have this installed for it to work (a download link is in that thread). If you're finding that the changes in client-side prediction made in Halo CE made playing more difficult compared to HaloPC... give this a try! Thanks to MasterGrief for pointing out the thread. (Louis Wu 09:31:08 UTC) (permalink)
Putting the 'Oo' In Zoom.
In classic Stuntmutt fashion, today's One One Se7en looks at an unintended consequence of a new Halo 2 feature. (No, it's not bee-related.) If it makes no sense to you... use that mouse button. (Louis Wu 09:21:45 UTC) (permalink)
Mac Halo Timer 1.5 released
The latest version of the Mac Halo Timer, now up to 1.5, has been announced. Lots of new features - if you're running MacOSX 10.3 or higher, and you want to keep track of spawn times for various items, this puppy's for you! (Louis Wu 09:01:23 UTC) (permalink)
GNF Phase 10
The final winning run for our Going Nowhere Fast contest, Trevor Fitch's Maw run, is now available for download via BitTorrent. Once again - it hasn't been mentioned for a bit, so here is a BitTorrent client download link. This run is really efficient - no deaths at all, and some really classy moments. 82 mb, QuickTime format. Go grab it! Now that all 10 winning runs have been released, we're ready to begin consideration of the Grand Prize winner - these 10 runs, plus 20 more, will be analyzed for style and speed, and the run that comes out on top of the heap will garner for its owner a brand-new Limited-Edition Halo Xbox. Expect an announcement sometime next week. (Louis Wu 08:58:14 UTC) (permalink)
The Bee Thing - Again
While I was out last night, a huge thread erupted on our forum, arguing about my choice yesterday to ban the use of the word 'bee' from forum posts. I've been accused of stifling speculation, of favoritism, and of limiting new fans from entering the Halo community (among other sins). In my defense, I'd like to say that I really do believe the ilovebees campaign is Halo 2-related, and that it comes from official sources... but I DON'T believe those sources are inside Bungie. And my biggest problem with the entire phenomenon (at least here at HBO) is that there is ZERO ORGANIZATION. The day this story broke, there were over 800 forum posts on the subject. If someone had filtered them for new and unique information, however, I bet there were fewer than 25... all the rest were simply restating finds that had already been found. (On Bungie.net, the signal-to-noise ratio was even worse; there were 5000 posts that first day or so, and only a tiny fraction contained new information.) Without organization, this puzzle is nothing more than an annoyance. There is some wonderful organization out there - at the NetninjaBeeWiki site, at the unfiction forums, and elsewhere - but NOT HERE. And THAT'S why I asked that discussion be taken elsewhere. It's likely that this puzzle will provide a ton of fodder for the Halo Story page, and that an after-the-fact analysis will show that it was hugely productive in building hype for Halo 2 - but for now, other, non-bee-related material is becoming harder and harder to process because of the roar, and I'm simply not capable of doing it all. (There's a great article on the subject, summing up my personal views pretty well, up over at Gamespot right now. Worth a read.) (Louis Wu 08:48:02 UTC) (permalink)
Tuesday's news in brief:
Monday's news in brief:
