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Thursday, December 2, 2004 |  |
Round and round and round she goes...
A few days ago, we opened a new section devoted to BOLL's panoramic shots of Halo 2. Thanks to BOLL's industriousness, we not only have a new set of 15 images for you, but the entire set of images (Halo AND Halo 2) are now displayed by the same system. You can easily jump back to see the older images if you choose to. Man... I LOVE the Metropolis shot. (Louis Wu 21:20:38 UTC) (permalink)
5 million copies.
The traditionally insane 'biggest shopping day of the year', the day after Thanksgiving, helped push Halo 2 over the 5 million mark in sales in less than 2 and a half weeks. You can read the press release for more details. Thanks, Dolbex. (Louis Wu 17:21:04 UTC) (permalink)
Mothergoat sings about Halo 2
I know it seems like pigpiling on Bungie... but it's not. Yet another hardcore community member has taken the time to write out, coherently, what he thinks is wrong with Halo 2. Mothergoat wrote up a 'Reflections on Halo 2' post on our forum, looking at the little things that (for him anyway) diminished Halo 2 from a GREAT game to a great game. (Tip o' the hat to Dazza for the distinction.) Before anyone goes ballistic: mothergoat says, clearly, "I love Halo 2 as a video game. Just... not as a Halo game." Personally, I find it heartening that so many longtime fans are making the effort to try and nail down what it is about Halo 2 that disappointed them; not a single one of the criticism posts we've mentioned recently has said 'Bungie sucks!' or 'Halo 2 sucks!' or 'I'm never buying another Bungie product again!' These are people who LOVED Halo, and (for the most part) LOVED Bungie, and want to see them get it right(er) next time. They want to turn the great game that is Halo 2 into the GREAT game that could be Halo 3. (Or whatever it ends up being.) (Louis Wu 16:21:36 UTC) (permalink)
New Bungie Wallpapers - Decoded
Recently, Bungie posted two new desktop images - both contained 'Covenant text' at the bottom. The code, it seems, has changed a bit since the Halo2.com site went live - but Ain Soph Aur, with the help of Hybrid-X-Ultima, managed to decode them anyway. ('Jiralhanae' is the Covenant name for 'Brute', according to the Limited Edition manual.) (Louis Wu 16:08:40 UTC) (permalink)
Those stats just keep coming
There's yet ANOTHER Stats aggregation option now (thanks, Craven); vviperrx, at the Bungie.net forums, has written a perl script to do the basic work for you. I just tested it out (the linux version, which I ran under FreeBSD - it's pretty generic Unix, actually), and it works nicely. There's also a Windows version - I haven't tested it. He's still working on it, and more details can be found in that forum thread. I'm going to hold off on any NEW aggregation techniques; it sounds like an entire section needs to be set up, and I don't want the front page overrun with this sort of technical stuff (I realize it's only interesting to a subset of our readers). You're welcome to continue sending in stuff you find - but realize I won't be posting it until I find time to compile a full 'Stats Tools' section. (Louis Wu 15:49:25 UTC) (permalink)
Prime SOMETHING, anyway.
Hehe - you thought the Covenant came to Earth to kill us. Calvin has learned otherwise, in today's Calvin and Halo. (Louis Wu 15:03:47 UTC) (permalink)
The Engine Room
A few days ago, kornman00, ViperNEO, and Fayt released a movie runthrough of a new level they were working on for HaloCE - called 'The Engine Room', it recreates the space from the Maw pretty nicely. (Thanks to MasterGrief for pointing this out.) The following day, kornman00 released a beta version of the map. (There's another version coming tomorrow, probably.) Check this out! (Louis Wu 14:43:50 UTC) (permalink)
Archiving your old XBL stats
There's an interesting news post over at Bungie.net - it addresses some of the fears and desires fans have expressed about long-term stats. Currently, there's no easy way to archive your old stats when Bungie does a purge... and even between purges, there's no way to look at your CUMULATIVE stats (total kills in all games, etc). Bungie.net user Clustered Index has put together an Excel worksheet that helps solve these problems - you can read about it (and download it) from his website. Nice! Update: Apparently, the XML tools needed for this don't exist on all versions of Excel. focused7 sent mail saying you needed "Excel 2003 with a Microsoft Office Professional install" -I hadn't realized things were quite so spread out on the PC side. (On the mac side, you can buy Office. Period. The version of Excel that comes in it uses this worksheet without problems.) Update 2: Eep, I'm wrong; I can VIEW content, but not import it. In order to use this worksheet, your copy of Excel will need XML Import tools. Sorry! (Thanks again to focused7 for setting me straight.) (Louis Wu 13:52:08 UTC) (permalink)
Wednesday's news in brief:
Tuesday's news in brief:
