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September 15, 2004 Link to this post
The Fansites Weigh In
Last week, Eclarap of Halo France posted a huge writeup of his visit to Bungie's offices in early August, a bit ahead of schedule. (The 'ahead of schedule' part wasn't malicious - it was all a misunderstanding.) In the furor that erupted over this release, the Halo.fr writeup was pulled down, but Microsoft bumped up the news embargo date, to last Friday... and because of that bump, you've been reading dozens of hands-on writeups in the past several days. And now, finally, the original writeup is BACK online, along with his screenshots and the shakeycam vid he collected. There's a translation, of sorts, over at HaloPlanet, if you don't read French - but at the very least you can look at all the pretty pictures. And whoa, speaking of HaloPlanet... it looks like Fluffy has put up the first part of his OWN impressions of that weekend - it'll be reformatted at some point, and added to, but it's a great start. (For the record, I had NO drinks on the plane; it was Fluffy's incessant talking that made me miss that turn. At least we didn't end up in Fishkill, NY.) (Louis Wu 15:42:12 UTC)
September 15, 2004 Link to this post
No. Way.
Uncle Mato found an auction on eBay in which someone is selling a 10 DVD set of themselves playing through the entire campaign of Halo (one level per disc). Starting bid is $20.00. The idea is to help you through if you're stuck, or something... but remember that there are plenty of text walkthroughs on the net (for free), we posted a 10-movie collection of superfast runs on Legendary (for free), and actually playing the game is fun. To give the guy credit, he DID do a nice job of labeling the DVDs. We've put up a local, no-links copy of the auction, for when this rolls off eBay's site. (Louis Wu 15:06:42 UTC)
September 15, 2004 Link to this post
Bungie.net Screenshot Gallery Updated
Bungie.net has put up their own copies of the 10 new screenshots - you can find them in the Halo 2 Screenshot Gallery. Well, some of you can. I'm having trouble right now; some machines here can see the thumbnails, but get errors trying to load the full images, while others can't even get to Bungie.net. Hang tight, try a bit later, and things should be solved. (Louis Wu 12:40:02 UTC)
September 14, 2004 Link to this post
Halo CE Push - Quick Update
Well, I'll say that last night was pretty fun. I logged onto the HBO Coerce server - one of the few 16-players-full CE servers running last night - and saw a HOST of names I never see any more, including one I haven't seen on Halo CE or PC... EVER. It was a blast. But again, even with the added publicity... total numbers never rose above 400. There are still a few more nights in which the 1000 player total can be reached, in this push... but I have to tell you, I'm starting to believe that this is just too little, too late. There are many hundreds of thousands of copies of Halo PC and Mac Halo out there - but Halo CE came along too late to capture the PC crowd, and the Mac folks never even got a chance. If the combined readership of all the largest Halo fansites can't generate 1000 online players when they're BEGGING for them... it just ain't gonna happen. (Goes without saying that I'd LOVE to have that last statement proved wrong.) (Louis Wu 10:36:33 UTC)
September 11, 2004 Link to this post
The Big Screen
Trigun writes to point out a new episode of Halo: On Vacation over at the 7th Revolution. I don't get it... but it's probably a cultural reference I'm missing. (Louis Wu 15:24:53 UTC)
September 10, 2004 Link to this post
He's Gearing Up...
Captain Spark has opened a Halo 2 dialogue center, in preparation for the huge flood of recording he's planning to do in a few months. At the moment, it's got a bunch of modified screenshots he's put together... quite pretty. Check it out! (Louis Wu 13:53:53 UTC)
September 10, 2004 Link to this post
Following the Big One
IGN Xbox has a 6-page article on what it's like to cover Halo 2, the 'most anticipated game of all time'. Interesting read. Look for far more content in the next couple of days; the media embargo that was set to be lifted on September 15 will now lift in 4 hours - at 12:01 am PST Friday. (We'll have a couple of writeups of our own, I should think... though I'm not sure when they'll get posted.) And those juicy hi-res screenshots that went up a bit early yesterday will be available again. Thanks, Oddworld. (Louis Wu 03:05:55 UTC)
September 8, 2004 Link to this post
Cover Design Contest Closing
Blade points out that the Halo 2 Cover Design contest he's been running are closing tomorrow at midnight. If you're interested in entering, now's the time. (We mentioned this contest when it started.) (Louis Wu 21:31:32 UTC)
September 6, 2004 Link to this post
Halo Babies pours out the artwork
Because one batch of Wallpaper is never enough, you need to stop by Halo Babies, for a massive art update, including some very cool collaborative wallpaper done by Gruntsbane and akba. (akba started by vectorizing the MC pose from Zoe's farewell desktop, and then both akba and Gruntsbane put this image (with various amounts of tweaking) into supercool desktop images, in a variety of sizes.) There's also a new fan strip, new fan art, and a submission information page. Whew! (Louis Wu 21:28:59 UTC)
September 6, 2004 Link to this post
Pretties for your screen
Back, finally, from Minnesota. There was no Wallpaper update yesterday (oversight), so here it is today - 10 new desktop images in the Wallpaper Section. Apologies for the delay! (Louis Wu 21:19:26 UTC)
September 4, 2004 Link to this post
TalkXbox takes a longer look at Halo 2
coolp, using the time he spent playing Halo 2 at PAX as a starting point, wrote up a pretty extensive 'Hands-On Halo 2' article over at TalkXbox. Go see if there's anything you didn't know. (Louis Wu 03:20:01 UTC)
September 3, 2004 Link to this post
Seventh Column to undergo major changes
Ouch. There's a long story over on Bungie.net, talking about the long-awaited upgrade to the Seventh Column; starting next Tuesday, it'll be down for 1-2 weeks for the upgrade, and when it comes back, there'll be lots and lots of changes. This is bad news for the HBO Junkies, which was actually using one of the features slated for the chopping block (the Events database) for a big upcoming lanfest... but hey, we'll manage, I guess. First heads-up for this came from SPARTAN-01110101. (Louis Wu 04:27:05 UTC)
September 3, 2004 Link to this post
Friday Fanfic
Some of you may have noticed I haven't been around much today. I'm at a family wedding about 1500 miles from home... so updates will be scarcer than usual (unless other staffers can cover for me). I CAN, however, post some of the user-submitted content... starting with the Fan Fiction section. 5 new items tonight. Go see. (halosn, the server handling Fan Fiction and Miscellaneous Art, among other things, is acting a little funny these days... so be patient after you click a link. Yes, we're working on it.) (Louis Wu 03:15:46 UTC)
August 30, 2004 Link to this post
Monday Morning Musings
Ten new pieces in the Fan Fiction queue were approved today - many new series started! Go see what you can find. (Louis Wu 12:46:02 UTC)
August 29, 2004 Link to this post
More details about Big Screen Halo
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a theater in Logan, Utah, using their screens for Halo-playing late at night. bentllama ran across another story of the same theater - with a LOT more detail. An interesting read. (Don't mind the forum thread in which everyone tells him to search first; he's bentllama, after all.) (Louis Wu 14:16:03 UTC)
August 28, 2004 Link to this post
Fellowship of aliens, eh?
Halo continues to make inroads in the fashion world, as Pallor points out that the September issue of InStyle puts an Xbox with Halo in their "What's Hot Now" section, along with a list of celebrity fans including Justin Timberlake and Julia Roberts. As with last time, it's good to see new audiences start paying attention to video games in general. (Count Zero 16:07:28 UTC)
August 28, 2004 Link to this post
Potential WinXP issues relating to HPC/CE
Just a quick heads-up; if you play Halo PC or Halo CE on WinXP, and you're considering updating to SP2... be careful. At the very least, read this thread on the Gearbox forums. I have a pretty untweaked machine; it gets used for very, very little besides Halo. I'd kept up on all the updates prior to SP2, and never had a problem. My Radeon 9600 uses the newest 4.8 drivers. I made sure to open all the appropriate ports in my XP firewall. I updated to DirectX 9.0c. (All of this was prior to SP2, and both Halo PC and Halo CE ran smoothly.) However, after the update, when I fired up Halo CE, I got a 'Direct3D failed to initialize' error, with a suggestion that I check dxdiag. No errors were found, all appropriate functions were enabled. Nothing I could do would get CE to start, however. I uninstalled SP2, and all is well again. Just one guy's story. (Louis Wu 09:55:46 UTC)
August 27, 2004 Link to this post
Every Saga Has a Beginning...
343GS.com has started Season 2 of its EchoFourNineteen comic series... this one is in Flash. Voice acting is funky... but animation is great. No comments about the plot. Check it out! (Louis Wu 21:45:06 UTC)
August 27, 2004 Link to this post
IGN goes to Germany
IGN recently put up a sizeable movie, labeled 'Halo 2 Stuff', on its Halo 2 media page. It's available as a 320x240 WMP9 stream, for everyone, or a downloadable QuickTime (up to 315 mb in 640x480) for Insiders. What it IS is a (decent) shakeycam video of the Halo 2 presentation at the recent Leipzig Games Conference; Pete Parsons and Cam Payne played out the E3 2004 demo for the crowd. As far as footage goes, all of this is already on the web, in better quality... but the start of this video contains some pretty funny stuff. There are a couple of Nightmare-Armor-clad guys (that's not the funny part)... and then the two show announcers try to get the crowd riled up for the demo, and finally (all in German, remember) start yelling 'and here's Pete Parsons!', while pointing at Cam. (Pete wasn't on stage yet.) Cam is quietly trying to let them know he's not Pete - but they're pretty much ignoring him. Eventually, they get the message, and there are a couple of minutes of fumbling while someone goes off and FINDS Pete. Dunno... I found the whole thing hilarious - and I don't even speak German. (Pete, when he started the presentation, was cool as a cucumber.) Thanks to Art Vandelay for the heads-up. (Louis Wu 18:04:32 UTC)
August 25, 2004 Link to this post
I don't even LIKE Bees.
Since the ilovebees phenomenon started back on July 23, I've been ambivalent about posting updates related to it; on the one hand, it's clearly Halo2-related, so it falls within our purview... on the other hand, we're just not equipped to handle a game of this magnitude. A few weeks ago, in response to forum flooding, I banned the word 'bee' (and some common variants) from our forum, to try and convince people to think twice about posting this information. I wrote a short piece, explaining where HBO officially stood on the matter, and requested that discussion be taken elsewhere. I stopped short of outright banning of the discussion, however.
Until today. Last night, I had to delete more than 350 posts on our forum that added nothing but noise; once again, folks were simply regurgitating what they found elsewhere on the net, without even TRYING to read what others had already written. The general excuse for this is 'this forum is too hard to understand' or 'there's too much here to look through'. And that's the point. The puzzle is pretty interesting; cut through the silliness and there's a lot to like about it. And it's definitely related to Halo 2, so once all is said and done, we'll do our best to wrap it up and include any relevant information in our various sections. For now, though, conversation MUST take place somewhere else - because what was happening here was not conversation, it was unintelligible noise. (And oh, yeah - for now, please stop sending us updates about what's happening on the various ILB-related websites; we're not going to post anything on the front page about it... that would simply encourage folks to discuss it again on the forum which would lead to... well, you know.) Update: Fluffy, site director at HaloPlanet, reminded me that they've just opened a new bee-related forum over there; yet ANOTHER good place to go and discuss this stuff. (Louis Wu 12:37:48 UTC)
August 25, 2004 Link to this post
Zanzibar Footage Update
As of now, a bit over 8 hours after posting the first link, the BitTorrent network has served up over 5300 copies of the MLG Halo 2 gameplay video (almost 650 Gigabytes). You guys rock. :) However, there are lots of people who can't use BitTorrent - they're on firewalled corporate networks, or family members have a problem with p2p software on the computer... for whatever reason, these people will not be able to see this film until it is made available via normal web channels. And this process has begun. The first few direct links have been posted on our forum - and we'll continue to add new ones to our Mirror Page as they come in (if you have the bandwidth to spare, throw a copy up, send us a link, we'll add it; when your bandwidth runs out, let us know, we'll yank the link). Please - if you CAN use the BitTorrent network, DO so. (Hopefully, later tonight we'll also have a Two Degrees link up for you, as well.) But the direct downloads are there on the Mirror page if you need them. (Tonight, or tomorrow, smaller versions will begin to appear, as well. I hope.) Once again, thanks to Dolbex and the entire MLG crew (and Bungie!) for making this accessible; it's clear from today's downloads that this is a cool drink of water to a LOT of parched Halo 2 fans. Update: Oops, almost forgot... mrsmiley, the player in the vid itself, started a thread on our forum to answer questions people had about the gameplay (or his performance :) ). Check it out! (Louis Wu 01:26:03 UTC)
August 24, 2004 Link to this post
Zanzibar Gameplay - in Hi-Res Glory
In the past few days, many sites have put up shakeycam video of public Halo 2 play - and many sites have been shut down by the demand. The sad thing is... quality has been HORRIBLE on almost every single released movie. Demand is still huge, because people want to see how this game plays... but it's like trying to enjoy the dance by rubbing a clear spot in the glass on the outside of the barn. Dolbex managed to grab almost 20 minutes of direct-feed footage of an 4v4 at last weekend's MLG-hosted Downpour event in Seattle, and he's shunted it over to us for release to the masses. Before you get a link, there are a few things you should know:
- This is NOT the final version of Halo 2; this is the E3 build of the map Zanzibar, created 4 months ago, and VASTLY altered since that point. If you see something that you don't like, chances are Bungie saw it also, and fixed it.
- There is no public demo of this level; this event wasn't even on the list of public Halo 2 showings. It was not mentioned beforehand because Bungie wanted it to be a surprise for the MLG guests, and because they didn't want people coming to the tournament SPECIFICALLY for Halo 2. In other words; this was a one-time deal, don't expect to see another showing like this.
- The game depicted here is mostly MLG staff and volunteers; the screen you're watching is mrsmiley, of Halo Babies.
- If you like this stuff, there is about an hour and half MORE footage at MLGpro.com and is primarily pro players playing Halo 2 in the world's first Halo2 tourney. Players like Ogre 1, Strangepurple, Darkman, Ogre 2, and Zyos. You can view it by becoming a member of Video On Demand ($20 to help support HaloTV/server costs).
All that said, I've taken Dolbex's footage and encoded it to a not-server-crushing 123 mb, and we're releasing it via BitTorrent. If you don't have a BitTorrent client, you can grab one here. Once you've got that, point it to our Seattle Halo 2 Footage seed, and don't forget to leave the window open when you're finished, to share the bandwidth love! The demand for this file is going to be huge; you can make it less painful to everyone involved by chipping in. (Later today, I'll release a smaller segment for bandwidth-challenged folks... please be patient.) Update: A lot of people seem unfamiliar with BitTorrent, and are complaining about slow download speeds. An explanation of exactly why this is happening and how BitTorrent works is beyond the scope of this post. However, the reason we are inflicting BitTorrent on you is that given the size of this movie and the tremendous demand for it, this is the only way we (or anyone short of, say, FilePlanet) could afford to host this movie. Bandwidth costs money- lots of bandwidth costs LOTS of money, way more than any fansite can afford. Just remember, when you finish downloading, please don't close the BitTorrent window. Think of it as a favor to the community that has brought you this movie- you just downloaded it from all the people who didn't close their windows either, and everyone who downloads it later will be able to do so thanks to you. Every little bit counts, so please help us justify posting more movies like this in the future. (Updated by CZ) (Louis Wu 15:58:41 UTC)
August 24, 2004 Link to this post
Next Up: MC on a Pogo Stick
Nil, building on some community speculation, finished off this picture of a new Halo 2 vehicle... but then confirmed that the MC could do worse. Thanks to Anton P. Nym for starting this whole mess. (Louis Wu 11:33:02 UTC)
August 23, 2004 Link to this post
More Leipzig Footage
Nafe Rubeus continues his quest for Zanzibar multiplayer footage, with another german website, die-klobrille.de. There are two links; the first is a 103 mb, 19-minute file that will make you nauseous if you watch the whole thing at a shot. (It starts with some footage of the Nightmare-Armor-clad MS rep on the show floor, and then moves on to game footage... the blue flashing really got to me after a bit.) The second is a mirror of the very first clip we mentioned - but you'll have to copy and paste the link, rather than click it - there's a typo in the code. If all goes well, we might have something better for you soon... (Louis Wu 21:34:26 UTC)
August 23, 2004 Link to this post
Halo CE maps - on the Mac
Grenadiac points out FANTASTIC news for the Mac community - bobindashadows has found a way to port Halo CE maps to the Mac. The system isn't complete yet - it requires modifying the way bitmaps are stored, so they can be tacked on safely to the existing bitmaps.map file (so that multiple mods can coexist) - but he's got a working prototype, with some great screenshots. Head on over to MacDev and read all about it! (Louis Wu 21:27:53 UTC)
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