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It's actually Bungie, the company behind Halo, that's selling a specially designed shirt for charity. The RvB guys just linked to it, along with the standard lineup of charities. Get the shirt here, read Bungie's news post about it here.

Linky, and cue Firefox users complaining about Gecko's abysmal performance with certain design elements (but it's open source, so people can fix the problems! That've been there for about five years! Go go open source!).

I suppose it's fairly informationless,[1] although there is a link to a page from the "Bible" Bungie have prepared, which is vaugely interesting for Halo nuts (like me).

[1] Condensed version: Hollywood types wanted to make a Halo movie. We held back, and were advised to write our own script, and not to sign all the rights away. We got Alex Garland. He's written some good books and movies, and like Halo. We say the scripts great. Fox and Universal are the studios producing it.

Linky, and cue Firefox users complaining about Gecko's abysmal performance with certain design elements (but it's open source, so people can fix the problems! That've been there for about five years! Go go open source!).

I suppose it's fairly informationless,[1] although there is a link to a page from the "Bible" Bungie have prepared, which is vaugely interesting for Halo nuts (like me).

[1] Condensed version: Hollywood types wanted to make a Halo movie. We held back, and were advised to write our own script, and not to sign all the rights away. We got Alex Garland. He's written some good books and movies, and like Halo. We say the scripts great. Fox and Universal are the studios producing it.

In a lot of people's opinion, it was a game that was NOT a sequel and was relatively unknown that actually made the first Xbox a success. The game I'm referring to, of course, is Halo. I know lots of people who bought an Xbox for the sole purpose of playing Halo (and later Halo 2 as a result). From what I can see, Xbox 360 won't have many of these wildcard games at launch to help potentially boost its success.

I don't know if any has posted this yet, but http://www.bungie.net/ usese some really impressive CSS. The page overlay is something that simply cannot be done with traditional table-based layout.

Yep, it is... and he used to play Halo 2, though it appears he hasn't played on Live since the beginning of January.

Almost right..except that MechAssault bootstrap still works on my newer Xbox (which doesn't support the MechAssault installation). I've played Live a bunch and I've booted from the "Emergency Linux" savegame in MechAssault. If it doesn't work for you then your Mechassault CD is too new, not your Xbox.

Anyway, it's not so much the disabling of Linux that I'm worried about (I can always reformat), but Frankie's statement last week that "I would delete anything on my Xbox that shouldn't be there, and I would do that today." He says "anything", not "any Halo 2 files". (Of course in TFA he mentions Halo 2 files by name, but it's not absolutely clear that non-Halo 2 files don't trigger the Banhammer.)

Why don't you just link the bungie.net article? News sites just continue a pointless cycle of linking.
http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=aut oupdate4&p=4040317/

Many games today have too much flash or pow, though the art or message or depth of the games have improved in some places.

For example: The Marathon trilogy, made by a few guys whose company went on to make another pretty popular game. This game was the "thinking man's" Doom, complete with aliens, serious weapons (many of which have returned in one form or another in Halo), and a deep storyline that enriched play. Marathon was also one of the first (if not THE first) multiplayer FPS game, introducing the concept of the mouse-as-head game control to make for rapid movement.

The coolness of this game is that it's now freeware (not open-source, however). The game originally appeared as an original Mac OS game. That game is available and (currently) playable only a Mac that can run Mac OS 9 or Classic (in Mac OS X). However, Bungie also released the second game, Marathon 2, as a Windows game. So Mac and Windows users can download a special Mac OS X-native or Windows-native application (thanks to enterprising programmers who loved the game and wanted to play on) to play the original code, complete with a few modern graphic pick-me-ups.

Bungie still puts in a few Marathon in-jokes in their games. The first one you'll see is the insignia on Captain Keyes' uniform in Halo, and later, look closely at the Monitor's eyeball. Familar?

I'm still fond of old-school Zelda games on NES, SNES, and Game Boy, too.

Frog blast the vent core!

Can't wait for Terminal.....

Moviegoers ask,
Have you read the Halo movie script?

I've read an early draft of the script, and it rules. I heart Alex Garland's stuff anyway, from The Tesseract to 28 Days Later. Garland also wrote the script for an upcoming Sci-Fi flick, Sunshine, which you can read more about here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/

Best thing about Alex, apart from his ability to type awesomeness, is that he's actually a Halo fan, and he really, really gets it.

So they've got a script written by a Halo fan who also happens to be an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter, and Bungie likes it. Sounds like they could be on the right track. I'm not familiar with Alex Garland's work myself.

A Day in the Life of an International Halo 2 Tournament - Cabel vs. the World!!!

An insiders view of Australias Halo 2 representative - Cabel's progress to the finals.

The scene was set - it was the day of the World Halo 2 Xbox Live Championship Finals. The 24 Xbox Live Region champions had been decided and it was game on for the final series.

This was the worlds first global Xbox Live Halo 2 tournament and the final series was being decided by a playoff on Xbox Live. The global championship rounds were played on Friday June 10th in double elimination rounds. The 24 regional winners were sectioned into four pools of six players each. The top three moved on to the next round, while the bottom three from each group moved into an elimination bracket. Once a regional champion lost twice, they were eliminated. Each round lasted 10 minutes with unlimited kills. All the final matches were played on the new Halo 2 map, Warlock as a Free For All Slayer with standard SMG spawn (what! no BR you say ).

More info at: http://www.xbox.com/halo2/tournament.htm

Earlier in April; Cabel had beaten out a very strong field (including his brother who almost snaked the win ) in a close fought FFA at the BigPond Halo 2 Tournament to be crowned the Australian champ and our representative on the world stage.

I arrived at Microsoft Australia's Headquarters at about 6:45PM with the trusty 'XboxZone Com AU' server in hand. We had thought that given our location in the world that we needed every advantage we could get to overcome the tyranny of distance (or network latency LAG for you simple folks ). Cabel may be playing on the 10Mbit link at MS HQ but nothing compensates for the 200ms delay to most other countries. I offered my server Xbox for Cabel to play on for the night - it was hoped that since this Xbox has been hosting Halo 2 games pretty much non stop 24x7 since early January on a 100Mbit link that its awesome Halo 2 host record/rating (300+ clan matches, 1500+ Big Team Battles, 2000+ large custom games, etc) could steal it host in some important games. Alas it wasn't to be so - each of the finals matches was hosted by a Referee (XboxLiveCommish the guy in white hiding in the corner ) at MS HQ in the states - I suspect Bungie rigged things up so he'd always be host for every round - which is fair I guess with no player getting direct host advantage.

Cabel and his brother Senyo were already there with Pidge and Kumar from Microsoft and after a bit of networking jiggery pokery it was practice time before the first game at 9PM.

It was then Pizza ordering time and since we had to plan ahead for a long night (if we made it to the finals they wouldn't be played till 5AM - so think positive and plan to be needing food for the long haul ). Senyo got to order a crapload of pizzas for the four of us on Microsoft's account - nice

In the first round Cabel's pool included:

ii CaBeL ii - Australia
l Kobegod l - Taiwan
Otcho Boy - Switzerland
ZpiKeY - Norway
Billykater - Austria
GermanFreak - Denmark

Pregame chat in the lobby was pretty friendly and discovering that GermanFreak was in fact NOT from Germany but from Denmark was a bit of a head spin - but hey - whatever makes you happy

Cabel had a slow start but picked up the pace as he went along to eventually catch the leader just at the end equaling on Kills but taking the win on Assists and lower deaths.

Full game stats at: http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStats.aspx?gameID= 201030311

Our next round wasn't till midnight so it was going to be a long 3 hour wait - time for some practice, customs and a bit of matchmaking.

Cabel and his brother Senyo also whittled away the hours with some head to head and double teams on the fast link at Microsoft - I couldn't believe how many people quit the games against them or worse tho

There are perfectly valid and useful apps for OS9 that simply are no longer updated or maintained (and often can't be because they are closed-source the the company who made them no longer cares), yet these programs are still needed by people working with more modern, up-to-date software just because no replacement has yet been coded.

My case in point: Aleph One is an open-source FPS engine based on Bungie's classic Marathon series. While the original Marathon series was pretty much Mac (Classic) only, the latest version of the engine runs on OSX, Windows, Linux... there's even some outdated versions for Be. The whole thing now runs in OpenGL, all platforms are being standardized on the SDL media layer, and so on. The engine itself, while still by no means a "modern" 3D engine (that's not the point), is very up-to-date and in keeping with current technologies and formats. There are still mod projects being made for this engine.

HOWEVER, all the TOOLS used to make CONTENT for the engine are not open-source (and can't be, the source code has been lost by the original developers). So for all of us working on such mod projects, we NEED to be able to run older Classic applications.

I guess my point is, modern mainstream apps from MS and Adobe, and minor system utilities or helper apps that get obsoleted with every OS or big-app update, are not the only things people use computers for. There are all sorts of niche applications that don't get updated because *they don't need to be*, so forcing them to update or not run when their users upgrade is not right. Hell, games themselves are often in this category. Every now and then I go back into my older games, like Caesar III for a current example, and start playing again because, despite being old, they're still fun.

You're right that writing NEW code for OS9 is stupid. But there's a lot of OLD code that doesn't otherwise NEED to be updated, which plenty of users probably still want to run. Forcing them to stop if they want to upgrade their system (or to keep an old machine around to run it), just isn't right.

I looked at the archives for that page and found this link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040206174724/http:/ /www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/0/news/ stories/the_marathon_connection.html

Which they practically never do. Why? Because that would be one less subscriber per banning, and that would mean Microsoft's XBL numbers would drop, as well as $50/year in subscription revenue.

When a gamertag comes up as violating their policies for online behavior, they are punished by being banned from the service. Keep in mind, this isn't just a ban on Halo 2, this is a ban on Xbox Live as a whole, so you won't be able to go online AT ALL during your ban. Initially a ban may be a day, it may be a week or, depending on severity, it may be permanent. Kiss that $50 goodbye.

As long as MS is bringing in money off of XBL subscriptions, they won't be canceling accounts for things like they say they will. The Xbox and XBL are money pits, practically bottomless money pits right now, so they want to recoup as much as possible, and banning people for things they should be banned for does not bring in any revenue.

Gee, someone who sucks worse than I do...

Ok, so maybe it was exageration. And actually, I have improved quite a bit over the last two weeks. However, Slayer is definitely my worst playtype because I don't seem to be very good at aiming. If I take someone else head-on, I almost always lose, unless I have something like the shotgun.

As for other gametypes, I find those more enjoyable because I can usually contribute something to a team. I'm fairly decent at returning flags, if I can get to it.

This was my greatest game so far though. It's the first individual game I've ever won.

The table in question is the one headed "Level" and "Maximum Match." The old table started out with Levels 0-5 allowing +5 levels, Levels 6-10 akllowing +6 levels, and on up to Levels 36 and up allowing +10 levels. The new table shows the maximum match for Level 1 is +10 levels, Level 2 is +9 levels, on up to Level 6 being +5 levels, then the maximum match slowly increases from there, with the curve getting steeper as you hit Level 30.

However, the XP-to-level table also shows that the XP required per level has dropped, starting with Level 4 and becoming more pronounced as levels increase. (Old Level 50 = 44500 XP, new Level 50 = 10250 XP) The XP exchange table has also become less steep the way it slopes off as the level difference increases, and the "Loss Factor" handicap table for low-level players now doesn't cause you to lose full XP until you hit Level 29.

It's difficult to interpret the effect of all of these changes, but I suspect that I'll probably be able to get back my old level easily enough once the addicts start zooming up into the 30s and 40s, which I expect they will soon. (Someone's already hit Level 22 in Rumble Pit play, and this is just the day after the stats got reset...)

I didn't see any evidence of such a change on the stats overview page. Can you point me to where they have that information?

Besides, now that the levels should be a lot more even in skill level, the games should actually be MORE interesting and closer than they were before. At least once people start drifting to the proper levels.

I don't really see what the big deal is. What do you think the game was like when everyone first signed up? I would imagine everyone started off at the same level, leaving Halo 1 experts and Halo 2 newbies playing against each other. From TFA (not the article linked in the story, the REAL Article, "It'll take several games before skill levels begin to even out again, so initially, players will be matched against folks who're a lot better, a lot worse and everything in between. As you start to level up, you'll also level off, and find yourself playing against similarly skilled players once again." Furthermore, does your "level" even influence anything other than the people you play against? I dunno, it seems like a big deal about nothing.

... are people who have high stats due to exploitation of broken combos, glitches, or loopholes. Now that the recent updates have dealt with many of these problems, it's fair to have everyone start over from a new, level playing field, instead of waiting for the false ratings to drop down through the ranks to their true level.

The point of the ratings is to have everyone play people close to their skill level. Yes, resetting the stats screws this up, but only for a short time. There are already players up to level 20 on the leaderboards.

Read the actual release from Bungie.net: http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=stathop perupdate&p=3243913

First one I remember is Marathon the original had a deathmatch map called 5-D Space. Remember that one guys?

We're still finalizing our plans but we can give you a general idea of what to expect. The existing core playlists will remain intact. The first two free maps, Containment and Warlock, will be integrated into the appropriate existing playlists. Since the 2 premium maps are "premium" and won't necessarily be on everyone's Xbox right away, we can't add them to the core playlists without creating all sorts of problems. Instead, we will be rolling out a special short-term playlist that will only be accessible for people who download the premium maps. Players interested in getting into matchmade games on Turf and Sanctuary will be able to do so via this special playlist. Eventually, as Turf and Sanctuary become free for everyone, they will be added back to the core playlists and the premium playlist will go away.

When the remaining premium maps become available in June, a similar process will occur except we will have more than one premium playlist to accommodate the 5 new maps. Over time, as those maps become available for free, they will be integrated into the core playlists and the premium playlists will be phased out.

According to Bungie, the Killtacular map pack will be free just two months after its release.

(I have a vacation in May, so I think I'm waiting!)

As for the update, it's already been pushed to everyone (yesterday). It's changed the game dramatically, encouraging a lot of grenade play.

Other items of note:

Videos of the maps, and a 3D [QuickTime] rotating picture of Warlock here.

According to Bungie, the Killtacular map pack will be free just two months after its release.

(I have a vacation in May, so I think I'm waiting!)

As for the update, it's already been pushed to everyone (yesterday). It's changed the game dramatically, encouraging a lot of grenade play.

Other items of note:

Videos of the maps, and a 3D [QuickTime] rotating picture of Warlock here.

http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org

As for which game had the "better" story, I'd rather not get involved in some kind of offtopic debate/flamewar about it.

If you want to compare the story content without playing the games, you can view the Marathon terminal texts on Bungie.org's Marathon fansite, and Halo cinematics and (currently incomplete) transcripts on their Halo site.

AFAIK, Greg hasn't been seen on the Internet since Double Aught Software went under.

Alex Seropian is working on Stubbs The Zombie, and has time for interviews, but apparently didn't have much to do with actually writing the story for Marathon, Halo or Stubbs.

IIRC, Matt Soell is the main mind behind Stubbs' story. Two select examples of his writing style can be found here (first thing to come off the top of my head). He's also widely (heretically) believed to be the Bungie Webmaster of January 2003 and earlier.

Both Linux and Macs have the porn covered, but what about the games? Until more games (or at least unique, innovative games, not available on wintel) become available on both platforms, Microsoft will continue its dominance. And Microsoft knows this. Why do you think they bought Bungie?

having all the game houses making all the games for your console.

Microsoft seems to realize this, their strategy seems simple; BUY ALL THE GAME HOUSES!

So far this doesn't seem to have worked to well for them with the exception of Bungie, although I personally think Halo stinks. Rareware hasn't released a decent game for the Xbox yet, and Microsoft had to shut down/sell their entire Sports division now that EA and Take-Two have shut them out of Football and Baseball. Most of the games I've enjoyed on the Xbox have been put out by Ubisoft, which is still owned by the Guillemot Family and releases most of their games for all consoles(Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil).

From: http://bungie.net/Inside/Page.aspx?section=FAQInfo &subsection=Contact&page=1

Contact Us by Mail

All correspondence can be sent to the following address:

Bungie Studios
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Bungie says otherwise in their weekly "What's New" update. Scroll down through the miserable slow scroller (with super neat bottom graphic overlay!!). Quoted below for the lazy:

Fourteen dudes asked,
Are you making Halo for the Gizmondo?

I am told Microsoft does have a relationship with the handheld maker, but I can tell you right now the arrangement does not include Halo.

I hear the guys at Bungie aren't too shabby at this here Halo 2 game. Bungie came out 3-0 against the Frag Dolls but it was a close 3-0 (50-26, 50-49, 50-45) and not a total whomping.

Halo Humpday Challenge

bungie has allowed from the distribution of marathon 2 data files just recently. see http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=481 167

Acgh, my mistake! You're absolutely right, I was misremembering... Doom 1 shareware was released on 12/10/93 and Marathon wasn't announced until 7/25/04, with a demo and release in Nov/Dec '94 (ten years ago, obviously). So, Doom predates Marathon by six months to a year.

Basically, I didn't double check my memories and I blame Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field for this oversight. However, since both games were in development for several years I still assert that it is hasty to claim one is a derivative of the other.

My googlin':
Bungie's history page
Marathon Story: M1 demo overview
Marathon Story: M1 demo readme
Wikipedia: Doom 1

First, you need Excel 2003 Pro, although he is working on making the file work with all versions of Excel. (I'm not sure if he means Excel 2003 Student edition or Excel 97 onward).

Second, he's a pretty crappy player, or he picks his teams poorly.

Now it just makes me want to play Halo 2... Grr.

And you need a Passport Account to boot

Of course, you already had to have a passport if you have a Live! account. If you don't have a Live! account, this is obviously useless to you.

who needs to know every kill in every game of every player in every universe. It's stupid

Do you keep track of the miles per gallon you get in your car? Do you follow your bank account, tracking where you spend your money? Do you follow any sports team? Even high school teams track stats. Maybe this is stupid for you, but this is an excellent feature even as a novelty item. Why? Because:

• It can enable competitions. You can give prizes for most kills, most wins, most deaths, or even most times you killed someone from behind.
• Halo 2 supports clans. Clans can range from a group of friends who typically play together to semi-professional groups of gamers who hold scheduled practices. For the former, tracking stats gives you something to brag about when you win. For the latter, the stat tracking and game viewer give you the ability to analyze your clan's performance and work on your weak spots.
• Bragging rights. For example, 21 kills, 1 death, 0 shots fired. Without stats I could still regale my coworkers with a description of the game, but now I can also point to my prowess (the fact that I haven't duplicated that feat is also obvious by looking at the rest of my stats).

The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.

However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals you can earn during multiplayer and a description of how rankings are determined.

This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).

The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.

However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals you can earn during multiplayer and a description of how rankings are determined.

This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).

The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.

However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals you can earn during multiplayer and a description of how rankings are determined.

This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).

I perosnally have played xbox live quite a few times, as well as the free online supporters (xlink Kai, xbconnect). I have found the free ones to be quite nice, and on par with xbox live. If more people switched to free the experience would only get better.

Let's see, how about:

• Single-sign on. Your gamertag is the same across all games. Of course, that could be done by these other services (presuming that one service does everything you want, so you don't have to jump across multiple services), so let's move on.
• Cross-game friends list. Again, this can be done by tunnelling services, but with Live I can access the list in-game, rather than having to jump over to my computer (which is upstairs and across the house from my XBox).
• Ubiquitous voice support. The game itself has to support voice, and few games support voice in system link mode (no point when you can yell across the room). I suppose you could use a different voice server like with PC games, and since you have to have a PC acting as a tunnel already it's not another hardware addition. Pain in the ass, though.
• Performance optimizations. Here's where things get interesting. These tunnelling services work via System Link (ie, the XBox thinks it's playing on a LAN). Games don't need to worry about network latency for System Link games, because there effectively is none (okay, I'm sure you could find a way to saturate a 100Mbps network and cause lag, but in general that's not going to happen with today's games). Live! expects to work over the internet, and thus good games will optimize for that (some games behave poorly, like Star Wars: Battelfront, but most work well). Nine times out of ten, you're going to have a more enjoyable experience on Live than on a tunnelling service, unless you have an uber-fast broadband connection (both upstream and down) and you only play with other folk with the same.
• Support. As I mentioned, these tunnelling services rely on System Link support. What do you do with a game that supports Live but not System Link? Oops, you're screwed.
• Matchmaking. Sure, tunnelling services can implement matchmaking, but they have to do it outside of the game. By using Live!, you get to use the game-specific matchmaking code (means it can take into account variables such as a player's skill level).
• Stat keeping. Again, this is something that tunnelling services can do, but not to the extent as Live nor as easily. For example, please tell me how you can record stats like this without having intimate knowledge of the game internals (and access to them)? There was a hack a while ago on Slashdot that used video capture to examine Soul Calibur 2 games and track stats, but you're not going to be able to do that in scale. Perhaps you could do it by examining the network traffic (assuming that data is even transmitted), but that's a huge reverse engineering process that you would need to do for each and every game. It would take time to get stats up and running for a new game while people reverse engineer the network data. In the meantime, I've been tracking my Halo 2 stats since the day it shipped.
• Cheater protection. Live isn't immune to cheaters, but by and large they're limited to exploiting existing bugs and not hacking their own clients. More importantly, Live allows developers to push bug fixes down to players, and can keep people off of Live if they don't want to patch. Let's see you do that with a tunnelling service!

I just dont see why pepople will pay for microsoft to screw them.

I don't. I pay less than $5/mo (oh nos! I have to skip a venti triple no-fat soy mocha latte-ccino with whip and a cherry for one day this month to afford that! whatever will I do?), and in return I get everything listed above. And I don't have to monkey about with setting up software on a PC, screwing around with my home network, setting up tunnels, and otherwise having a poor experience. I turn on the XBox, put in the game, login to Live, and play. Simple, and totally worth the monthly fee.

Apparently, when running in 480p the game overscans the HUD right off the screen on roughly 90-95% of all HDTVs on the market. Grenade
info, Radar and Shield information are all lost from the left part of the display.

There's a large discussion thread about it on Bungie's forums.

If you want to take a peek at the game manual, check it out at Bungie's site here: http://bungie.net/images/games/halo2/support/halo2 manual_EN.pdf

No, this is not correct.

Halo was originally being developed for Macs and PCs with the Mac version scheduled to be released first.

Development for both was being done on Windows PCs. Sorry if you believe otherwise, but you're incorrect. The coding was being done on PCs.
The art/media, however, was being created on Macs.

If you don't believe me, you can read it directly from Bungie.

You'll be pleased to know that Halo's development originally commenced on the PC because the 3D stuff on the Mac wasn't up to par at the time.

Then MS threw tons of cash at Bungie and they sold out and Halo became a Xbox game (and laster a PC game). I feel it was a smart move on Bungie's part, even though I did send an email to bungie at the time chastising them for selling out.

Thought it would be worth noting that stats and rankings are insanely deep and well thought out. This is all I could have hoped for...

http://bungie.net/Help/page.aspx?section=Pages&sub section=Main&Page=6

That signature, -S, looks somewhat familiar. If you're who I think you are how could you ever say that? Traitor!

:)

the cast they got for ILoveBees was amazing!
here are some hilarious Halo 2 outtakes:
Halo 2 Outtakes
betcha can't stick it!

I'm not really sure why I'm replying- your message didn't make too much sense to begin with. But if I understand the gist of it, you are saying that Microsoft treats their developers poorly. And because they treat them so badly, they ended up having to buy Bungie from Apple to get some decent developers/games.

Of course we all know that Apple didn't own Bungie. They may have thought they pwned them, but that is a different story.

If you read the History of Bungie as told by Bungie (which is a pretty interesting read). You'll see a great quote from them: The PC market was really cutthroat, but the Mac market was all friendly and lame. .

It's not like Bungie really wanted to stay in the backwater game developer community around the Mac. They started there almost by accident, and they found that being a medium-sized fish in a really small pond was not such a bad place to be.

Aren't Mac 'enthusiasts' tired of living back in 1994 when Marathon came out? A lot has happened in 10 years...

I'm so incredibly dispirited by the lack of creativity in games nowadays. Tolkien has done the world of fantasy irreperable harm. Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Men, Dwarves, even Gnomes...all of them in every game. They have become a shorthand for lazy game developers, the computer game equivalent of "Once upon a time".

While I disagree with your assessment of Tolkien doing harm, I agree that things have gotten stagnant. Of course, Tolkien only studied the great epics of the past to craft his work. Prior to him everything was minature- dwarfs, sprites, nymphs, leprechauns, etc. He made fantasy more approachable by making it more human. But it isn't his fault that no one since has been able to lift fantasy to the next level.

I will say that one game that was different and did relatively well is Bungie's Myth tactical series. (There were three of them, although the last one tanked, but it wasn't made by Bungie either so it doesn't really count.) The Myth series wrote its own storyline, races, characters, lands, languages, etc.... It was a blast to play too! There are humans and dwarves, but the humans do lots of things and the dwarves... well, they're mostly drunk and launch molotov cocktails and other explosive things.

I will forever remember fondly those slugfest king-of-the-hill matches with the zombie-like, slow-moving Thrall and a few well-placed dwarves chucking bombs causing massive amounts of limbs and other detritus to go flying around the screen. What a hoot!

Looks like MS may go to some lengths to stop the piracy of this game, and in this instance I say more power to them!

Linked because I'm lazy too and don't want to cut and paste this into my browser seven times...

http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/news/0408/0831-MCRooster s.htm

http://www.schnohne.de/2004/08/masterchief-im-hrte sten-einsatz-aller.html

http://www.nightmarearmorstudios.com/

http://files2.bungie.org/dragoncon2004.mov

http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=122 218

http://files.bungie.org/rapture/saturday_update_1/

http://files.bungie.org/rapture/sunday_update_3/

And don't worry about the bandwidth, these are hosted deep in the depths of the Microsoft data center, well beyond our own servers.

Halo was originally "INTENDED" for Macs, it was made for PC and Mac simulateously. However the PC version was much further in development than the Mac version. Apple then approached Bungie to showcase Halo on the Mac so Bungie had to catch up on development for the Mac version.

Go here for the details

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=pre xboxhistory040904&p=42