Slashdot Mirror
New Halo 2 Details
Grinn writes "Gamesarefun.com has obtained some new information about Halo 2. Most interesting is the ability to hold two weapons at once, each operating individually on the left trigger or the right." Although apparently sourced via a German site, this may be similar info to that contained in the new June issue of the US Official Xbox Magazine. And even if it's not due for a while, the Halo series continues to be a serious killer app for Microsoft's console.
This just in, it will most likely never ever ever run on a Mac. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
John Woo style HALO with AI that can drive...should make Warthog that much more fun...probably will add to the game a bit more. Imagine 3 or 4 Warthogs in a single area all filled with marines destroying stuff...this could be very interesting. Hopefully HALO2 won't suffer the same FPS problems that HALO 1 did. That's all I wish for!
Shouldn't that be: Halo series continues to be THE ONLY serious killer app for Microsofts console.
Well, the player doesn't have to worry about being the driver anymore. AI controlled marines will now also take command of vehicles. But, watch out... they seem to have gotten their licenses from a box of Cracker Jacks. They'll drive erratically and in fairly dangerous ways. Much like drivers on the LA freeway during rush hour.
Virtually every game I've seen that has both driving and walking AI characters, the ones driving are either total pussies or complete psychos behind the wheel. Battlefield 1942, the entire GTA series, Operation Flashpoint, the botpilot mod for Tribes 2, all of them are either a danger to themselves and their own team or they're so timid that they can't bring themselves to do anything useful.
I would think that the path-finding AI involved would remain precisely the same as on foot. The only additional processes involved would be trying to compensate for a larger bounding box and not trying to roll the thing.
anyone else got any ideas on what's going on with this crazy bots?
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I own an Xbox and there's nothing so great about Halo. It's just another shooter, nothing to see here. Halo is the game I play the least on my Xbox. Sorry if I shocked you :) But seriously, I prefer playing Splinter Cell, Buffy, etc. I'm tired of shooters.
It seems the when Bungie wrote Halo for the Xbox, they compiled-in the textures for each polygon for the levels.
When they started on the PC port they realized that the PC community (rightfully) wanted to Mod the heck out of the game, so they've had to rewrite a considerable amount of the engine to allow for the dynamics of user-created levels. Since it's a completely seperate company doing the port, the Port is progressing a bit slower than people would expect.
Honestly, I think a PC port of Halo is going to miss something considerable - the rumble effect of the X-Box controller which, being so large, throws your hands around when it wants to. There are so many events in Halo that 'cause various degrees of controller rumble that it's definitely going to take away from the game's immerision when played with a mouse.
Hopefully the user generated content will make up for this.
Grinn.Most interesting is the ability to hold two weapons at once, each operating individually on the left trigger or the right.
I've been able to do this for a great many years now by playing Marathon, Bungie's FPS for the Mac. (Here's a screenshot of me doing it.) Though I guess Halo2 will let you hold a different weapon in each hand, which would be new and cool.
BTW... I know that Marathon is old and ugly compared to newer 3D games, but I have a soft spot for it. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it's more fun. Ah well...
for whether Halo for the PC will come out before Halo 2 =P
The Xbox provides something you overlooked, competition. With this console on the market other companies are forced to address their price matrix, and adjust accordingly. Who wins? We, the gamers do. Your inability to form a coherent thought without the intentional adolescent misspelling leads me to believe that my points are wasted on you.
An interesting read It is a little more recent than your vauge statistics from "last November".
"Video game sales disappoint
Reuters
Sales of video games in the United States rose 8 percent in March over the same month last year as Japan's Nintendo lit up the charts with three hit games, industry analysts said on Tuesday, citing market research.
Sales of games for the latest generation of consoles -- Sony's PlayStation2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube -- rose 36 percent, Deutsche Bank Securities' Jeetil Patel said, while sales for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance handheld rose 32 percent.
Patel and other analysts based their figures on monthly market research from the privately held NPD Group.
SoundView Technology Group analyst Shawn Milne estimated Nintendo's sales for March at $101.5m, or about £65m, up 168 percent from a year ago and well ahead of No. 2 Electronic Arts at $62.3m.
The top-selling game of the month, he said, was "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" for GameCube, doing nearly $41m in sales on 826,352 units sold.
"We view the March industry software data as disappointing, noting that, excluding the strong software sell-through by Nintendo, industry software sales would have been down 8.3 percent," J.P. Morgan analyst Dean Gianoukos said in a note.
But Gianoukos also said he expected EA, Activision and THQ to meet or beat their estimates for the March quarter.
Sony's PS2 ended the month with a 37.8 percent share of the hardware market, Gianoukos said, followed by 14.7 percent for the Xbox and 10.7 percent for the GameCube.
There was a 70 percent decline from a year earlier in sales of games for so-called "legacy" platforms like Sony's original PlayStation and Nintendo's last-generation N64, Patel said.
That decline was a drag on overall sales growth, he said."
I am me...I think
Splinter Cell, Mortal Kombat, NFL2k3, Mech Warrior...
should I keep going?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Halo is the ONLY thing I've ever heard anyone talk about being so wonderful on the Xbob
Ever heard of Splinter Cell? Yeah, thought so.
And even if it's not due for a while, the Halo series continues to be a serious killer app for Microsoft's console.
In other news, Sony are hyping Final Fantasy 17 for the PS4. While they accept that neither game nor console are out yet, they don't see why Microsoft should have all the fun claiming killer apps that aren't anywhere near release.
The graphics are reported to be in a different league to anything X-Box users have ever dreamed of.
Splinter Cell, Mortal Kombat, NFL2k3, Mech Warrior...
should I keep going?
You'll need to. NFL2k3 and Mortal Kombat aren't exclusive and not exactly "killer" apps. Splinter Cell is comming out for PS2 which leaves uh... what was the last one again?
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Also, That article you pasted is only focusing on software titles. The point I was making with the above "vague" numbers is in reference to number of console units sold. What I'm saying , is that real "Killer apps" are what is supposed to drive the console purchases, and the Xbob hasn't stepped up to the plate since Halo, and now all the hype is about a sequel. Doesn't sound very "killer" to me. Mabye Bill thinks it's "cool" enough to keep dumping money into.
Must be nice to be able to screw up three times before you get it right....
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
It's a well-established fact that OXM gets juicy exclusives on all new Xbox content. They also have a circ of over 400,000 issues a month, by far the most for the Xbox and rivaling the circ of some of the largest console mags in the world.
At the most, no one else should at this point have more than a one paragraph blurb based on some message board rumors. I know that scans of OXM's coverage for the June issue were leaked because I stumbled upon the scans myself while looking for information on Half-Life 2.
Disagree instead of modding down.
Well, Doom III is coming to Xbox and no other platforms, I'd say that is a pretty killer app. I've read that Brute Force should be good, too.
What bums me out is that Marathon was the last FPS for the Mac that came with a map editor. I used to have a blast making Marathon and DoomII maps back in the day. There was Quiver for Quake(I think Scott Kevill wrote it), but I don't think he ever completed it.
GTA and Vice City ARE the primary reasons to buy a PS2. Just like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, F-Zero, Mario Kart, and Star Wars games are the only reasons to buy a Gamecube...oh wait, thats more than one killer app for both PS2 and gamecube.
My Nostromo mouse n30 has rumble IN IT. JOY!
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
The gun-in-each-hand thing is something Bungie did with its earlier shooter, Marathon 2. One of the guns was a shotgun... the readme file had a little joke about how it was "too complicated to detail" how actually you could reload it without using your other hand.
On Marathon, one of Bungie's earlier (and IMO better) games, you could use the spacebar to fire the right weapon and the option/alt key to fire the one in your left hand. Red Faction II also just did this, allowing you to fire with either trigger.
and yeah, I meant consoles
On a sidenote, I own a PS2, an Xbox, a reasonably powerful gaming PC and a Cube. I have ONLY played Cube games in the past four months.
Halo is an average game compared to the "rehashed" Nintendo titles. Don't trust me on that, just play Metroid Prime. You'll thank me.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Does this mean the original Halo will be available for the PC?
Doesn't anyone still hold a grudge because Halo was supposed to be the game to take the throne from Tribes on the PC, but was denied from us by the XBox-exclusive release?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I've got an XBox and I have to admit the games line up really does suck. Almost all the big hyped titles have been busts on the machine and other 'must-have' titles are just being pushed ever forward into the future.
I'm hoping 'Brute Force' will show some signs of life in the XBox market. But that isn't until the end of June - assuming it actually ships on time.
But thank god I bought a Cube!
As a matter of interest which games do you consider outstanding on the XBox?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Although they're not exlusive to the Xbox, these games shine especially on the Xbox. NFL2k3 for the Xbox is un freakin' believable in terms of graphics and gameplay. Shines considerably brighter over my friend's Playstation 2 version.
Plus, the Xbox controller offers a better rumble experience, something key in a hard hitting football game.
Grinn.
Yeah I've got Metroid Prime. Halo is the ONLY game I'd buy an XBox for. Thats why I haven't bought one. I'm not interested in any of the other games, the same basic stuff exists on the PS2 and Gamecube now but Something like Halo doesn't exist on anything but XBox. But thats still not enough to spit out the money for it. If it ever drops to $99 or close to that then I will.
While that's true to some extent, you should pick up a copy of Time Splitters 2 for PS2 and give that a try if you haven't already. It's not exactly the same as Halo, but it's a blast. I played the whole way through with a friend and just found it fun/hilarious. I wish they made more decent multiplayer games like that....
:)
Every now and then our gameplay would degrade into setting each other on fire and screwing around killing each other. I guess most co-op fps games sort of invite that, but it was extra hard to resist with this one.
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
Of course, if we're talking KP duty, then it would be "Master Chef" (or is that "Iron Chef"? now that would be an interesting game :-)
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.