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Halo 3 Has Gone Gold
The official Bungie site has the word that Halo 3 is done. In games industry terms, they've 'gone gold'. "That means we delivered a final version to our internal certification group that passed all the tests and is now being whisked away to top secret manufacturing locations to be turned into retail versions of the game - and eventually packaged and sent to stores in various cases, tins and cat-helmets. We can't wait to share it with you guys on September 25th and 26th, but we have to say thanks."
Umm, didn't that happen yesterday?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Costco in Northern Cali is breaking the release date _now_. At least that's what one of the customers at the local EB was saying yesterday.
I saw H3 at PAX last weekend... it was the final round in the omegathon this year.
Looks sweet!
Corridor. Corridor. Open Bit. Corridor. Corridor. Incomprehensible NPC. Corridor. Corridor.
Reverse Corridor. Reverse Corridor. Reverse Corridor. Reverse Corridor. Reverse Open Bit. Reverse Corridor. Reverse Corridor. Cliffhanger.
Real 'next gen' material here.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
I'd love to be at those developers' post-Gold party. (And I'm sure they have them)
i can't wait to pick up halo 3 at costco, along with 10,000 bottles of Mt dew game fuel AT DISCOUNT WAREHOUSE PRICES!
oh marmalade.
This means they've made double-double sure to delete the hidden minigame where a lady soldier invites the player to come over to her base for some nice hot bubble-shields.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
i play xbox with my brother sometimes... its very cool... my brother is 30 years old hes pretty smart... he has 45 iq its the same as heis shoe size.. pretu good considaring 100 is full.... nentendo is cool but wii is beter... i am masetr chief from halo... bcz when i played halo for the second time i knew what was going too happen befor eit happend... so im takeru... its pretty cooll... sonic is cool... i dont like tails though bcz hes sonics girlfrend... i want2 be sonics girlfrend.... sonic is so fast and handsome its increddibnle... sometimes... together... my mom and dad are brother and sister... its prety cool i gess... i herd its prety normal in america.... they love eachother like a father and daugher... theyr so cute together... together... sometimes... xbox... my brother is in wheel chair... but hes cool because hes smart... yea... the boy in the basements said he isnt smart and he say bad thing about my dad... but its no mater... he is chained up... in basement... together... xbox... yea... maybe... xbox is pretty cool bcz they its like games... together... sometimes... i hear screaming from basement... dosnt mater... the boy there is happey.... yea...
I like Microsoft. Thye make cool games, good mice, and comfy keyboards.
So what if I don't like Windows and Office?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I seem to recall there being a Vista only version that was announced pretty long ago...
you must be new here.
my sig is an honor student
Not that I have anything against Metroid...but Halo 3 is breaking records before it is even out. Lots of people are interested in it and people submitted the story. If you really cared you could have submitted Metroid stories but you can't even post with a user name. But there really isn't anything all that significant about Metroid other than it finally gives hardcore gamers who own a Wii a reason to dust off their console while they wait for Smash Bros and Galaxies.
Yeah, we all know the Xbox is Microsoft. Gamers (for the most part) don't care. If they make a good console with good games, we will support it. It is not like they have a monopoly on gaming...it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like Nintendo and Sony.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Indeed. Why, he (or she) has a five-digit UID that starts with 1 -- what a n00b!
Don't worry that this is yesterdays news. I am sure subscribers got to see it on time.
It certainly can't be that the Editors were too busy posting political, advertisements, and troll articles that they didn't actually have time to post "news for nerds"
...while I'm not going ape shit over Halo like a large portion of the "console-only" generation (I have yet to meet a long-time FPS PC gamer who thinks Halo was anything beyond "entertaining") I did rather enjoy Halo 1 and 2...Halo 3 will hopefully bring a nice close to this story arc.
Strictly speaking of the Halo franchise, I'm more excited about Halo Wars than Halo 3...but what do I know, I grew up on Zork.
Living With a Nerd
Indeed. Having owned Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2 and now Metroid Prime 3, Halo is in a far different category than Metroid. While Metroid is long running and beloved franchise, Halo is a fever pitched hyper hysteria that can draw people from all over just to play a game tourny. It's more competitive than Metroid, which is far more story driven.
With that said, the 60mins I spent with Metroid Prime 3 (after starting over having missed scanning a spaceship and remember previous versions being completely screwed if you missed some scans, I'm being extra cautious scanning stuff), I'm really liking the story line, but the controls are still growing on me. They definitely tightened up the cross-hair movement compared to Red-Steel, but there's still some sluggish feeling trying to quickly change modes.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Yeah, really. I mean, it's only got a million pre-orders.
I agree! If they make a good operating system with good office products, we will support it. It is not like they have a monopoly on software...it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like IBM and Novell.
To think that someday everyone will be able to play together in World of Microsoft and nasty things like choices will be a thing of the past.
I for one welcome our new video game overlord.
No, Bungie makes good games. Like Marathon and Myth.
It's not like 1 million people have ever been wrong before, majority wins logic?
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
Cue the Nazi Analogies in three...
two...
one...
"But there really isn't anything all that significant about Metroid other than it finally gives hardcore gamers who own a Wii a reason to dust off their console while they wait for Smash Bros and Galaxies."
The Metroid Prime series is one of the most polished & rewarding gaming experiences you can have if you are a serious gamer. Halo is a fine series too, I personally have enjoyed the back story to that game also, but underneath it is a simple FPS.
A simple FPS which has a polished production & awesome exposition.
Looking forward to both, but as a pure gaming experience, if its any thing like the older games, MP:Corruption will be my choice, even though I will probably dig the more visceral experience & movie like exposition of Halo3 probably more.
1. I hope you're control interface is on Advanced. It makes a HUGE difference in responsiveness compared to the default controller setup
2. IMHO the control scheme is SO much better that it pretty much makes any dual analogs unusable. Well, I wasn't much of a console FPS fan to begin with, but Metroid 3 is the first game that I can say comes a lot closer to intuitiveness and control that PC keybopard/mouse gamers take for granted.
Bye!
I don't know if I would personally call the whole series "polished" I hated MP's control scheme so much that I stopped playing it after about 15 minutes and never tried again. Not being able to strafe unless you are locked on an enemy? wtf mate. That being said, MP3 controls feel very nice comparatively, and I'm not a huge fan of the Wii controls either.
But the flood really do relate quite well to hitlerian ideals. The idea that those dirty humans don't deserve to live!
I've been holding off on a 360 on account of that whole, you know, random permadeath thing. Is that fixed yet, or am I going to have to wait a little longer to finish the fight?
Unfortunately Bungie was swallowed by the whale and we don't get good Mac games from them any more.
No, the universe revolves around the Flat Earth.
I'll give $75 to anyone who can get me a PC / winXP version. I'd LIKE to give that money to the game developers, but MS doesn't want that to happen. And I'm not going to buy an xbox just to play Halo3. So I have $75 ready for whoever gets me Halo3 for the PC first.
You REALLY must be new here.
Sure. Mac gamers have been mourning the loss of Bungie as a Mac developer since Halo disappeared from the G4 and reappeared on the XBox. But even worse, it must suck a little over at Bungie. ALL they do is Halo and they must be getting tired of it from a creative perspective. Taking a dip in your Master Chief-built money bin can only go so far to relieve creative frustration.
Another long-time PC gamer here, of FPS's and otherwise. I think we may look back upon Halo as being one of the most innovative shooters of this post-millennial decade. The reason is all about tempo, and specifically, the way Halo's "recharging shield" system dramatically alters the pace and experience of FPS games.
In a conventional FPS, the player character restores health lost through attrition by picking up some variant of "Medkit" liberally sprinkled throughout the level. Thus, the cycle of the typical FPS goes something like this: fight, fight, fight, pick up health, fight some more. This cycle is a relatively long one, in that there are generally substantial gaps between health restorations. This is necessary to maintain game challenge, and to prevent the whole "Medkit" conceit from becoming too self-evidently contrived. However, as a consequence, the "tempo" and "pace" of the game is dictated by this cycle of fight, lose health, find (or backtrack to) medkit. Because of this structure, the PC is also gifted with a substantial amount of health in order to sustain him from one cache of medkits to the next. Games are generally most exciting when the player is clinging to life, trying desperately to make it to the next medkit, but the very structure of the conventional FPS dictates that this can only occur so often per level, if at all. Indeed, many players simply choose to reload if they find themselves in perilous straights health-wise, knowing the next medkit is far off and rightly intuiting that the conventional FPS is not really designed to be played on a sliver of health.
In Halo and the health-recharging games that followed it, the cycle instead goes something like this: fight, recharge, fight, recharge, fight, recharge. The cycle is shorter, the recharges more frequent, and the amount of time the game allows the player to come close to death is thus much higher. Indeed, games with Halo-type systems its not uncommon to frequently take cover in the middle of a firefight to find some minor respite and desperately hoping to avoid any incoming fire in order to restore health. You may have noticed that it takes far less time to kill an exposed, inactive player in Halo than it does in, say, Quake 4. This is because the constant health restorations compensate for the increased risk. Thus in Halo-type games the risk of death can be more constantly exploited, and the tempo of a Halo game is much accelerated as the player constantly comes perilously close to death, and repeatedly takes a sigh of relief at restoring their health just in time.
You can already see an awareness of the superiority of an accelerated game tempo reflected in the design of subsequent FPS games. Gears of War is possibly the most recognizable incarnation of a "recharging shield" health system, but on the PC side Rainbow Six: Vegas also employs a similar system. Both games have perfected this idea to generate an incredible sense of tension as exposure to sustained enemy fire for any length of time results in a swift demise. The player feels naked and very vulnerable even when simply walking through a exposed courtyard. The unforgivingly swift tempo of these games is far more successful in evoking dread and terror in the player than the repetitive haunted-house antics of, say, Doom 3. Sure, imps may jump out of nowhere at me in Doom 3, but I'm loaded up on armor and health so I know I'm in no real danger. I'd say that Gears and R6Vegas demonstrate a far more sophisticated grasp of the design potential of recharging-shield systems than Halo does, but it was Halo that first introduced this concept and its utility to gamers.
I'll leave it at that. Halo also took the somewhat daring step of strictly constraining the player's weapon loadout, but I'm more hesitant to give it credit for that as there were plenty of similarly constrained, tactically minded shooters that preceded it. I'm also going to add that I own no copies of Halo or the Xbox, in any incarnation, and I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer myself, so to the ex
.it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like Nintendo and Sony.
BNope, Microsoft has so much money there is no risk to them whatsoever, only potential gain.
Very interesting read, thanks. I guess this is what zonk is hoping for when he posts all those gaming stories that most /.ers hate.
I have been less than impressed with the public beta's. I think despite Microsoft will pay someone to give it GOTY, titles like Assassins Creed and BioShock will slaughter the Master Cheif IMO
Make SELinux enforcing again!
We don't know that Master Chief is male, or even human! We cannot assume he/she/it would desire a lady.
(Made me smile.)
I must disagree with you about Microsoft's mice; I've had 4-5 of these http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/product.asp x?view=22&pcid=f918997d-8a10-49a2-86d4-350fc658f44 7&type=ovr
fail (left, right and/or middle mouse buttons cease working) under normal use (web surfing, windows navigation, NOT gaming).
And lets not forget their Habu which wouldn't work as intended if you followed the instructions for installation (something about the driver not recognizing the mouse as a Habu)
15975.... bitch.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I have a Microsoft Home serial mouse that I have been using since 1996. This thing is simply indestructible.
If anything the dirth of 232 ports nowadays is what'll do it in. I am to cheap to buy a 2 dollar adapter (which is why I am still using that mouse).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You sir, have made a friend. Several minutes ago I had a post composed about my hatred for health paks. After I lost interest in writing that much, I closed the tab and found your comment. Well said.
IMHO, halos best innovation was seamlessly integrating ranking into online play with a level playing field and actually making attempts to keep it that way. I love how once I hit level 15 or so I no longer have to worry about team killers or n00bs or quitters, because the the level range is composed of people who are bound to win a few games. I generally don't get people who talk to much, and opponents who are fun to spar with.
Fuck you! Just because you have a low UID doesn't mean I have to (or should) respect you!