Bungie Makes World Premiere of Chill Out Remake at MLG San Diego I was just thinking the other day that Bungie really should have re-made the Chill Out map (from Halo: CE) for Halo 3.  I remember many an epic multiplayer battle on that map - back in the day when the game was limited by 4 consoles and the pistol fired automatic rounds with a scope! The map, renamed "Cold Storage", has some preview images available at the link above.  Bungie has never done remakes of my three favorite Halo: CE maps: Prisoner, Damnation, and...

This is on the verge of taking it too far.  It's beginning to get funny.  Halo 3: Making of the Believe diorama Technorati Tags: halo3 halo believe xbox

Don't read on if you don't want spoilers. I finished the game today.  Story-wise, I don't know what to think.  I wasn't really satisfied or convinced that everything got wrapped up in this game.  At the end of the game, Cortana and Lord Hood acknowledge closure to the war with the Covenant and the fight against the Flood.  It seems strange that just because the Prophet of Truth was killed that the Covenant is no more.  I mean, all the Brutes left fighting didn't decide to just leave the fight, did they?  What about all those Grunts and Jackals?  And...

Pick up high explosives at your local bait shop first. Technorati Tags: halo3 fishing

You know it had to be done! www.halo3basics.com The site is a compilation of basic strategies and tactics you can employ in Halo 3 multiplayer to get better at the game.  Now that Halo 3 through XBox live supports "saved films", I hope to include some video examples on the site some day in the future.  For those of you looking closely, Halo3Basics.com looks very similar to the old Halo2Basics.com (which no longer exists).  This is true, and in fact much of the content base from Halo2Basics was used for Halo3Basics.  Thanks to those who helped provide content...

Last night was a Halo 3 pre-launch party at the Microsoft office in Bloomington.  Jason invited me, and he also allowed me to bring along one other person, so I invited Raymond to come too.  There were six consoles going all at once, each with 4-person games going on.  There were more people than there were controllers (maybe 75 people?), but folks were really good about getting up after a game and letting other people play.  They handed out some gifts (t-shirts, hats, posters) and provided food and drinkies.  They also organized a Slayer tournament, and somehow I managed...

I have fallen victim to the 33% failure rate of the XBox 360. Last night my games kept freezing, and I saw the red ring of death once. This morning I was on the phone with XBox 360 support, and the red ring re-appeared and the games kept freezing while we were troubleshooting. Most importantly, through troubleshooting, we ruled out the game(s) and hard drive as the problem. The console by itself is busted. Now I can't even get the "boot up" screen to show up (although the audio works). The good...

Some new screenshots from Halo 3 are available over at EW.com: EW.com: First Look: Halo 3. Seems that every gaming publication now has an article titled "First Look: Halo 3". Heh. Anyway, these new screenies show off a little bit of the Elephant vehicle, the map "Shrine", and 4-player campaign co-op (with mention of campaign multiplayer scoring). Included in the series of screenies are some older ones too that were available on b.net a while back.

I haven't really kept up with pre-launch Halo 3 news lately, and today I came across two nuggets of H3 goodness: 1. The Elephant. I don't know any specifics at all, other than a) it is a vehicle and 2) you can fit 16 players + some small vehicles in it. The Elephant 2. Forge. There will be a map "editor" called Forge. You can't actually design levels with it, but you can highly customize weapons, vehicles, and items within the maps. e.g. create a giant pile of fusion cores or something. I found both of these pieces of information in this...

I've played about a dozen games of the Halo 3 Beta (sorry basement - you'll just have to wait a few more days for painting to start up again), and this is what I think so far. First, I think Bungie realized they had a hit with the Zanzibar map in Halo 2. Zanzibar had big spaces and small spaces, a unique layout, and lots of interesting features. Two out of the three Beta maps (Valhalla and High Ground) have the offense/defense setup, and both of them have complex and fun terrain. Valhalla is cool because the...

I just checked out my stats from the Halo 3 games I played last night, and I must say that the new features Bungie is putting into their stats pages are impressive. The two best features are: For a single game, when you hover over your most-used weapon in the list of players (the "Breakdown" tab), a window pops up showing you ALL of the weapons that you used to kill with. Over all games, you can view your overall kill/death ratio. I'm not sure if this page is publicly viewable to...

I went ahead and bought the Halo 3 Beta Crackdown last night. Crackdown is an awesome game. The new weapons are pretty cool - especially the Spartan Laser. The matchmaking has some nicer features too in Crackdown, like telling you how many matching games it's finding for you, etc. Crackdown's film replay features are good - it's just fun to be able to replay your game, however I'm a little disappointed that there aren't more options for changing the film's point of view, etc. Of course, Crackdown is still in beta form so that may change come September 25th. Crackdown's...

Check out this gorgeous video of footage from the Halo 3 Beta: Mr. Jukes' Halo 3 Betalicious Video | direct download tags: halo halo3 beta video footage xbox bungie

Halo 3 release on 9/25/2007. Nice. I'll be letting my boss know right away that I'll be taking that day off :) So let's see, that's about four months away. Very cool. The anticipation for H3 isn't nearly as big as it was for H2 - at least for me. I remember back in 2004 searching and clawing for every news byte, screenshot, and tidbit I could find on H2. Now I just try and watch the vidocs when they come out. For now, I'll save all judgement, anxiety, and excitement for...

Date and Time 6/15/2007. We'll be starting at 5:00 and ending around whenever. Directions Jason Bock will be hosting. 1796 Quail Dr Shakopee, MN 55379-4351 Food Please plan on brining a little cash for ordering pizza. If you'd like something special to drink, please bring your own beverage.  Bringing stuff to share for everyone is great too. Garlic butter is optional. Roster # Name Xbox Controllers TV Halo Copies Cups of Garlic Butter 1 Mike Hodnick 2 4 2 2 7 2 Jason Bock 2 5 3 2 4 3 Jake Good                 11 4 Larry Dukek 1         1 3 5 Tom Taintor                  6 Ryan Oliveira 1 2    1    7 Vince Bullinger    2 1    25 8 Wes Preston              2 9 Dan Mork              2 Cases 10 Nick Hansgen              .78 11 Michael Dunn             0 12 Andy Pickett             0 13 Raymond Mitchell (questionable)      Maybe 1    0 14 Erik Luckjohn 1 or 2 2 or 4  0 1  5 15 Grace              -2 Total: 7 or 8 13 or 15 6 or 7 7 2 Cases + 55.78 cups   tags: lanparty...

Jason sent me this link this morning: Halo 3 to support True (not upscaled) 1080p at 60fps. Ok cool, but at the bottom of the article there are these tidbits: Two other major tidbits. The next true Halo sequel (Halo 4?) will use a new game engine and depending on everything, could be a launch title for the new Xbox in 'Fall' 2010/11. A semi-sequel to Halo 3 is a possibility, it would use the Halo 3 engine. But this is most likely going to be new weapons/levels/vehicles. Halo 4? Or Halo 3.5? I honestly didn't see that coming. I'll...

I just read Jason's post on the new Halo 3 video which shows off some of its new features. Holy crap. Go watch it.. tags: halo video bungie jasonbock

I just finished Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter last night. Add this to the extremely short list of video games I've actually finished. It was a hell of a game and I'd play it all again. The last mission in the game was pretty awesome - a very violent shootout with heavy weapons in downtown Mexico City. It reminded me a lot of the shootout scene in the movie Heat (Pacino, De Niro). This might be the best game I've ever played. A while back I blogged about how I hope Bungie in corporates some...

I'm kind of going through a rediscovery phase with video games these days. It's probably due to the fact that I now own an XBox 360, but that's beside the point. For a long, long, long time I pigeonholed myself into only playing Halo and Halo 2 for the shooter genres. I figured that 1) Halo and Halo 2 were just damn good games that couldn't be beat by another game developer and 2) I just didn't have time to sink into another campaign-style game at home. I ended up being wrong on both counts. After getting...

Life and work have been insanely busy lately and I thought I'd make sure things don't get too stale around here an post a quick update... On the basement front, I now have 41 panels of sheetrock in my basement, ready to be hung. Nikki's stepdad and I carried them down the basement 1 at a time last week, and I don't care to ever do that again. Now it's a matter of finding a weekend to wall-up the studio room. I'm currently reading Halo: Ghosts of Onyx. It's the fourth book in the Halo series and chronologically it takes place...

A great photo created by the folks working on Halo Wars: Awwww, cute.

Hilarious, and NSFW, unless you're wearing headphones. Permalink

The Halo 3 TV Commercial The audio is a little quiet on this copy, but it's the one with the best quality image I could find.

One of Bungie's posted screenshots of Halo 3 multiplayer footage is pretty awesome. It shows 1) the new Mongoose ATV vehicle in use by two players and 2) the new "laser rocket" weapon. A few details about these new, tasty goodies can be found here in this 1UP.com article. The screenshot is on the new "Valhalla" map. There are other hi-res screenshots on Bungie.net of Valhalla, High Ground, and Snowbound available here

Check out this site called Halo Everywhere. It's just a fun site where Photoshop and Halo come together. Go look and you'll see instantly what I mean. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the site: Water Skiing POW's (look closely)

I stumbled across a lot of Halo 3 tidbits while eating lunch today. First off, there are 33 Halo 3 screenshots and images available to view over at 1up.com. View them all here. Lots of juicy visuals to browse through. From what I can tell there are three multiplayer maps in the screenshots. One of them looks like it'll be a Zanzibar-esque map with a base and some interactive features of the map environment (e.g. doors to open, etc): I can't be sure, but there is a diagram of a map that looks like the one above. The diagram illustrates the...

...awesome! The party was great - complete with shenanigans and tom-foolery. Here are some brief tidbits: Twelve people showed up - we had a lot of cancellations within 24 hours before we started, and a surprising number of people never showed up who said they would. Those bastards. Twelve is still a great number though and mass carnage ensued... Lots of great games - lots of great CTF games, lots of bad one-sided ones, team King on Terminal... too many others to mention. Captured a ton of raw gameplay footage with the USB video capture device Everyone, and I literally...

There's a ridiculously detailed set of scaled images that illustrate the relative size of objects within the Halo universe. The web pages allow you to drill down into more and more levels of relatively sized objects. Everything is included from the Halo ring, the Covenant city of High Charity, and the Pillar of Autumn down to Warthogs, Forerunner structures, and a UNSC medkit. Pretty cool stuff. I can't imagine how much time was sucked into obtaining the geometries for everything. Interesting how some objects are shown that don't really ever appear entirely visible in the game - such as Gravemind. Where...

We'll be using a video projector for the LAN party on 10/13/2006, but I don't own a screen or have a good, plain wall to shine it on. This morning I made a screen out of nine pieces of poster board: Pretty snazzy eh? It's bigger in real life than it looks like in the picture. It's kind of a PITA to hang up so I hope I put it in a good place!

If you're into Halo then you probably know by now that a new real-time strategy game named "Halo Wars" will be coming out for the XBox 360 in the "near" future. The game site is www.halowars.com, and Bungie's announcement is here. There's also a sweet trailer for the game at http://www.halowars.com/trailer.html. The trailer wasn't rendered on the 360, but it's still pretty awesome. The shot of the Elite is excellent. The game is based on the first human battles with the Covenant. Bungie is involved with the game (although they're not developing it), so I'm assuming that some...

Jason went ahead and made a sign for our Friday the 13th LAN party next month: By the way, the "brains" reference has to do with the "Dawn of the Dead" custom gametype we'll often play.

There are some photos posted over at halo.bungie.org of Fort Jesus located in Mombassa, Kenya. Notice the eerie similarity of these pictures with Halo 2's Zanzibar map. No surprise that Bungie did their homework of the real Mombassa and modeled Halo 2's environments after real structures and locations. It's pretty cool to see the comparisons (if you can recall what the Zanzibar map looks like or have a screenshot handy):

http://podtacular.com/node/3931 I think this "top 10" list was randomly picked out of somebody's arse, but some of the feature requests are decent: More interactive and destructible maps - Absolutely. The gates in Zanzibar are pretty sweet, as an example. I'm no creative genius when it comes to other ideas, but more complex environment manipulation would be really fun. Usable Jackal shield - It'd be pretty awesome and would add a new dynamic to the game. It would definitely cater to a defense-first mentality, as you wouldn't have much offensive capability with it (assuming you could only wield a single dual-wieldable weapon while holding...

Well, that was pretty damn easy. Here's a video demonstrating my first successful video capture with the new toy I got today. EDIT: I wanted to mention that the video quality on YouTube is pretty poor after uploading. Not sure what the trick is to get a good-quality video on YouTube. On my own machine I captured the raw video at a pretty high resolution... so I'm pretty happy with my new little device. EDIT: Download the higher-quality WMV version. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ahi6HHMsQ

Date and Time 10/13/2006. We'll be starting at 5:00 and ending around whenever. Directions 2396 Molnau Ct.Chaska, MN 55318Click here for Google map There's a chance that the Google map (and other map services isn't reliable. So use it at your own risk. Here are some alternate directions:From 494 From 494, Take Hwy 5 West Turn left (south) on Hwy 41 Turn right (west) on Hundertmark Rd. After the single stop sign on Hundertmark, you'll enter a round-about with a Washington Monument sculpture. Go 3/4 around the round-about and turn out of it so that you're heading south on Clover Ridge Drive Go past...

My copy of the Halo Graphic Novel came in yesterday. It's kinda neat. There are four stories in it, and in a way I'm a little disappointed because it's such a short "book". Oh well. The content that is there is fun to read, and adds more questions and answers to the Halo story. e.g. one of the stories practically confirms that the "Ark" is on Earth. Another is about a retired Spartan (Maria) and she mentions that she started a family. Ummm, ok. The other two stories are about one encounter that the Covenant have with the Flood and...

Yes, there is. You can actually view the entire background history and timeline of the Halo story originating on Earth in the year 2160 to 2552 (post-First Strike and pre-Halo 2) at HBO's Halo Story Timeline. Most people probably aren't interested in all those details in the timeline. I'll probably be told that I need to get a life for writing about this :) Oh well. It's fun sci-fi. Halo 2, the graphic novel, and another Halo novel by Eric Nylund entitled Ghosts of Coral continue the story and timeline. Ghosts of Coral will be out on 10/31/2006, and...

I just ordered the Halo Graphic Novel today. I happened to take a quick browse around HBO and noticed that a lot of fan/halo story speculation has arisen as a result of this new book. The universe of the Halo story is deep and rich, and I've enjoyed keeping up with it. This novel supposedly fills in some gaps in the storyline (which spans way outside of the video games). I'm eager to see what's inside. On the Halo side of things, I actually hooked up with three friends online last night and we played some matchmade-Team...

So we all know now that H3 will come out next year: Bungie H3 Announcement Cool. While it was arguably inevitable that Bungie was going to resolve the cliffhanger ending of H2, I'm glad to see that Halo 3 is fact instead of fiction. I think I'm a bigger fan of the Halo story and universe than the game itself. There's a ridiculous amount of detail and "mystery" in the plot and environment of the games, not to mention the Halo novels. I'm eager to see how the story plays out in H3. It's barely a secret that the Halo rings in...

I stumbled across the Halo in 77 project page today... wow. The goal of the project is to complete Halo: CE in exactly 77 minutes. Not under 77 minutes, but exactly 77 minutes. Yikes. There are a couple reasons why the people doing the project picked 77 minutes - and they have to do with the significance of the number seven in Bungie lore and the numbers 1:17 (Spartan 117 - a.k.a. Master Chief). Anyway, they are including game footage of each level and have some details and information on how each level was completed. ...

On Sunday I had the pleasure of watching my dad play the last two scenes of "The Maw" from Halo: Combat Evolved. Normally this wouldn't be anything to be very excited about, but this is a 60-year old guy finishing his first FPS game ever. I've said it before: I think it's really cool that my dad enjoys video games so much - let alone playing Halo in its entirety. Granted, it's a little hard watching him play. He's played through the entire game on easy, and it's kinda painful to see him just stand...

Halo 2 stats online through XBox live was really cool. It STILL is really cool. But I usually play with people I know more in person rather than online. A lot of my Halo 2 buddies don't subscribe to XBox live, and big group games with my friends are usually played in person at LAN parties (as opposed to meeting friends online). None of the stats for local LAN games are recorded anywhere. A game's stats are viewable only immediately after it has finished. To my non-XBox live buddy, I have no way to...

Maybe this is why I'm SO good *rolls eyes* at Halo 2:

My Halo2Basics.com site gets about 2000 hits a month, so I figured with all of these damn web sites that I've been launching I might as well take advantage of the traffic and make some coin. So, I subscribed to Google AdSense a few weeks ago and put some advertising on the H2 Basics site. So far I'm not to impressed. I've had one click for $0.06. But what's interesting is that the advertisements are kinda-sorta-relevant in a certain way. While I write this, these are the current ads on the site: Sniper Rifles - Wide...

Halo2NameGen.com has been upgraded:

Spread the word. Halo2NameGen.com, a Halo2 Gamertag generator, has been launched. Fear this: Mike's Halo 2 Gamertag is: DrunkenFreak You blaze through the game in a zen-like stupor and your battlefield skills are so crazy that your teammates don't recognize you. Permalink: http://www.halo2namegen.com/Default.aspx?name=Mike I'm still looking for more gamertag data, so if you have ideas or suggestions please let me know.

Images from Friday's LAN party are available for viewing: http://www.kindohm.com/ngallery/albums/57.aspx

It's back to Apple Valley at John's place.  Hope you can make it.  Time We'll be starting at 5:00 and ending around midnight.  Directions Click here for directions to John's place.  Note that Google may say that the address is in St. Paul.  John's zip code is recognized as either Apple Valley or St. Paul. Food Please plan on brining a little cash for ordering out. If you'd like something special to drink, please bring your own beverage.  Bringing stuff to share for everyone is great too. Helpful Resources Check out the LAN party page for some links to helpful Halo 2 gameplay resources. Roster  # Name Xbox Controllers TV Halo Copies 1 Mike Hodnick 1 4 1 1 2 Jason Bock 1 1 1 1 3 John Schreifels 1 4 4 1 4 Mike Dahl 0 0 0 0 5 Tom...

If you're still an active Halo 2 gamer, Bungie has put out a couple of new matchmaking playlists for Halo 2 that are a bit interesting: Rumble Armory and Team ActionSack. I have to admit that I think the names are cool :). Get the details here. Rumble Armory is unranked because it's so bizzare. I played a few of the new playlist games yesterday after work and they were a nice change from the same old slayer/ctf/BR/human games.

Jason just posted on a Halo 2 game that we played last night, and I just wanted to chime in and agree with him that it's good to be playing the game again. The honeymoon with Halo 2 and the excitement of matching up with players online to play the game wore off a long, long time ago. When the game came out we were all in love with the matchmaking, new maps, RSS feeds, and online stats. Like most new things, it eventually got old. But now I'm back at it again, eager to play at night. I think...