Archive for the ‘Halo’ category

Halo: Reach Multiplayer Trailer analysis

March 3rd, 2010

Bungie have just released the “MP bomb” that Marcus Lehto referenced yesterday – it’s a trailer showing some multiplayer action from the Alpha build of Halo: Reach, and it shows of some new features we’ll see in the public Beta in May. You can read about it and download HD versions direct from Bungie.

I’ve stepped through the video frame-by-frame and came up with the following observations:

  • 00:13 – 00:15 From the Loadouts bit, I think it’s clear that jetpacks, active camo, and sprint are all armour abilities.
  • Also looks like the radar shows you the name of the area you’re in e.g. “Slipway” (00:15) , “Yard” (00:21) – should help with team communication 🙂
  • 00:22 The bit where the Spartan survives the Ghost ram, looks to me like the Spartan does some kind of power punch to the ground or something that kills the Ghost? As kidtsunami points out on the HBO Forum the movement of the Spartan is very reminiscent of the action in the Halo 3 CGI trailer where Master Chief triggers the bubble shield
  • The Covenant weapon at 00:48 looks like a plasma grenade launcher or rocket launcher with tracking projectiles 🙂
  • Human grenade launcher at 1:03.
  • You can see the armour ability icon “recharging” the jetpack ability at 1:05 – a small circle around the icon.
  • 1:09/1:10 some kind of new gametype where you have to blow up the generators? It’s marked with a “C”, and it’s definitely called a “Generator” in the text that comes up when you blow it up. A Territories variant?
  • 1:12/1:13 – Phantom airstrike taking out the tank?
  • 1:16 is definitely some kind of Covenant equivalent of the Spartan Laser.
  • 1:17 you can see “Revenge” come up as he headshots the guy – is this a new medal?
  • 1:20 – DMR looks like one head shot kills.
  • Looks like the Covenant Laser is back at 1:23 (top-left, targeting the tank).
  • 1:24 Guy that lands beside the “May 3, 2010” shoots the human grenade launcher towards the camera

Conversation about the video is progressing in this thread on the HBO Forums 🙂

Halo 3: ODST Review

October 11th, 2009

So it’s two and a half weeks now since I dropped into New Mombassa, and I’ve emerged into the dawn of the new day, campaign complete. I’ve also spent some time repelling endless waves of Covenant, and so I thought I’d share my thoughts on the ODST experience. Read on, but beware – spoilers may lie ahead…

» Read more: Halo 3: ODST Review

Halo Ringtones page updated

January 4th, 2008

I’ve updated the Halo Ringtones page with a bunch of MP3 Halo 3 ringtones from XBox Mobile that normally are only available to download when you view the site on your mobile phone. I’ve mirrored them here since some of them are now unavailable on XBox Mobile, and also to make it easier to download them.

Halo 3 ARG – Iris

June 21st, 2007

There’s lots of stuff I’ve been meaning to post recently, including my final impressions of the Halo 3 Beta, but they’ll have to wait. The “Halo Nation” is abuzz over Iris – the Halo 3 ARG. So far there haven’t been many puzzles to solve, but rather we’ve been led from place to place. There’s lots of coverage at Hushed Casket, but I’m following things over at the newly created forums at args.bungie.org.

I’m not going to go into the progress so far in detail here, but it started with the appearance of AdjutantReflex on the Bungie.net Halo 3 forum, and links to www.halo3.com/comic, which in turn led to http://www.societyoftheancients.com and a countdown site at 206.16.223.65. The countdown finished abruptly as AdjutantReflex was destroyed/asimilated by something older, more powerful, and now you are redirected to 206.16.223.61 where there’s one of the “servers” that are referred to on the www.halo3.com site.

Clicking on certain glyphs on the rotating machine provides several files to download, and also plays a movie. I’ve managed to re-encode the movie as a Quicktime Movie. You can download it by right-clicking here and chosing Save Target As… or whatever is equivalent in your browser. It looks like this ARG will give us more info on the Forerunner and the background to why they did what they did 100,000 years ago. I’m eager to find out more, but hopefully it will involve more puzzles and less just waiting around for the next thing to be revealed 🙂

Betalicious!

May 18th, 2007

Halo 3On Wednesday I was able to download the Halo 3 Mulitplayer Beta and jump into the action – unlike people who were waiting to use Crackdown to download the Beta. Apparently there were problems that led to a 15-hour delay while Bungie and Microsoft came up with a patch to Crackdown that sorted things out. There were also problems with some people that got in via the “Rule of 3” promotion that didn’t receive their codes via email, and Bungie have resent these emails and are dealing with any remaining issues themselves. The Internet nearly melted with the ire flowing from disgruntled players, with Major Nelson seeming to get the brunt of it, bringing down MajorNelson.com. You’d think this was something important 🙂

Thankfully for me the biggest problem was to decide what to delete to make room for the download. I’m considering getting the 120GB drive when it comes out later this year. The game appeared in the “Demos and More” section, and started up no problem – with a simple loading screen that said “Loading”, “Halo 3 Beta”, and “Love, Bungie” 🙂

» Read more: Betalicious!

Halo 3 Release Date Announced

May 16th, 2007

Halo 3Bungie last night announced the official release dates for Halo 3. It will be available in the US on the 25th of September 2007, and in Europe on the 26th of September 2007. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since many people expected to see a November release date given that Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 were both released in November. Mind you, it’s a nice surprise 🙂

Now that the dates are official, I’ve updated my countdown timers on My Halo News and Halo Screen Saver.com. I’ve also put the countdown timer into the sidebar here.

For some reason a lot of French gaming sites picked up on the original date I used (07/07/07) and thought it was official because there was a news post up on Bungie.net about my updated screen saver. Well, now they would be right 🙂

Roll on September!

Halo 3 Beta Starts Today

May 16th, 2007

Today marks the start of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta for those of us who weren’t given a head start via Bungie’s “Friends & Family” scheme. I found my activiation code in my inbox this morning 😀

I can’t wait to get home and start enjoying the Halo 3 goodness! I’m going to make the most of the next three weeks. See you all online!

Download links for Halo Ringtones fixed

April 19th, 2007

I’ve been revising the layout of the site recently, reorganising things more logically, and in doing so I broke various links related to the Halo Ringtones page, as well as breaking the redirect from the old URL from halo.blackice.ie. Well, I’ve fixed the redirect and other external links into the Halo Ringtones page, and the download links for the MIDI files on that page are also fixed now. Sorry for any inconvenience!

More details on the UNSC Sparrowhawk

March 13th, 2007

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for pointing out that Ensemble Studios have posted more details on the UNSC Sparrowhawk. Here’s the lowdown:

Known more readily as just “Hawk” the Sparrowhawk is a formidable air to ground armor busting support aerodyne. The Hawk is still being assessed by command before full production starts while engineers are still working on an experimental propulsion system that has led to failures in the field making the future of this vehicle uncertain. The Hawk first saw actual combat against the Covenant on the surface of Harvest in the final months of that campaign.

For those of you (like me) that don’t know what an “aerodyne” is, Wikipedia defines it as:

An aerodyne is a heavier-than-air aircraft which derives lift from motion, as opposed to an aerostat which uses buoyancy (such as a balloon) to fly.

So, it’s a fancy word for plane, then 🙂

There’s also a new desktop version of the image available here in various resolutions. From this it’s clearer that what I thought were rocket pods are more like missiles or bombs.

UNSC Sparrowhawk

March 12th, 2007

Over at the official Halo Wars website there’s a recent forum post that gave an update about some Microsoft bigwigs that came to see a playable version of Halo Wars. Since the post went up there’s been an image being ‘decrypted’ at the end of the post. The image is finally fully visible, and it has revealed one of the new vehicles that will appear in the game – the UNSC Sparrowhawk.

UNSC Sparrowhawk

This looks like a relative of the Pelican but designed more for offensive duties – a bit like a futuristic Apache helicopter. In the image you can see that the vehicle has a chin-mounted gun, two double-barrelled cannons on wing mounts, and three rocket pods under each wing too. It’s not clear how much elevation these vehicles can get – perhaps they’ll hover more than fly.

I’m beginning to really look forward to Halo Wars. I like RTS games, and had a great time with Age of Empires, which Ensemble also made. There’s no release date mentioned yet for it, but it sounds like they’re making good progress.