Narcogen and Trindacut examine the second level of Halo 3, A Crow's Nest, for Anger, Sadness & Envy, the official podcast of Bungie fansite Rampancy.net. Features include an interview with the Prophet of Truth, changes to voice actors, and Halo 3's equivalent of the Jackal sniper: the invincible Brute chieftain.
This is the plain MP3 version, for use in a flash-based web player or for those who prefer the MP3 format.
Kato at Katonian.net has an article up on how to make stereoscopic screenshots from Halo 3.
The story mentions only the Windows program StereoPhoto Maker but I also located the Macintosh freeware AnaBuilder, which you might have some luck with if you're a Mac user.
Rockslider famously rejected Halo 2, preferring instead to spend six years tricking the Halo 1 engine into delivering him continually more epic "megabattles".
So, naturally, people wanted to know what he thought of Halo 3-- did it return to the roots of the original game enough to keep his interest?
Now he's provided the answer in typical exhaustive detail.
Thanks for the heads-up to Louis Wu at HBO.
The first episode of Anger, Sadness & Envy, the official podcast of Bungie fansite Rampancy.net, covers the first two levels of Halo 3: Arrival and Sierra 117.
Sorahn wrote a script to power Haloscreenshots.net; you enter your gamertag and it pulls down all your screenshots from Bungie.net. For the next step, it assembles those images into a mosaic composed from the submitted images. The first mosaic is up now, check it out!
UPDATE: sorahn had to make a change to how the archive stores images in preparation for making the large mosaics; please feel free to head on back to the site and resubmit your gamertag.
Frag The Cullen forwarded to me a film clip made by Jihaku of a Team Slayer game played a few days ago. In that game, player Geo Stelar seems to have an infinite bag of bubble shields. No matter how many times he deploys it, he always has another, a fact he uses to his advantage in this film. There's also a thread about the alleged exploit at Bungie.net.
It's quite definitely identified as a team slayer game and not a Forge or a Custom film, so that would seem to rule out those ways of altering the behavior of the bubble shield.
Have hackers already been able to modify Halo 3 maps and use those modified maps in matchmaking? Is this a bug in the game? An artifact of extreme lag? The last theory might be the best; the clip author Jihaku seems to die after deploying a bubble shield, but then drops one when he shouldn't have had one. Geo Stelar picks up that bubbleshield, and shortly after realizes that it doesn't disappear from his inventory when deployed.
deadox1138 has created a site for Halo motivational posters. It's fantastic, check it out right now.
Amazon.com has a page up for the two-disc Halo 3 Original Soundtrack, due out on November 20, 2007. It will include the music created by Marty O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori for Halo 3 and be published by Sumthing Else Records. However, it will also include a track by the lucky winners of a contest being run at Halo 3's Myspace page. Submissions will be accepted until midnight on October 22. For contest details see the myspace page.
Today's entry into the Halo 3 Weapons Guide is the SMG.
A few items of note that slipped through the cracks lately:
ForgeHub is a site featuring descriptions and links to custom maps and gametypes people have created in Forge. Some very interesting stuff up there now, with more sure to follow.
High Speed Halo is still getting up to speed on Halo 3 speedruns, but for a taste of coming attractions visit goatrope's file share for some runs on Cortana, Floodgate and Halo.
Stuff.co.nz has a nice biography of Bungie's kiwi wunderkind Chris Butcher up.
Today's entry in the Halo 3 Weapons Guide is the Covenant Carbine.
Nthro Sraom submitted a nice how-to for finding the Famine Skull in Halo 3. Since Rampancy's collection of skull pages isn't complete, we're asking readers to submit entries on their own favorite skull: how and where to find it, what it does, your preferred method of reaching it, and how it changes your experience of the game. Not just the location; lots of sites have lists of skulls with locations. This isn't about getting credit for finding a skull, or just compiling a walkthrough to finding all the skulls, but also some information on how each skull changes your experience of playing the game.
When submitted it'll be added to the list of Halo 3 Skulls, a subsection of the Halo 3 Tricks page.
Once again more news has transpired in 24 hours than I'm able to handle with the individual loving care that each unique-as-in-snowflake bit of news fully deserves to be treated. So sue me.
Here's what happened:
Bungie cheated HBO out of a Humpday win. Makes you wish there was some large company comprised of adults watching over these boys Luke Smith while at play.
Speaking of cheating, NBA player Gilbert Arenas apparently sets up dummy matches of doubles in social slayer and gets the dummy to quit out, leaving him with the victory and the experience points. MC187 sniffed out the method looking at statistics, and the Washington Post got Arenas to admit to it, who arrogantly asserted it wasn't cheating. Bungie, instead of banning him, pointed to Arenas' apparently legitimately high matchmaking skill ranking as proof of the player's ability and ignored the fact that he's manipulating the experience system. So that's it, it's OK to set up fake social games to get free experience points. If you're a famous NBA player who is friends with top MLG teams. Otherwise, don't. You might get banned.
Speaking of HBO, Bungie AI engineer Max Dyckhoff gave an excellent and wide-ranging interview to HBO about exactly how the Saved Films feature works (it is simultaneously both more and less complex than you'd think) as well as how driving AI works (or doesn't).
Frankie pointed out Halolcats, the content of which is pleasantly predictable.
Shacknews interviewed Wideload's Alex Seropian about being an independent game studio.
The ultimate vehicle, my favorite vehicle; The Mongoose. Here's what I use with my friends to totally own with a mongoose.
One of the things we do is travel. This works especially well with sniper. You get on the mongoose and then the sniper gets on the back. After that you take him to one location and hide the mongoose. Stay close to your sniper and when he gets a couple of kills get back in the mongoose and go somewhere else. This technique works very well on Valhalla and Sandtrap. Also you can just travel to anywhere pretty quickly. The mongoose is pretty durable and fast.
