Rampancy

In a weekly update that was almost uncharacteristically chock-full of real information, including an update on Halo 3's current control scheme, button-by-button, one last morsel was hidden in plain sight, in the desktop wallpaper "teaser image" that features the Halo 3 logo above the glowing Forerunner artifact from the announcement trailer.

Even the Mister Chief version that accompanies the article features the text so obvious that you might have missed it: Fall 2007. Given that Halo 1 was released in November, and Halo 2 was released in November-- was there ever really any doubt?

Sometimes, you've got to take the good with the bad. So first, watch KP take on random jerks you don't know who are doing what you can't right now: playing Halo 3. Nobody else showed up for the Humpday this week, so you don't get specific jerks, just random ones.

After you've downed that nasty medicine, you get the candy. Although you can't play Halo 3 right now, there's a chance you might be doing so sometime soon if you're one of the lucky ones in the Halo 3 Multiplayer Public Beta. If you are, or merely hope you will be, check out the Halo 3 Beta FAQ.

Keeping a company light on its toes by keeping the core creative staff small and outsourcing the fiddly bits is how Wideload Games is approaching the problem of rising game development costs. Gamecock is taking the same approach to publishing, according to interviews with Wideload's Alex Seropian at GameSpot and with Gamecock's CEO Mike Wilson at Next-Generation.

Of course, in amongst all this news about cocks and chimps is a tidbit about Halo and Halo 2:

Now they are saying [games will cost] $20 or $30 million on the new platforms. Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne—all of these games cost under $5 million to make. And then Halo 2 cost like $22 million to make, because as soon as it [catches on with] one of these huge companies, they just can’t help themselves—everybody in the company wants to attach themselves to the game and basically all this overhead gets attached to the game.

How relevant this idea of people in a company "attaching themselves" to a project seems specious to me with regards to Halo 2; after all, Bungie is segregated from the rest of Microsoft in their own building and has been now for quite awhile. Perhaps there are too many Microsoft cooks spoiling the soup and inflating the budget, but $15 million worth? That's a big chunk of change. And whether or not there's truth to the idea that popular sequels attract unwanted expenses, it's still hard not to admire the desire to keep costs down. Now, if that only meant a decrease in the price of the actual games...

Version 1.6 of Myth II, for which a public beta was available last summer, has now finally been officially released for Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows. It's available in the Myth II Updates section of the recently-launched The Tain, an archive for Myth-related files.

From ProjectMagma.net:

Myth II version 1.6, adds native MacOS X map making tools along with a Universal Binary for OS X. Not to be left out the Windows version received some modernization that drastically cut down startup times, allows the game to be played in a window, and shares the CPU better with other tasks.

This update will be of specific interest to Myth fans running Mac OS X as this update makes the game a Universal Binary, good for play on PPC and Intel machines.