Rampancy

PMA Blades at PlayMyth.net has put up a thoughtful piece on the future of the Myth franchise, looking forward to PlayMyth's fourth anniversary coming up near the end of this month, and the ten year anniversary of Myth: The Fallen Lords next year-- hopefully to be marked by a tournament.

For those who have copies of these classic games, you owe it to yourself to brush the dust off and get online, either through PlayMyth.net or Marius.net; the latter's gameserver is running, even though the website seems to have had a meltdown. MariusNet can't create new accounts anymore, but the username "guest" doesn't require a password and will let you in to play.

If you haven't played Myth before, you're missing out on a big part of the Bungie Experience (despite the fact that they don't own the franchise anymore) which is a lot more than cyborgs and AI constructs.

Early in Stubbs the Zombie, the game's eponymous street-shambler is captured by the police and taunted by Chief Masters, who wonders if "there'll be anything left to dissect" for Professor Wye.

Well, it seems there was.

Alex "The Man" Seropian pulled out the scalpel and put Stubbs and its creator Wideload Games under the knife at GDC, talking about what worked and what didn't work with their subcontractor-heavy business model:

First and foremost, Stubbs was built using the Halo engine that Bungie built from the ground up. This was less than ideal for contractors who hadn't worked with it before, as Bungie had no documentation for the engine, nothing to use to train people how to work with the engine or troubleshoot problems that arose. As a result, Seropian said he spent an inordinate amount of time not just training people how to use the engine, but deciding which contractors needed training, and how much.

GameSpot has the a full article on Seropian's GDC talk.

Of course, in about the same span of time there was actually real, tangible, factual information to be had:

• Volume 2 of the Halo 2 Soundtrack has been announced, and will be released on April 25th. Marty The Elder had this to say:
  

  For Halo 2 Volume Two I decided to use a 'suite' structure that also corresponds to the chapters within the game. In a sense by listening to this soundtrack you will hear the musical representation on the story of Halo 2.

• Bungie also revealed its secret project-- no, not Halo 3 that secret project, but the upcoming Halo Graphic Novel, forthwith to be called HGN. For those who are fans of comics and of Halo, this is great news. A baker's dozen of comic book artists and a fellowship from Bungie will work on the book, and Marvel will publish, external underwear notwithstanding.
• After battling with developers like EA over letting developers host their own XBL servers, Microsoft is backing down and opening up the system. This potentially opens up the way for different kinds of games on XBL.
• Major Nelson is sending out the call for volunteer Xbox Live Ambassadors.