Rampancy

[image:8488 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The Halo 2 Illustrated Guide that Rampancy began compiling last week, using images extracted from Halo2.com by akba and dogchow, has now been greatly expanded with the assistance of BOLL who provided even more images.

New sections have been opened:

• Covenant Units
• Human Units
• Multiplayer Maps
• Multiplayer Gametypes

These sections are still not yet complete, of course, and will continue to expand in the near future. Each section features an illustration and text describing an aspect of Halo 2. Images can be viewed in several sizes, and users can attach comments to any item in the Guide.

Just in time for Halo 2, part VIII of the Junkyard's series on realism in Halo has been posted. This part covers Two Betrayals.

Thanks Ryan "Mhaddy" Matthews.

[image:8472 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]A new set of 12 screenshots have shown up in the Celebrities section of MSN, spotted by M3XGhost39 who alerted Louis Wu at HBO. Some are old, some are new, some aren't supposed to be out yet, apparently, and some might be spoilers if you knew what you were looking at.

About five of the twelve are multiplayer (one, two, three, four, five) it seems the rest are single player (six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve) although in many cases they are cropped so tightly you can't see much of the level they are in.

We've added them to our Halo 2 Gallery.

Several sites, including current one-Wu-wonder HBO, pointed out an article on Halo 2 in Entertainment Weekly. Some of those sites also pointed out some things which, while not outright inaccuracies, certainly seem to skew their perception of the game through a film industry lens.

For instance, from reading this article you'd think Halo 2 was entirely Joe Staten's project-- there's no mention of any other staffer, and Staten is referred to as the "philosophical ringleader of Bungie Studios" (Editor's Note: We thought that was Jones' gig. So sue us. Without diminishing Staten's contribution to the project one bit, we do suspect other people were involved.)

However, there are still several revealing bits of information here.

But the biggest step forward is that Staten's story about an invasion of Earth is now told from the perspective of both the humans and the Covenant aliens.

We're not quite sure what that means, although it might be the reason why some new Covenant species, like Prophets, speak English-- so that parts of the game showing events from the Covenant perspective will be intelligible without resorting to subtitles.

Staten also admits to political, as well as religious, themes in the story:

"You could look at [the story] as a damning condemnation of the Bush administration's adventure in the Middle East."

In fact, the story also cites that Microsoft's legal team forced a change in one alien name due to "Muslim overtones".

The article also tries to place Halo within the context of religious beliefs, something hinted at in Halo 1, but never fully explained:

Since Master Chief was already well established, Staten and his father, a professor of theology, developed a set of religious beliefs that could explain the Covenant's actions in the sequel. They zeroed in on the idea of the Halos — 10,000-kilometer-wide ring worlds — as utopias, safe havens in a universe filled with terror.

Which makes one wonder exactly what it is about being crawling with hostile adaptive lifeforms like the Flood makes a piece of cosmic real estate into a Utopia. I guess there's no accounting for taste.

To top it all off, we get a hint of what might be next from Bungie:

To that end, he's busy at work on several projects, including the possible resurrection of Phoenix, a non-sci-fi project that Bungie spent two years on before putting it aside to finish Halo 2.

Quite a lot of revealing information, even if it is from a source that doesn't usually follow games; so take it with a few grains of salt.