Rampancy

Slashdot has linked to a humorous look at the console wars over at Pointlesswasteoftime.com. The first part is on the GameCube, the second (which is rather short) on the Xbox, and the third on the PlayStation 2.

As I said, the page on the Xbox is a short one, but it does contain this tidbit:

There is a feel of inevitable victory with the X-Box line, despite the fact that this version is still 40 million units behind the Playstation 2 in sales and that Microsoft could have made more money off the expensive machine if it had wrapped them in hundred-dollar bills and fired them out of a cannon at passing pedestrians. But of course, that's the point. One gets the feeling that Bill Gates is willing to spend $500 per unit on the X-Box 2 and mail them out for free like AOL trial disks if that's what it takes to win.

The summary conclusion is that "the past belongs to Nintendo, the present to Sony, the future to Microsoft." Although some might disagree.

Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, the man who provided most of the information about PC Halo during the recent Fanstock event, has been interviewed by Computer and Video Games. Highlights include the fact that playing as the Covenant-- originally a central idea in Halo's design, pre-buyout-- was discussed and rejected. And while bots will not be in the game as shipped, the possibility exists for something in the future:

One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with.

If the title is any indication, it looks like this one features Private Donut prominently; Episode 16: A Slightly Crueler Cruller is now available to the general public at Red vs Blue. They have the usual DivX and Quicktime versions, plus the BitTorrents.

Several years ago, we heard on the Rampancy Hotline server that Halo was going to be "the most customizable Bungie game ever."

[image:3805,left] That was, of course, before Microsoft purchased Bungie and Halo was changed into an Xbox game. Now it looks as if that prediction is finally coming true.

Along with the news that Gearbox intends to make Halo's editing tools available for download on their site after the release of Halo for the PC, we also received some screenshots of those very same tools, including the Halo level editor, Sapien. However, we aren't allowed to release those screenshots until... sometime later.

What we can do, however, is to share with you some photos taken and provided graciously by Steve of Forerunners.org, who attended the event and brought a digital camera with him. We've put those in a special Gearbox Fanstock gallery created just for this event. When the screenshot embargo ends, that's where they'll be.