[image:8656 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]dogchow has produced an illustrated list of the available emblems in Halo 2. Check them out and pay particular attention to #8 and #29.
UPDATE: The direct link to #8 seems to be broken... so we've put up a complete emblem gallery of our own, and added notes for some of the recognizable logos: zero, eight, thirteen, twenty-nine, and thirty.
There are a few bits of interesting information in the PDF manual that bear noting. Although none are actual spoilers, rather than posting them here on the front page, we'll just link to them; so to see the list click "read more" below.
The Spectre is a Covenant armored troop transport, most likely comparable in size and capability to the human Warthog Light Reconnaissance Vehicle. It can carry a crew of two (driver, gunner) and two passengers. Supposedly it is not very fast, but it is manueverable. As in the Warthog, occupants are offered little protection by this vehicle.
A version of the Spectre was spotted in the E3 2000 video, but did not make it into the shipping version of Halo 1.
Louis Wu at HBO notes that the Halo 2 manual is available in PDF format from Bungie.net, and that the Halo 2 Info section of Bungie.net has also been updated. The Halo 2 Guide here at Rampancy is being updated to reflect this new information.
The Covenant Fuel Rod Gun uses radioactive fuel rods as projectiles and has a 2x zoom. It cannot be dual-wielded.
Hunters have this weapon molded into their armor, and in Halo 1 it was also used by SpecOps grunts. It was not availalable in Halo 1's multiplayer mode, but was enabled in the PC version by Gearbox. It is not known if there are any differences in the weapons behavior between Gearbox's PC Halo version and Bungie's Halo 2 version.
The clip holds five rounds.
Hunters are large, and heavily armored units, with Fuel Rod Guns molded into the armor around their right arms, and huge metallic shields that double as a melee weapons on their left.
In Halo 1, a Hunter could be killed by a single sniper or pistol shot to the vulnerable orange fleshy areas that were easy to hit when Hunters were relaxed and standing at their full height, or when their backs were exposed after a melee strike. Word is they will be harder to deal with in Halo 2.
Hunters always travel in pairs.
The phenomenon that was the I Love Bees ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, well and truly wrapped up this weekend. Players who followed through to its conclusion (some of them, anyway) were treated to a "training session" where they got to see Halo 2 pre-release, and some won copies of the game. Others received commemorative DVDs with the content of the audio drama on it, as well as other things.
On Sunday, to cap it off, the architects behind the game, the so-called "Puppet Masters" held a chat with players about the game. We're put up a transcript of that chat.
Of special interest to Halo fans were a few questions about the relationship between their game and the Haloverse:
AgentMunroe: Is the story in ILB considered official Bungie/Halo backstory, or is there some amount of creative license that you were allowed and used?
sean: So here's how it worked: We went in with a story idea and went over it with some Bungie folks. They made some pertinent suggestions (e.g. the use of the Forerunner artifact as the McGuffin to create the slipstream malfunction) and the ship name Apocalypso. After that, they gave us the Halo Bible. We had the three novels, and then a Bungie person read every script to make sure we didn't so something weird.
There's also a mention of the fact that the ARG players are "just way better at this sort of thing then [sic] they are," referring to Halo fan forums, but we'll let that slide in the interest of general civility.
MrFluffy, who followed the game closely, has written a feature called The Buzz Ends for the Junkyard, and Scott Weisgarber told HBO about a BitTorrent tracker for the ILB DVD.
With Halo 2 hitting shelves on Tuesday, the magazines and websites are free to post their reviews, and they are doing so:
UPDATE: More review links from Voodoo Extreme:
Without providing an indepth review, at least yet, Voodoo Extreme's Andrew Burnes said "I loved it."
UPDATE: Slashdot now has a thread discussing the reviews of Halo 2 from major gaming sites. As usual for Slashdot, the majority of comments are negative.
We've all heard that the Halo 2 levels are much bigger than those in Halo 1, and that all of Halo 1's levels could, in fact, fit inside a large part of a single Halo 2 level. And yet rumors that the game ends too quickly have persisted.
Rapture at cooked gamers tries to dispel the rumor but ends up perpetuating it; he says that he feels the game ended rather quickly, but attributes this to his skill...
Check out cooked gamers' spoiler-free campaign preview.
The NetNinja Bee Log notes today that at 17:00 EST on Sunday, November 7 there will be an IRC chat with the Puppet Masters of the I Love Bees alternative reality game on the server irc.chat-solutions.org in the #apocalypso channel. The chat will be logged and moderated. For those without IRC clients, Unfiction also has a Java-based web client.
Since Major Nelson has (quite obviously) had access to Halo 2 for awhile now, he's been able to post links to his own stats RSS feed over on his blog.
The following is a transcript of my experience at the I Love Bees Training Exercise in Schaumburg, Illinois.
GameSpy's prelaunch coverage continues with an interview with Tyson "Ferrex" Green about level design and why Halo 2 won't include repetetive levels like Halo 1 did.