Chinese characters on the side of the Chief's new assault rifle read out "monkey king". It's a reference to a famous Chinese myth that is also mentioned (incidentally) in the audio commentary for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
A shot from the announcement trailer showing the elevator shaft that carries the MC to Fighter Bay 02.
Looking over the MC's shoulders, through the window of Fighter Bay 02 to see the "glassing" of Earth by Covenant energy weapons. From the announcement trailer.
Part Two of Bungie.net's feature on the making of the E3 demo is up. This one, by SketchFactor, is called Lights, Camera, Action! and features an interview with Joseph Staten, BungieТs Director of Cinematics.
HBO's Louis Wu gave us the heads-up.
We won't summarize the whole Halo 2 Preview at UGO, pointed out over at HBO by Louis Wu, but we'll just mention a few of the more... ahh, interesting bits of... ahh... information. Some of these aren't new, some of them are, and some of them... well...
Some of these-- like weak Prophets and mercenary Brutes-- seem a bit odd, especially since in the E3 demo, Brutes emerge from Covenant vehicles, and earlier articles attributed unique attacks to Prophets. However, time will tell.
The following story by SketchFactor is running over at Bungie.net-- go have a look! It's basically an interview with Jaime Case Griesemer, Design Lead on Halo 2, and Tyson Ferrex Green. For the new Bungiefen, they both ran a Myth site together called the Codex several years ago, and Ferrex was one of the founders of Rampancy, then called The Core.
Well, we're not in the lofty company of mirror sites like Mythica and o1, that pump out Halo videos by the terabyte, but we've done what we could in the past few days.
So far, we've meted out about 28 Gb of the high quality WMV, about 6.5 Gb of the high quality QuickTime, and 4.5 Gb of the low quality QuickTime versions of the Halo 2 demonstration at E3.
We hope you enjoy the video (we do, immensely and daily) and we'll continue to host it until the next popular file comes around.
Also, it's worth noting that the end of the last month we missed our fourth birthday, as this site-- originally known as The Core -- went online on May 26, 1999. Happy birthday to us!
The official, high quality version of the Halo 2 demo shown this year at E3 will be made available to selected websites this coming Friday; we know it's true because SketchFactor said so at Bungie.net, plus a little birdie told us.
According to the post, it will be available in WMP 9 and QuickTime. According to HBO and Gamepro, the WMP9 version will be 640x480 with Dolby 5.1 sound and weigh in at about 150 Mb.
Over at Bungie.net there is a contest to contribute to the UI in Halo 2. Read all of the details here!