thehalogod

Here’s the official word straight from Bungie:

Almost Nobody asked,

What’s all this about Bungie and Microsoft splitting up?

Bungie Branches Off

As you have no doubt read on the web today, Microsoft Corp. and Bungie Studios, have reached an unprecedented and exciting agreement – starting immediately, Bungie will become an independent company and will retain a long-term publishing agreement with Microsoft Game Studios for “Halo” titles. The new structure became effective on Oct. 1, 2007. The official blurb follows, but since you’re a valuable part of our community, we thought we’d sum it up simply and concisely.

Bungie has long been built on creativity, originality and the freedom to pursue ideas. Microsoft agreed, and rather than stifle our imagination, they decided it was in both our best interests to unleash it. We’ll continue to make Xbox 360 games, and we’ll continue to make amazing games for MGS. In that regard, nothing has changed. All that has changed is that now Bungie Studios is once again, the property of the folks of Bungie Studios. Microsoft is and will continue to be, a brilliant, inventive and creatively collaborative publishing partner. Practically speaking, nothing has changed and you guys won’t see much, if any difference, for a while unless you come to work for us, that is – we’re hiring at http://www.bungie.net/inside/jobs.aspx

Well, I suppose the good news is at least they will still be making Halo games right? I’ve actually heard that Bungie was tired of making just Halo games several months ago from some tester friends that were working there but I didn’t know it’d lead to this. My guess is that Bungie gave some sort of ultimatum saying they wouldn’t make any more Halo games unless they’d be allowed to do other stuff as well.

Wow though. Isn’t this crazy?

Check out the official Bungie story here.

So I have finally found the time to drag myself away from Halo 3 to give my impressions on the multiplayer game. First off, I’m still not a fan of the starting AR in nearly every matchmaking gametype but I believe it’s an improvement over Halo 2’s matchmaking with starting SMG. Other than the starting AR, I really like the team slayer gametypes even the excessive use of shotty sniper variants.

My favorite maps would have to be The Pit, Gaurdian, Construct and Narrows. Which maps are your favorites?

I’m a HUGE fan of the ability to record games and go back and watch them from a different perspective, although I believe there should have been some changes to the camera controls in theater mode. The primary thing I’m most disappointed with is the fast forward speed. To only be able to fast forward a video at 2x is incredibly lame, especially if the only thing you’re interested in is a game winning kill. I mean come on, how hard would it have been to make the fast foward speed to be controlled by the pressure sensitive triggers? The harder you press, the faster it goes. Or to be able to drag the timeline bar or something.

Is anyone else frustrated by the slow fast forward?

One other thing that isn’t related to Halo 3 but still frustrates me a lot is the speed of the xbox 360 blades. It takes soooo much longer to send and receive messages than it did back in Halo 2. Why isn’t there an option to speed up how quickly the xbox 360 blades come out? It takes WAY too long to send and receive messages than it should.

Does anyone else agree with me?

I’ll be uploading some Halo 3 videos soon so watch out for those.

Fyler is the winner of this contest:

Here is the comment in full:

I deserve to win H2 Vista because my birthday is September 24th and it would be a great early birthday present to know I won. Also, I will play it more than anyone who will comment here, I can guarantee you that. Lastly, I am a fan and would add the Vista box to my collection and shrine of Halogod in my closet.

Thanks and I hope you pick me!
Fyler

Well Fyler, happy birthday you get my copy of Halo 2 Vista for free. Contact me with an address where you would like your game sent. And if you can send me a picture of the shrine in your closet that’d be great just kidding.

Runner up goes to jdog10000 (Nothing but repect for second place though )

Dear Mr. Halogod,
I am not a very creative person, and therefore, I do not have good ideas. There are few things in this world that I am certain of. One of those things is that Halo 2 Vista should be sitting on my computer desk. The other thing I am certain of, is that you are a beautiful person Halogod. Thanks for the memories.

Love,
Jon

Thanks to everyone for participating. I will be holding another contest soon.

I personally have yet to preorder the game as I wasn’t sure if I would be attending a midnight launch party or not, so what I’ve decided to do is just preorder it from Best Buy and pick it up in the morning. If you still haven’t preordered the game you can do so through one of these links at Best Buy. Which version will you buy?

Halo 3 Standard Edition Halo 3 Limited Edition or the Halo 3 Legendary Edition ?

As a contract game tester at Microsoft, testers are often given the game that we tested for free after it is released. So for me, the first game I was contracted to test was Halo 2 Vista (pretty cool huh?). Anyway, I built a brand new computer and wanted to try playing Halo 2 Vista on it to see how my new machine handled it. I only planned to play it for a few hours, but after a couple hours a day for 5 days I have all of the achievements and don’t care to play the game anymore because I used to test H2V 40 hours a week for about 6 months!

Because I don’t care to keep the game anymore, I am going to give it away for free to anyone in the US. (I’ll have another contest that will involve everyone else later on). Because this game has been opened I want to make this contest really easy to win so here are the simple guidelines:

1. Register on this site and make a comment on this post in 3 sentences or less saying why you deserve to win the game over everyone else.

Yes. This is a really easy contest to win. Creativity and comedy count so keep that in mind when you write your short comment.

The best comment will be chosen by me on Sept. 22nd and the winner will be notified. You will have 48 hours to respond to the email that I will send to the winner with an address where you’d like the package sent or a new winner will be selected.

And although this isn’t a requirement of the contest, I’d appreciate it if you subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribing will allow you to keep track of my newest videos and more contests. As I said before, I’ll have something for my foreign friends after Halo 3 is out.

I recently posted about a 7 foot tall Master Chief statue on eBay that sold for a little over $1,000, but this latest item will end up selling for even more. The Master Chief armor suit is one of the most accurate pieces of armor I’ve ever seen depicting the MC.

Currently the item sits at over $4,000 with 7 days remaining on the auction. Since I correctly guessed the price of the last item, I’m going to give it another shot. I predict this armor suit will break the $10,000 mark. According to the auction listing, it’s been on Spike TV, G4 TV and a Dell commercial. Here is the auction listing. What do you think it will sell for?

Check out this 7 Foot Tall Halo 2 Master Chief Statue available on eBay. As of this writing it’s up to $660 with five hours remaining. How high do you think it will go? My guess is that it will certainly pass the 1k mark.

Update: The statue sold for $1035 (Looks like I made a good guess)

It’d make an excellent addition to the game room don’t you think?

For those of you that didn’t have the opportunity to play the Halo 3 Beta you also missed out on a new feature that allows you to save replays of your in game experiences. The beta version of this “theatre” feature was incredibly limited and only allowed the video to be played back from your perspective without the ability to pause, rewind or change to different player perspectives. So it’s easy to see how there wasn’t a whole lot of excitement about simply being able to watch yourself play the game. The excitement for me was in knowing what was to come when this full feature debuted on Halo 3 later this year.

It’s finally official. The Halo 3 film feature will change the face of Halo forever by offering a plethora of tools to improve montage making, machinima video creation, team strategy development and more. The ability to watch the replay from any player’s perspective is huge! If you plan on running some scrims against a lot of teams and find yourself always losing on one specific gametype and map, save the replay and watch how they played. You can pause the replay at any time and switch to any player or go into a free roaming camera! This feature alone will dramatically help to improve team strategy.

I don’t want to share any of my ideas for future montage creations, but suffice it to say you can expect to see some ridiculous montages released by yours truly.

What do you think of the new Halo 3 saved films feature?

Well, the Halo 3 Beta is finally over. I wasn’t able to play it nearly as much as I would have liked to, in fact, I just barely passed the 200 games mark. Overall though, I had a blast playing the Beta. I would have to say my favorite map of the three was High Ground. I thought that SnowBound and Valhalla were alright, but I definitely think that High Ground proved to be the most popular map among the people I spoke with. I also think that my favorite new gametype is the twist on territories where your team has to lock them down to get a point.

One other thing I thought was odd about the Beta was how easy it was to level up. I think that the reasoning behind that was to test out Bungie’s matchmaking system accross a broad group of players with different levels, and what better way to do that then make it easy for people to level up quickly. Perhaps when the final game is released it will be more difficult to level up, but when I was playing team slayer I only played a little over 50 games and made it to level 44. I’m sure if I had a little more time I would have reached 50 easily. I believe I only received a couple losses legitimately, whereas the other times we lost team slayer games were due to disconnects.

I’m also a little bummed out that they changed the emblem system and removed a few of the backgrounds that were available in Halo 2, most notably the ‘quadrants’ backgrounds. The only way to create the emblem I used all through Halo 2 is by using one of the ‘quadrants’ backgrounds, both of which were not in the beta. Because they kept in nearly every background from Halo 2 for the emblem system, it leads me to believe that the ‘quadrants’ backgrounds will not be in the final game and if that’s the case I’m not sure which emblem I’ll switch to.

In any case, I had a lot of fun playing the beta did you? What was your favorite map and gametype? Let me know by posting your comments.

HaloBoards.com now has 20 professional and semi-professional Halo 2 players offering lessons. The professional players lessons start at $40 for an hour or $25 for half an hour, whereas the semi professional players lessons start at $25 an hour or $15 for a half hour.

 We have added great players like:

Elamitewarrior, FBI HaloGod, Mackeo, Overshield, Timeliest Brute, Victory X and many more!

If you have always wanted to play with the pros and learn from them, now is your chance! Head on over to HaloBoards.com now to purchase a lesson.