Halo Stuff

So Luke is at Bungie now and got to post his first post for the weekly update. The Bungie site now shows how many people are playing Halo 3 (over 1000 as of right now), also it shows how many Halo 2 games have been played in the last 24 hours (over 400,00 as of right now).

The Friends and Family invites went out today. I checked my Bungie private message section and found no invite. It must be from all the ball kissing I talked about.

A new Halo novel is coming out this fall. It is titled Halo: Contact Harvest and is written by Joseph Staten, the writer of Halo:CE and Halo 2. So it should be interesting to see a story coming straight from the creators.

Bungie released a video showing gameplay of the Halo 3 beta. I've posted it below. Also Bungie has posted a bunch of new screen shots. The missile pod looks pretty cool. I know Eric is just as excited as I am.

There is also a new Halo 3 Beta forum section. Some things mentioned on the forums: needler rocks and makes a good weapon, one guest is allowed, crouching is faster than Halo 2 so teabagging is easier, the game films are saved to the harddrive or to file share and the user determines the amount of space to allocate for this, and slow downs with downloading the game. Seems like the 16th we won't be playing as much as we'll be downloading.

Halo 2 Ranks Reset

Some old news that I didn't catch, but apparently Bungie will be reseting everyone's ranks in Halo 2 next week. This will come in the form of an update for the new maps. I imagine this will cause a lot of unfun games for a while as the people ranked 50 smash everyone else as they climb back to the top. This week an update was added for new game plays, but it also cleared the networking history, which told Bungie who had a great connection and who didn't. This helps them with choosing the host of matches. With it reset it has been causing a lot of connection problems this week along with a lot of laggy games. Good times.

New Halo 2 Maps Out Today

Two new Halo 2 maps come out today. For $4 you can play Tombstone and Desolation, which are remakes of Halo:CE maps. Of course the Bungie forums are seeing a lot of post that people can't download the Blasttacular map packs and IGN is reporting that the map packs are only for the 360 only. But user Halo is Ok reported that he was able to download it to his old xbox. Good to know.

I'll download the packs tonight and see how they play. I'm hoping the old clan will do the same and we can play tonight. Yes? No? Eric? Also this is our 100th post. Boo yaka.

New Halo 2 Maps on April 17th

Bungie has posted news about 2 new Halo 2 maps that will become available for purchase ($4) on both the original Xbox and Xbox 360. Bungie says:

The maps ar Tombstone and Desolation - remakes of Hang 'Em High and Derelict, respectively.

That's right kids Frankie can't spell. It seems like April 17th that Andy, Josh, and Charlie will be back on the Halo 2 grind. I do have to argue that Hang 'Em High wasn't as popular as Sidewinder or Blood Gulch.