Bungie and Microsoft will be showing off a bit of Halo 3 to the press on May 11. I think they might even give us some significant hands-on time. Sig-nif-icant.

This week's regularly scheduled Bungie update features some interesting info about the upcoming public beta of Halo 3. In addition to detailing some of the maps for the third Master Chief blast-a-thon-that may or may not make it in time for the beta-Bungie's Frankie teases the beta set with fancy-shmancy split-screen play and a feature he refers to as "Saved Films."

Simply describing the Saved Films feature as "very, very, very limited" in the beta, the name would imply a game recording feature that would (we hope) allow players to record, save, and upload multiplayer matches for posterity. Recording is already a fairly common feature in a number of first-person shooters and will surely be a welcome addition to the world of Halo deathmatches.

There's a lot more to read and some intense Spartan eye-candy to take in in the form of the above pic, suitable for wallpapering at 4008x2258 resolution. Michael McWhertor

Preorder the Halo 3 Master Chief Kubrick figures



MediaCom's highly collectible Kubrick figures are getting a Halo 3 upgrade. These 2-1/2" tall Spartans, imported from Japan, come in blue, red, green (Master Chief's favorite color), and Active Camo flavors. The four pack will set you back $18 and is scheduled to be available November 2007. If you've already preordered the Legendary edition, what's another $18, right?

Source

  omg anyone getting these? i couldnt help but notice, u mentioned the word "flavors"...can eat? anyways, if anyone does see this in Malaysia or is gonna order it, lemme know

Sergeant Frickin Avery Johnson! Woohoo!

In the Halo Graphic Novel, on pg 122, reveals that he was involved in Project: ORION, the Spartan-I program.[1] This would make him over 60 years old, possibly even 70. This would mean that either Spartans can live longer without aging, or people generally live longer in the future. Another possibility is that Johnson has accumulated a total of several years spent frozen in cryo-chambers during missions requiring long periods of time traveling through slipspace, thus keeping him physically younger than he actually is. Any or all of these conditions may be have contributed to Sgt. Johnson physically appearing younger than he actually is.

Also, his supposed "Boren's Syndrome" may be part of an ONI Section III black op to cover up the fact that he is possibly a SPARTAN-I. This is made possible on pg 122 in the Graphic Novel, most notably with the hard copy of the query from Dr. Catherine Halsey to the ONI sever from the Gettysburg.

Johnson also whistled "Oly Oly Oxen Free" to a group of SPARTANs, which also contributes as a lead of him being a SPARTAN. However, only SPARTAN IIs know the all clear signal, which they made up as children.

I'm pretty sure it'll end with.

999 Spartans - 1 Brute

The 1 Spartan killed because he tripped over mounds of corpse and hit his head.

haha!!!

then what happened to the other 999 Brutes??

At the New York City edition of the Halo 3 press preview, the Bungie tame found time for a quick Q&A before hands-on time. Some known, some new info within, so keep reading.

Gears of War has been getting a lot of criticism because of the net code. Has there been any updates to that in Halo?

Yeah, everything is kind of redone from the ground up. We had really good net code in Halo. It's a peer to peer system, so you have some of the disadvantages that come with that. But the advantages, is as it scales, the more people you have, the better conditions get, the better the experience is. Even with the population we're gonna see today, it should be pretty good. We're having a pretty smooth experience so far. And there's a couple of thousand people out there.

What's the maximum number of players?

16, same as Halo.

Are all weapons going to be available in the beta?

We're certainly saving some for the final game in the fall. And there's gonna be a couple weapons that won't even be shown in multiplayer, they're going to be campaign only, but you haven't seen all the multiplayer weapons today, no.

What is the weapon count for the beta?

You know, I actually don't know. It's something like ten or eleven or twelve or thirteen... There's a lot. Everything that is dual wielded can be reloaded independently unlike Halo 2. You're gonna use the RB and the LB buttons to reload. And RB replaces X from Halo 2, from boarding for activating door switches, all that kind of stuff. So play around with the controls, you can change them any time in here with the controls menu. All the ones you're used to are in here, so if you like Green Thumb and South Paw you can play around in there any time in the game.

We also have one more feature which is saved films. After a game's finished and you're in the lobby, you can save a film of the entire game. You can send that, recommend it to a friend and watch it back at your leisure later.

In the beta, it's first person viewpoint only, I believe you can switch to another camera for another player and see it from their viewpoint. In the final game, we're going to have a whole suite of controls, rewind, slow motion, freeze frame, pan around Matrix-style, whatever you want to do.

Where are those video saved?

They are saved on your machine initially, but they also go to Fileshare, which is a set amount of file storage. You can have either set number of films or a megabyte limit. Now a saved film is pretty small compared to a Windows Media file. An entire game of, like, 15 or 20 minutes can be 6 megs and that includes every single possible angle, replays with full sound effects in the engine. We have a cool feature that when you pause, it continues to play some ambient sounds, for example, the sound of a rocket, we've got some cool things with looping and sampling where it sounds like a rocket is going past your head in freeze frame. It's weird but you should try it.

The third person perspective, does that automatically engage when you pick up a selected weapon?

As soon as you pick up one of those specialty weapons, yeah, it engages.

Can you tell us what those power ups are we saw?

We have a new element in the game called equipment. It's activated using the X button, you'll see these items laying around on the floor. They come in all sorts shapes and sizes and they all do different things. There's a Bubble Shield you might have seen in the TV commercial. There's a grav lift which will propel people or vehicles into the sky about 20 feet and you can use it to jump over walls. There's a power drain, which is really, really dangerous. It depletes shields in a large globular radius and toss in a couple grenades at people standing near that and its pretty much a sure kill. There's a couple of other ones that aren't in the beta, and you'll see those in the fall.

Can you tell us about the ranking system?

There is a ranking system, you'll see it after a game. You'll see two numbers. One is RP, which is your ratings points. What they do is signify to everyone exactly how much you've played. You also have a skill level, which is matchmaking playlist dependent. So if you go to a matchmaking playlist and you see someone with a really low skill level in Team Slayer, but you see that they have a lot of rating points and a high rank-your rank is associated sergeant, major, whatever-with the number of rating points, you know that they're not a scrub. It keeps things fair and we can sort of matrix those numbers to keep players more evenly matched. So, you're not gonna get beat on by experts that are pretending to be noobs.

Are you using the same TrueSkill system as everything else or is it modified?

It is modified, but we do work with the TrueSkill guys in Cambridge, yeah.