J Allard had a keynote speech at the GDC today, including some interesting information on the Xbox 2. The main points are an in-game market system (actually sponsored by the developers, gasp!), wireless controllers and networks, every game Live-enabled, every game 16:9 HD compatible, costumizable soundtracks in everything. The transcript of the speech can be found here. It's pretty long and full of PR sugariness; you've been warned. But it does give you a clearer idea on where the next Xbox is going. All of the concrete details are going to be released at E3.

Louis Wu's long-anticipated interview is up for your perusal. The parental perspective makes it different from the other interviews. Interesting read. Next week is Jeff McAllister of PlanetDoom. What I think would complement the series is if they could wrangle interviews with guys in the media (say, Lou Dobbs, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Aaron Brown, etc.) to get their take on the situation.

CNN.com has an article up on the new Walk of Game, talking mainly about Shigeru Miyamoto and Nolan Bushnell. Their Bushnell segment notes that the man who essentially founded the industry recently hooked sixteen televisions throughout his house for a sixteen-player game of Halo. Nice.

Last Stand fits in an Inigo Montoya reference (7 meta-points!), and One One Se7en has reds trying to solve their problems with words, rather than violence. How foolish of them; violence is always the answer.

Source: HBO

In the continuing and high-profile series of video game violence interviews at CBS News, they've put up an interview with Scott Ramsoomair, the man behind VG Cats. Not as stimulating as the earlier interviews with Jack Thompson and Tim Buckley, but it's a welcome break for someone to take the issue lightly. :) Next week comes HBO's Claude Errera, who spends his whole life immersed in the brainwashing filth of violent video games and may well be the nicest person on the planet. Speaking of Claude, he's put up a couple of interesting links at HBO:

Link #1, a forum post by SPARTAN-01110101 questioning the editor's labeling of those proposing video game restrictions as "conservative watchdogs" Link #2, a point-by-point Jack Thompson rebuttal at Cathode Tan

Just to put my two cents on this, I find Jack Thompson's points particularly ridiculous since I did a research project on violence in video games, and read through most of the studies conducted on the subject. None of them found a direct link between engaging in a simulation of violence and participating in real-world violence. The only exception to that rule is a study that compared two groups of six-year-old children, one group after an hour of playing Doom and the other group after an hour of playing Myst. The two groups were put in a room afterwards with dolls to play with. In the first group, a number of the boys ripped the heads off of the dolls, while none of the girls did, and none of the Myst group did anything to the dolls. The problems with this test, readily recognized by the reasearchers, is that six-year-olds generally have a more malleable sense of right and wrong, and Doom causes an adrenaline rush more likely to result in violence against the dolls that Myst does not. They also note that the test may do nothing more than prove that boys are moe aggressive than girls. And also, as the dolls are inatimate objects, they acknowledged that the boys may have just taken the dolls to be an extension of the game. There have been a couple of laboratory tests that found a link between simulated violence and real-world aggression (but not real-world violence), but they are outnumbered two-to-one by tests that were found to be inconclusive, and matched nose-to-nose by tests that "proved" video game violence reduced real-world aggression. So basically, there is no evidence besides the anecdotal that video game violence has any link to real-world violence, or even aggression (besides the obvious adrenal link; many tests used their control as Gran Turismo, which causes a similar adrenaline rush, and those were the tests that usually turned up inconclusive), but people like Jack Thompson readily spout un-scientific nonsense that the sensationalist media is more than ready to lap up and shoot out at panicky parents who have never actually played the games in question, or researched the topic to a nominal degree. People wield the 'OMGWTFGTA!' card to achieve their personal gains, and there are very few outlets for the real information to circulate, which would make Thompson look like the sleazy, manipulative slime he is. The old foe of video game freedom was Joe Lieberman, but now we're dealing with a new kind of monster. Lieberman sincerely believes in enforcing video game regulations to keep violent games out of the hands of children until we can get more conclusive facts on the matter. Thompson is a new kind of monster. He's made it clear in previous interviews (I've been following Jack Thompson for over a year now, before he's become a name known in every forum) that he only wants to open the door for multi-million dollar lawsuits against the burgeoning video game industry, and take a big slice of the pie for himself. He's noted gleefully how he plans to bankrupt Rockstar. I disagree with people who think Thompson is actually crazy, he's just greezy and a bastard.

WTF, you ask? Well, I'll tell you WTF. Earlier today Halo was among the first six inductees to the 'Walk of Game', a Walk of Fame-like tribute to gaming on Metreon's Ground Level in San Francisco. Pretty neat, especially considering the exclusive company it's in (the other five inductees are Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Link, Mario, and Sonic). Sorry about not giving you a heads-up on this earlier so you could be there at the induction, but you can go check it out when you're in SF. Here's to hoping the Walk sticks around!

Source: HBO

It's been a while since the Junkyard has had a spotlight (almost as long as it's been since I did any schoolwork), but they've started it up again with Ross Mills. I can relate to the wierdness of being recognized in real life; I was eating at a pizza place in January, during one of those periods where I disappear from the internet, when two complete strangers at the next table over wondered aloud where TankRamp went. 0_o

Source: Mhaddy

Check this one out: The Mechanical Aspects of the M12 Warthog LRV, by Speedy. Wow. Hope you paid attention in physics; Speedy did.

Source: HBO

Stephen Loftus has an interesting, in-depth, succint article up at HBO entitled 'The Pillar of Autumn Conundrum'. It covers the anomolies in the Pillar of Autumn, and comes to some conclusions about its total size based on interior scale. It ties in with his old article, 'Determining the Real Sizes of Objects in Halo'. I like how the Halo community puts out articles that sound like college research papers, and are just as detailed. :-P

Source: HBO

Old HaloPlanet moderator, current High Impact Halo administrator, and long-time Halo trickster DarkHelmet has an interview by Ducain up at HIH. For the uninitiated (read: uncool), check out some of the videos this guy's put together after you read the interview, but lay down a tarp first. Because they will BLOW YOUR MIND.

Source: HBO

Louis Wu from HBO got word from a Halo-fan that Bungie.net has put up a guide for the Halo 2 multiplayer map Lockout. It's very detailed and contains a lot of helpful images to explain strategies and points at the map that are of value. If you want to improve your skills on this map then have a read.

Source: HBO

I'm logging off for tonight; I need sleep if I plan on getting any schoolwork done tomorrow around rugby practice. I'll catch up on all of the news from this weekend and today tomorrow afternoon. 'Night.

Interesting article about the business side of games in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Talks about rising costs (and rising profits), as well as the salaries of your average game designer, programmer, and artist. Some of the Bungie info is flawed (they are NOT doubling their staff, for instance), but there is some interesting parts about how profitable games (games, implying Halo) have been for Microsoft thus far, and how big the industry is getting. ($56 billion by 2008? Wow.) If nothing else, this should get you to invest in the industry while it's profitability is doubling. My money's on Ubisoft; they're getting better each year, and you'll make a killing if and when EA makes a hostile bid. Though I may overuse this phrase: Ka-ching!

Source: HBO.

A little late, I know. My fault. Got's to get my Rumble Pit ranking back up to a healthy level, since I haven't played seriously in about two months. This week has lots of specifics about cheat and glitch fixing (no more Sword Jumping or grabbing flags through walls in multiplayer), as well as another hint about upcoming downloadable content. "Timetable". Sound more like a single-player map than a multiplayer map to me, but my intuition hasn't ever been right before, so I doubt it is now.

Mat "shunji" Noguchi has updated his blog for the first time in months, reflecting on the purpose of plans, methodology, and education and their role in actual game design. A short read, and interesting if you're trying to break into the industry.

Source: Rampancy

Xbox.com is opening up the first official European Halo 2 Championship soon, with plenty of cool stuff (Camcorder! Plaque! MC Statue! Justification of existence!) on the line. Only the eight top-ranked Rumble Pit players in their respective countries are entered into their nation's competitions, so start playing right now, and don't stop: The Rumble Pit rankings are recorded before the end of March. Check your country's Xbox.com homepage to see if they have the contest page up. Make your country proud. (We're rooting for Fluffy, if he can pull himself away from his hot tubs and beautiful Swedish women long enough to commit himself to the contest. Which we doubt he can. Basically, we're just jealous of him.)

Source: HBO

This isn't entirely Halo-related but since a big part of Halo 2 is the LIVE-experience I think this may be interesting for some of you. In the latest My so-called LIVE Will Tuttle talks about accessories for your Xbox and in this case it's all about communicators. Most of you that have LIVE are aware of how easy it is to break the standard Xbox Communicator (I know I broke mine in two days). So if you are looking for something to replace your old one with then this is the article for you.

Comics for (Insert Date) is back! Although with the recent swarm of Halo machinema being released, I might need to start a Movies for (Insert Date) segment soon. But I digress. One One Se7en describes how the clearest sort of Halo communication isn't done over the headset, and Halo Babies starts a 'Bungie Fundamentals' three-part series. Humor! Coming from all angles!

Source - HBO, in case you're new here and didn't already know that.

MTV, in association with MLGPro, is holding a contest to find the 'Best Gamer on Campus'. "Compete on the biggest HDTV in the country", you say... Count me in! Oh wait...I'm a high school sophomore, and I'm not that good at Halo anyway. (In fact, I'm 15. According to Jack Thompson, since I played an M rated game under 17, I'm entitled to a multi-million dollar cash payout from Bungie. Ka-ching, baby!) But if you're not me, you might want to check this out. Thanks to HBO for the heads-up.

If you set the two against each other with real guns, the Real Army (and one Marine) would beat the snot out of Bungie. But in video games, especially in a video game they made, the Bungie Army would do pretty well, right? Wrong. Pure unadulterated slaughter. I'm not sure about Jack Thompson's allegation that shooting in video games makes you a better shot in real life, but the inverse is clearly true. U-S-A!

Frankie has a cool piece on Havok physics (which has achieved a notoriety in the general public no set of technical tools has since the Unreal engine), and how it comes into play in Halo 2. Very informative for those of you wondering about the engine that runs the machine; they incoporated it so well with the "Halo" feel, I didn't even notice when I was playing that they were working with a new physics engine. Neat.

You may or may not recognize Jack Thompson as the lawyer traveling the country defending every teenage murderer who played Grand Theft Auto, claiming the game, and the game alone, caused them to commit the crime. He's tried and failed about a half-dozen times in civil suits against Rockstar and Take 2 Interactive demanding hundreds of millions of dollars of reperations. Thankfully, common sense has prevailed, and he's thus far been unsuccessful. He's made it very clear in interviews that he's looking for a way into legal history books and a lot of money from commission, since if he wins once, he'll start winning every time. "Opening the floodgates", he calls it. Basically, he's the biggest single threat to the video game industry as we know it, far bigger than Congress or the FCC, since he's not seeking tougher regulations, he's seeking to bankrupt the industry. Anyway, I noticed over at Penny Arcade (which describes him as "essentially building his legacy on the broken bodies of desperate teenagers", which is a fairly accurate assessment of the situation) that he gave an interview to CBS News. What caught my attention was a rebuttal interview from Tim Buckley, of Ctrl-Alt-Del. Above it the list of other people interviewed for their thoughts includes halo.bungie.org's Claude Errera, aka Louis Wu. I'll tell you when that interview goes up. In the meantime, go shoot some hookers.

And in response to Fluffy, my life is freaking fascinating.

Some of you may have noticed my absense over the last couple of days (hopefully). The reason for this is that in my endevour to get the most secure computer in the world I ordered the latest version of Panda Internet Security 2005. For those of you that have a broadband connection and worry about worms, intruders, hackers, trojans, viruses and other malicious computer-stuff I can highly recommend this awesome piece of software, it works really well. Actually it works a bit too well. Since I installed it a couple of days ago I'm still unable to connect to the Internet. I've tried to solve this problem myself for several hours, with techsupport from my ISP for several hours, with techsupport from Panda Software for several hours and still no result. So once again I had to go up my attic and bring back my old 100 Mhz IBM laptop from the dead.

Well I guess it's time to stop now, after all most of you come here for things related to Halo and not the not-so-interesting happenings in mine and Tankramp's life.