Halo 3 Trilogy

In appreciation of Guitar Hero and Halo fans alike, Neversoft, Bungie, Activision/RedOctane, and Microsoft have all joined forces to bring players the iconic Halo theme (MJOLNIR Mix) as a free playable song for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, exclusively for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. The theme will be available from Xbox LIVE Marketplace on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 22nd.

The Halo theme was written, composed, and performed by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori; and the MJOLNIR Mix features guitars performed by the Grammy Award winning guitar hero, Steve Vai.

“It’s a real pleasure to hear one of the best loved and most iconic themes from Bungie’s Halo Universe in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock,” said Marty O’Donnell, Composer and Audio Director for Bungie Studios. “As longtime fans of the Guitar Hero® franchise, it was great to collaborate with Neversoft and Activision/RedOctane to offer this exciting free download to our fans.”

  December 11th Bungie is releasing new maps for Halo 3, and they will cost you 800 MSpoints. Standoff, Rat’s Nest, and Foundry are the map names, and they should be implemented into matchmaking as they are launched.

When Halo 2’s downloadable content joined the Internet, it effectively split the Matchmaking population into the “haves” and the “have-nots,” Bungie was readily aware of the problem that caused, and has rectified it in Halo 3″…..”Simultaneously all of the DLC maps will be rolled in to the regular Matchmaking playlists as well and then as folks are getting matched up, the game will take into account who has what maps in the matchmaking process.”

Lets hope for us “have nots” that this doesn’t make our lobby wait times any worse. Have not I say? Yes, I don’t plan on downloading the maps, even though I play way too much Halo for my own good. They plan on making the maps free to download in the spring, just when they are ready to unleash a few more maps. Do YOU think 3 maps are worth 800 points?? Compared to other recent DLC offerings this isn’t exactly a super value, so I’m waiting till the spring. You could argue that with the Forge capabilities the new maps are totally worth the price, but I still don’t have a custom games search, so I won’t be making that argument

No, we’re not talking about the Halo 3 Xbox 360 console. Microsoft has announced a new promotion that will get you a copy of Halo 3 absolutely free. All you have to do is purchase an Xbox 360 console by December 21st. Once you do that, visit this website and register using the promotional code XBX7777 along with the serial number on your Xbox 360. All that remains is you waiting for your copy of Halo 3 to arrive in the mail. With the majority of retailers now bundling Xbox 360 consoles with games, it’s really just icing on the cake. Adding a free copy of Halo 3 only makes things sweeter.

                                                                                                                                                                                            The full soundtrack for Halo 3 will be in shops later this month, which is about as surprising as doing your teeth.

Officially the US will get it on 20th November, while retailer Amazon believes we will have it on 26th November. Microsoft Europe was unavailable to comment, helpfully.

The two-hour soundtrack contains some really rather impressive music from Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, which has been recorded by a full orchestra and voices of real people who can sing.

It is one of the most memorable scores from one of this year’s biggest games, and we had a chance to talk to O’Donnell about it at the Videogames Live concert held recently as a part of the London Games Festival.

Pop over to our Halo 3: Music To Watch Armageddon By article to find out more

Heatmaps have been welcomed into the Bungie.net architecture and are now supported in Halo 3. Although we’ve turned this feature on, we’re still treating it like a beta, because we’re not entirely sure how it will affect the database and load balancing for our current server system. Additionally, we’re still trying to prioritize all actions in-game that require processing for the Web site (things like statistics, file share data) ahead accoutrements like Heatmaps in the database. If introducing Heatmaps slows things down, we’ll probably take them offline while we work out the kinks in the interest of preserving the end user experience.

What’s a Heatmap?

Heatmaps are the Doppler Radar System of Death in Halo 3. We’re tracking encounters, weapons used and their results in a given game, collecting that data and sharing it with players visually. The key here is “the darker the red, the more frequent the deaths (or kills, depending on the parameters).

We’ve taken that tracking system and adapted it to your own statistics. By visiting your Career Stats page, you’ll see a new tab labeled Heatmaps. Once you click that, you’ll be able to click each of Halo 3’s maps on the left side and see all manner of statistics, what weapons you’ve killed (and where you’ve used them) with on a given map, where you’ve died to a certain weapon on a given map all via sortable dropdown menus. These heatmaps, however, aren’t a collection of your lifetime statistics, we’re only processing roughly half of the information right now, but we’ll be turning it up to full power once the feature leaves this beta phase.

In addition to your own stats, there’s now a Global page displaying Heatmap results (it’s found under the ‘Bungie Online’ tab of the main site navigation bar). Here, you’ll be able to look through each map in (both Social and Ranked playlists) and see where shenanigans are beget. Like the Career Stats page, the Global Heatmap page uses dropdown menus to display on what the tools of destruction are on a given map. Are more folks camping the canals of Snowbound, while your Heatmaps show you atop low base with a Carbine?

The below images show the heatmaps in action. These are global heatmaps tracking the kills (top) and deaths (bottom) from the Sniper Rifle on Jub-Jub Guardian.

                                    In a thought-provoking article, Wired’s Clive Thompson discusses how his lack of skill in Halo 3 has caused him to adopt a kamikaze kill method, musing on how the act is strangely parallel to real life suicide bombing.

Gamers learn quickly to compensate for their weaknesses. If they’re no good at targeting an enemy while running around out in the open, perhaps they adopt the hide and sneak method, avoiding opposition fire until a time when they can pop out and strike. Don’t like a certain gun? Switch to grenades. But what do you do when you just plain suck?

Wired’s Clive Thompson has an interesting take on this precise dilemma in regards to Halo 3 Multiplayer. His solution? Go suicide bomber.

In this intriguing yet fairly succinct read, Thompson details how, when going up against a player in Halo 3 who considerably outmatches him in skill, instead of exhausting his usual fruitless and frustratingly weak defensive tactics, he’s adopted the kamikaze pilot method of racing head on at his opponent with a sticky plasma grenade in hand. While this strategy invariably kills him, the sticky grenade will also kill his opponent.

Thompson goes on to call this tactic “an act of revenge” spurred on by “ritual humiliation” and parallels it to the mentality of a suicide bomber. Why does he justify killing himself in order to take out his enemy? Thompson explains:

I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don’t have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

While he places careful caveats to assure that he is not over-simplifying or trivializing the “horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing,” his analysis of the class systems in Halo 3, those who have the resources (time) to perfect their skills and those who don’t, is at the least thought-provoking and relevant:

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes — haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away — just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

In short, it’s certainly worth a read below.

Ticket sales down a whopping 27 percent for first October weekend, film execs blame the Chief.

Film executives are blaming Halo 3 for lower than expected October Box Office numbers, which on the weekend of the 5th were down a whopping 27 percent from the same time last year.

Many film executives, reports Advertising Age, are convinced that punters stayed indoors to play Master Chief’s latest, which let’s not forget broke all box office records by making $170 million on its first day. It’s now gone on to sell well over $300 million.

Ben Stiller’s new offering, The Heartbreak Kid (which cost $60 million to make) was expected to clear $20 million in its opening weekend, instead it made only $14 million. Execs blame the Chief.“The audience on this game is the 18-to-34 demographic, similar to what you’d see in cinemas,” said Mike Hickey, an analyst at Janco Partners, adding that “this could last for several weeks.”

In its first week of release more than 2.7 million Xbox 360 owners played Halo 3 online - that’s more than a third of all Xbox Live subscribers worldwide.

So you can see why a good portion of 18-34s were busy shooting people in the face rather than watching Ben Stiller.

Microsoft is apparently not surprised either: “We marketed it like a film,” said Josh Goldberg, a product manager at Microsoft, adding, “and now, we’re just as big or bigger than film.”

We’re starting to think its time to pack this journalist lark in, and sell bootleg Master Chief shirts out the back of a VW. Who’s with us?

Halo3Trio.com

IGN has the scoop on the status on the Halo movie project. Neill Blomkamp, the director attached to the project, provided an update on the big screen debut of Master Chief:

“The film is entirely dead. In the configuration it was in. Whatever happens with that movie, assuming that movie gets made, will be a totally different configuration,” Blomkamp informed Creativity-Online.com. “It’s not so much me as the entire vessel sank. Basically, it was a combination of; there were two studios involved that weren’t getting along in the process of making it, Universal and Fox. That kind of stuff happens, it’s a fragile industry. So the film collapsed at the end of last year, and it’s been dead, ever since then. I’ll be curious to see what happens.”

Halo3Trio.com