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

New York, NY – Monday, November 19, 2007 - Halo®: Contact Harvest has become a New York Times Bestseller within the first week of sales. The novel, which went on sale nation wide on Tuesday, October 30th , also debuted on USA Today Bestseller List at #23 in the Thursday, November 8 th edition. The new novel is the second of the New York Times bestselling series based on the hugely successful Microsoft and Bungie Studios’ Halo® video games for the Xbox 360 videogame and entertainment system.

Halo: Contact Harvest is written by Joseph Staten, Bungie Studios’ lead writer and one of the original creators of the Halo game trilogy. The book marks Joseph Staten’s first foray into novel writing, but he has served as a writer and cinematics director for Halo (2001) and Halo 2 (2004) and the record-breaking Halo 3.

In Halo: Contact Harvest, Staten reveals the state of the Halo universe leading up to humanity’s devastating first contact with the Covenant —a chance encounter that catapulted mankind into a struggle for its very existence. Readers will experience the start of the Human-Covenant war from the perspective of Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson, Master Chief’s legendary confidant and mentor.   As readers follow the young Sergeant’s adventures, they will gain terrifying insights into both the Covenant’s genocidal fury and the vicious civil war that threatened to destroy humanity’s fledgling interstellar empire, even before the Covenant got their chance.

Halo has emerged from the video game world as a global phenomenon. Its latest installment, Halo 3, garnered more than $300 million in its first week alone, making it the fastest selling video game ever, and one of the most successful entertainment properties ever. With a fully fleshed-out universe of heroes, villains and epic scenarios, the novels expand the universe to give fans a grander view of the game environments and characters they encounter.

To date, over 20 million copies of the games in the Halo trilogy have been sold worldwide. The record week one sales comes on the heels of the previously announced $170 million in sales in the U.S. within the first 24 hours of the game’s release, which marked not just the biggest videogame launch, but the biggest entertainment launch in history. The Xbox 360 title beat previous U.S. sales records set by blockbuster openings for entertainment events like the release of Spider-Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Additionally, more than 1.7 million copies of Halo 3 were preordered in the United States, making it the fasting pre-selling game in history, surpassing the previous record-setting pre-sales of Halo 2.

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

                                                                                                                                                                   Microsoft has announced that it will soon offer downloadable Xbox titles including Halo and Psychonauts as part of a new “Xbox Originals” campaign, as well as free Xbox Live Arcade titles in celebration of the previously announced fifth anniversary of the Xbox Live service.

November 15th marks the five year point of the service, and and company has said that, “as a gesture of thanks to the gaming community,” all Xbox Live gamers will get one free Xbox Live Arcade game, as well as 500 free Microsoft Points for all members who joined the service at its start in 2002.

More interestingly, the company has announced that with its latest Xbox Live update launching December 4th, Microsoft will kick off a new “Xbox Originals” campaign that will see the release of downloadable games for 1200 Points ($15) each.

Thus far confirmed titles include Halo, Psychonauts, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Fable, with “a growing catalog of Xbox games to download and own over the coming year.”

Said Live, software and services vice president John Schappert, “In just five short years, Xbox LIVE has revolutionized the way friends and family have fun in the living room. On its fifth birthday, Xbox LIVE truly is the place for hanging out with friends and enjoying downloadable TV shows, movies, videos, game add-ons and now downloadable Xbox games on demand.”

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.

                                                                                                                                   Bungie has added a new feature and stat tracker to Halo 3. This one in the form of blood red “Heatmaps.” Heatmaps are used to track “encounters, weapons used and their results in a given game, collecting that data and sharing it with players visually.” As shown in the Snowbound snapshot below, the darker red areas are places where more deaths happen, while the cooler blue areas are places where less deaths occur.Bungie noted in it’s weekly update that the Heatmap tracking is in a “beta” right now, tracking 1/2 the stats. They’re monitoring the public performance of this form of stat tracking, previously used internally at Bungie. In other words, they don’t want processing power taken up on crunching Heatmaps by sacrificing some of the more critical pieces of data to Halo 3.

See the death signatures on the Global Heatmaps here. You can also look on your own Career Stats page on Bungie.net. Will this change the way we play Halo 3? Cooler areas are probably going to require more sniping action and likely won’t get as much kills.

Check out the latest weekly update report from Bungie, which also discusses upcoming downloadable content, bug fixes and the two disc Halo 3 Original Soundtrack.

From Bungie.net

                                    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.

                                        I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.

That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing.

This probably bears some explanation. I’ll begin by pointing out a basic fact: A lot of teenage kids out there play dozens of hours of multiplayer Halo a week. They thus become insanely good at the game: They can kill me with a single head shot from halfway across a map — or expertly circle me while jumping around, making it impossible for me to land a shot, while they pulverize me with bullets.

I can’t do those things. I haven’t got enough time to practice as they do: I’m an adult, with a job and wife and kid, so I get maybe an hour with Halo on a good day. I wind up sucking far, far more than most other Halo 3 players, and despite the best attempts of Xbox Live to match me up with similarly lame players, I usually wind up at the bottom of my group’s rankings — stumbling haplessly about while getting slaughtered over and over again.

So after a few weeks of this ritual humiliation, I got sick of it. And I devised a simple technique for revenge.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I’m only making it easier for them to shoot me — and thus I’m marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I’ll whip out a sticky plasma grenade — and throw it at them. Because I’ve run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I’ll die — but he’ll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone “from beyond the grave.”)

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.

It’s not just that I’m willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It’s that I’m exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don’t want to die. If they die too often, they won’t win the round, and if they don’t win the round, they won’t advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it’s all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. 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.

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.

I do not mean, of course, to trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing. Nor do I mean to gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves. These are all impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what’s happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.

But the fact remains that something quite interesting happened to me because of Halo. Even though I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

And the truth is, I’m probably going to keep doing it. Because when it comes to online Halo — I still suck.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive’s observations on his blog, collision detection