Halo 3 Trilogy

                                                                                                                                                                   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

                                                                                                                                                                    It’s not too late to enter to win a Halo 3 Legendary Edition at 2Old2Play.com

For those of you that already own the regular Halo 3 or don’t know what the Legendary Edition is, I can sum it up as a Halo Geek’s dream. Better yet, just look at the feature below:

1. Includes storyboard art that depicts key moments and scenes
2. Comes with an audio-visualization tool custom-designed to enhance high-definition home theaters for the ultimate in Halo 3 audio and visual performance
3. Legendary Edition includes two bonus discs of extra content and a collectible replica of a Spartan Mjolnir Mark VI helmet with display stand
4. Bonus discs include behind-the-scenes features, a making-of documentary, remastered cinematic content from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 with director commentaries and more

So What Is The Contest?

We basically want to see how funny, witty, and/or shocking the community can be with a randomly selected screenshot from the Bungie Active Community Files. So all you have to do is give us a quote for the image below and email it to contest@2old2play.com with Halo 3 Contest in the subject line. Try to give us something that expresses the image best and makes us laugh while we go through the countless emails. The winner will be selected by our admins, mods, and writers from both sites on November 5th.

What Are the Rules?

The rules are simple. All you have to do is send one email with your quote for the picture to contest@2old2play.com in order to enter. You can only send one quote per email and only one email per person is allowed. Emails without Halo 3 Contest in the subject line will not be read. The contest is only valid in the United States and Canada so please keep this in mind when entering as the prizes will NOT be shipped elsewhere. The contest will end November 5th, 2007 but all entries must be in by November 2 to be counted in the contest. By entering this contest you agree to the contest rules provided here.

What do i Win?

• First Place: Halo 3 Legendary Edition
• Second Place: Halo 3 Regular Edition

Our multiplayer design teams are hard at work on a couple of things. One of them is a fun, seasonal addition to the matchmaking playlist which should keep you entertained for about 27 hours around Halloween. No specifics yet, but suffice it to say that if you want to spend your witchy holiday playing Halo 3, we’ll give you some spooktacular reasons to do so.

The other thing keeping the designers busy, and the artists and audio guys for that matter, is downloadable content. The maps themselves are being prepared in a logical order, designed to fill gaps in our matchmaking selection and add new, interesting environments to our multiplayer arsenal. The more finished the maps are, the faster they’re likely to make it to marketplace. We’ll have more news on the specific plans for timing and availability soon, and we promise to let you guys get a look at the maps and hear more about what they have to offer.

We’ve been testing the new maps pretty regularly and I loved all except one, which for the purposes of this article, I shall refer to as, “Purple Reign.” I sometimes have an initially adverse reaction to symmetrical or semi-symmetrical map designs because I am not terribly smart and I sometimes have difficulty become oriented within those types of space. Invariably, I get used to it and learn to love them. This was just such a case, but when a new slew of architecture was added in the distance recently, it was enough for me to recognize which way was “up,” so to speak. Now I love it.

So the good news is that as far as I am concerned, all of the projected DLC maps are sweet.  Two of them in particular will cause a Three Mile Island scale pant-fill-disaster in the Halo community. I can’t say why, but some of you will figure it out correctly and be able to say I told you so later.

Luke and I have been playing a lot of SWAT on the new maps because it’s an easy way to check out a map with only a couple of players. At least two of the projected DLC maps however, are simply far too large for even the hair-trigger nature of SWAT to speed ‘em up. Both of them support lots of vehicles, but one of them, John Carpenter’s Prince of Dorkness, doesn’t need vehicles per se. It’s tough to explain. When you finally see it, you’ll understand.  

Source:  Bungie.net

HaloGameworld.com

I’ve had a lot of mails from skilled Halo players saying things like, “Hey, I am stuck at level 41 skill level and I am not going up, so your skill system must be broken.” Actually, what you’re seeing is that it works. What the system is telling you, is that relative to the other players currently playing Halo 3, you are a level 41. You should not be going up in skill level until you become appreciably and significantly better.

If you suddenly developed a whole new level of headshot ability, for example you’d find that your skill level would rise commensurately. It is not, like your rank, supposed to climb inexorably based on experience, but rather to judge and determine your relative skill and match you with players of like skill. My experience is that games are closer, tighter and more fairly balanced than ever before. The spikes happen at the low end, as you mix it up with folks who haven’t played enough to determine a steady skill level. As you get better, progress will slow and eventually halt as the system determines your overall ability and uses that to find matches.

It’s important to note that it is an increasingly accurate estimate, designed to become more accurate over the long term. So don’t worry about dips in your performance, or unexpected sprees, those dips and spikes are not given much precedence by the system.

In theory, it is trying to put you in the most competitive matches. It is not some goal or trophy – it’s a tool.

You may think that Halo 3 is a great game or you may not. Either way, you’ve got to recognise the hype surrounding the game as being something powerfully attractive to young kids. Especially hell-bound young kids.

You wouldn’t be the only ones to notice either and a recent New York Times article has picked up the story of a Colorado Community Church which is using the game to try and attract newcomers to the Christian faith.

“Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.” Said the original article.

I have to confess, as somebody who spent countless summers at ‘Christian Camp’ and attended Sunday School every single week, i’m a little miffed that these kids get to play Halo 3 between their psalms. The most we ever got was word games based around the Book of Proverbs.

HaloGameWorld.com