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Official Pre-Release Halo 2 Topic

Xenon

Xenon

Member
So what deals are there out there for this game?

I know that EB is giving you $50 for 5 games(not including sports and totally worthless crap). I assume you'll have to pay tax.
 
M

MightyHedgehog

Member
Interesting tidbits from an Entertainment Weekly Halo 2 article found on TXB Halo 2 Forum (posted there by kupal)
Gates, for one, isn't surprised that videogames are generating such huge numbers. ''Movies are great,'' says Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, ''but games like Halo 2 take the experience one step further. They allow you to be the character, the director, and the audience, all at the same time.'' Just ask all the Xbox owners who've waited three long years for the sequel to Halo, a man-versus-alien thrill ride that has grossed around $225 million. Fifteen-and-a-half million people now own an Xbox, and many of them bought their console just to play Halo. The new game — which cost upward of $20 million to create — retails for about $50. No matter how you do the math, the release of Halo 2 is a major event, even though videogames still fly under the mainstream radar.
Click to expand...

Clearly, there are political and religious dimensions to Halo 2 that were absent from the first game. (''You could look at as a damning condemnation of the Bush administration's adventure in the Middle East,'' admits Staten.) Such provocative themes were bound to come under the scrutiny of Microsoft's legal team. Even as the game was getting its final polish, lawyers forced Staten to change the name of an alien antagonist, arguing that it carried Muslim overtones. Staten objected. Nonetheless, some of the voice actors (who include Michelle Rodriguez, Ron Perlman, and Miguel Ferrer) were called back to rerecord dialogue only weeks before the final version was delivered.
Click to expand...

The only thing left is the Halo movie. Producers call, but Bungie is playing hard to get. ''We delete voice-mails without even listening to them,'' says Bungie manager Pete Parsons. Staten says their anti-Hollywood stance is about staying focused on making great games. To that end, he's busy at work on several projects, including the possible resurrection of Phoenix, a non-sci-fi project that Bungie spent two years on before putting it aside to finish Halo 2. But right now he's more concerned about getting back into the regular rhythms of life — like sleeping in his own bed..
Click to expand...

Looks like Phoenix might be the first Bungie Xenon title.
 
C

COCKLES

being watched
Glad to hear their not in a rush to make a movie.

Halo 2 & HL deserve the triple AAA production treatment, not a Uwi Boll disaster. Actually if they ever make a Halo movie, I hope it's a Final Fantasy style CGI movie...I can't imagine you'd be able to make a Master Chief suit that's flexible enough to run, leap and jump around in for an actor.
 
M

MrparisSM

Banned
DAMMNNN, Just listend to "Ghosts Of Reach" and it's da bomb!! Can't stop playing it. These are actual in-game tunes right????
 
B

border

Member
Kind of hard to have a movie where the main character wears a mask the whole time. And I doubt that the Covenant would look any good unless you spent a ton of money...
 
B

Bob White

Member
HOLY SHIT!

Taking cars to the import place in San Fierro give you a SHIT LOAD of cash (depending on the car though).

They just gave me around $68,000 for delivering an Infernus!
 
R

raYne

Member
Bob White said:
HOLY SHIT!

Taking cars to the import place in San Fierro give you a SHIT LOAD of cash (depending on the car though).

They just gave me around $68,000 for delivering an Infernus!
Click to expand...
wtf? lmao!
 
M

Mr. Lemming

Member
Bob White said:
HOLY SHIT!

Taking cars to the import place in San Fierro give you a SHIT LOAD of cash (depending on the car though).

They just gave me around $68,000 for delivering an Infernus!
Click to expand...

I knew vehicle jacking would be useful! Halo 1.5 my ass! :)
 
H

Hitler Stole My Potato

Banned
Bob White said:
HOLY SHIT!

Taking cars to the import place in San Fierro give you a SHIT LOAD of cash (depending on the car though).

They just gave me around $68,000 for delivering an Infernus!
Click to expand...

compass.jpg


map%20reading.jpg


gps.jpg


lost.png





Anywho, here's the Entertainment Weekly piece on Halo 2 in its entirety:

Hooray For 'Halo'-wood

An inside look at ''Halo 2.'' The videogame that has millions of fans (including Justin Timberlake and Bill Gates) by Geoff Keighley


Quick: Which personal-computer-pioneer-turned-new-media mogul is about to dazzle America with a new computer-animated smash hit? Steve Jobs? Well, yeah. But don't forget about Bill Gates. On Nov. 9, just days after Disney floods theaters with The Incredibles, the latest moneymaking machine from Jobs and Co. at Pixar, Gates will unleash his own animated superhero: a green-armored, machine-gun-wielding soldier named Master Chief, the star of the Xbox videogame Halo 2. Preorders guarantee that the game will reap at least $80 million on day one, far more than The Incredibles is likely to earn its first day— indeed, far more than any motion picture in history has made in a single day.


Gates, for one, isn't surprised that videogames are generating such huge numbers. ''Movies are great,'' says Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, ''but games like Halo 2 take the experience one step further. They allow you to be the character, the director, and the audience, all at the same time.'' Just ask all the Xbox owners who've waited three long years for the sequel to Halo, a man-versus-alien thrill ride that has grossed around $225 million. Fifteen-and-a-half million people now own an Xbox, and many of them bought their console just to play Halo. The new game — which cost upward of $20 million to create — retails for about $50. No matter how you do the math, the release of Halo 2 is a major event, even though videogames still fly under the mainstream radar.


Flying under the radar comes naturally to the game's writer-director, who once pursued a career in the CIA. Joe Staten, 34, is the philosophical ringleader of Bungie Studios, a 60-odd-person cadre of shy coders who toil in a Microsoft cubicle farm in Redmond, Wash. Staten has spent the past three years laboring on Halo 2 — and the last few weeks grabbing naps in the sleeping bag he stashes under his desk. It's hardly the life that Staten once thought he'd lead. But after graduating from Northwestern's drama school, he realized performing wasn't in his blood. The acting bug squashed, he went on to earn a degree in military history, writing policy papers on ethnic conflict. Then he applied to become a spy. After two years of psychiatric evaluations, polygraph tests, and background checks with his college roommates, the CIA turned him down. ''That would have been a pretty exciting career,'' he admits. ''But I'd also probably be dead by now.''


So Staten did what any failed spy with a degree in acting would do: He turned to writing videogames. His first effort, Halo, pitted Master Chief against aliens hell-bent on attacking Earth. Halo wasn't particularly innovative, but it came wrapped in a pretty package: The visuals were cinematic; the lush vistas included snowcapped mountains and breathtaking waterfalls. And the music was evocative, effectively using choral chanting and moody jazz. But what really resonated with fans (who include such A-listers as Julia Roberts and Justin Timberlake) was the game's multiplayer mode. ''You get so consumed in the game that your brain feels fresh when you finish playing it,'' says music producer Nile Rodgers, who worked with Incubus and Hoobastank on the sequel's soundtrack.

Die-hard fans will notice that the core gameplay in Halo 2 remains largely unchanged. The most impressive new feature is the ability to wield two weapons at once. But the biggest step forward is that Staten's story about an invasion of Earth is now told from the perspective of both the humans and the Covenant aliens. Since Master Chief was already well established, Staten and his father, a professor of theology, developed a set of religious beliefs that could explain the Covenant's actions in the sequel. They zeroed in on the idea of the Halos — 10,000-kilometer-wide ring worlds — as utopias, safe havens in a universe filled with terror.


Clearly, there are political and religious dimensions to Halo 2 that were absent from the first game. (''You could look at as a damning condemnation of the Bush administration's adventure in the Middle East,'' admits Staten.) Such provocative themes were bound to come under the scrutiny of Microsoft's legal team. Even as the game was getting its final polish, lawyers forced Staten to change the name of an alien antagonist, arguing that it carried Muslim overtones. Staten objected. Nonetheless, some of the voice actors (who include Michelle Rodriguez, Ron Perlman, and Miguel Ferrer) were called back to rerecord dialogue only weeks before the final version was delivered.


That bump now behind him, Staten and his team are focused on the game's huge rollout. Despite a leaked version of Halo 2 that hit the Internet in mid-October, Toys ''R'' Us is expecting Harry Potter-esque lines when it opens its Times Square store at 12 a.m. to start selling the game on Nov. 9; 6,500 other stores across the country are joining in the midnight madness. Gates hopes a big opening day is just the start of a juggernaut. A new online-play feature will ''make Halo 2 a much bigger phenomenon than Halo, because it's more of a social experience,'' he predicts. Microsoft also expects the game to have a halo effect on sales of the Xbox system, which remains a distant second to Sony's market-leading PlayStation 2.


The only thing left is the Halo movie. Producers call, but Bungie is playing hard to get. ''We delete voice-mails without even listening to them,'' says Bungie manager Pete Parsons. Staten says their anti-Hollywood stance is about staying focused on making great games. To that end, he's busy at work on several projects, including the possible resurrection of Phoenix, a non-sci-fi project that Bungie spent two years on before putting it aside to finish Halo 2. But right now he's more concerned about getting back into the regular rhythms of life — like sleeping in his own bed.
Click to expand...
 
C

Cosmic Bus

pristine morning snow
This is probably a horribly outdated question ("How '99 is that?" *chortle*) and may have been addressed already, but I don't really feel like digging through nine pages to find out. Are there going to be bots available in the multiplayer? I don't have/can't afford Live...
 
Burger

Burger

Member
Hotarubi said:
This is probably a horribly outdated question ("How '99 is that?" *chortle*) and may have been addressed already, but I don't really feel like digging through nine pages to find out. Are there going to be bots available in the multiplayer? I don't have/can't afford Live...
Click to expand...

No.
 
D

Deku Tree

Member
Hotarubi said:
This is probably a horribly outdated question ("How '99 is that?" *chortle*) and may have been addressed already, but I don't really feel like digging through nine pages to find out. Are there going to be bots available in the multiplayer? I don't have/can't afford Live...
Click to expand...

No bots, but it looks like every copy of Halo 2 comes with a card good for 2-month free months of live... do you have broadband? And can you afford an ethernet cable?
 
C

Cosmic Bus

pristine morning snow
Deku Tree said:
No bots, but it looks like every copy of Halo 2 comes with a card good for 2-month free months of live... do you have broadband? And can you afford an ethernet cable?
Click to expand...

No broadband, unfortunately. I'm stretching my paycheck thin enough simply buying Halo 2 to begin with. :)

Oh well, I wasn't planning to use multiplayer much anyway, but it would've been a nice addition.
 
D

DopeyFish

Not bitter, just unsweetened
for the people who want to listen to the ilovebees story, to listen from beginning to end will take you 4 1/2 hours nonstop.
 
D

Deku Tree

Member
Thanks for the link GhaleonEB.

DopeyFish said:
for the people who want to listen to the ilovebees story, to listen from beginning to end will take you 4 1/2 hours nonstop.
Click to expand...

Wow. The last two weeks must be pretty long.... close to an hour. I've got and listened to the first 8 weeks and they're somwhere between 3-3.5 hours I think.

EDIT: I just uploaded the last two weeks into iTunes. It says all 10 weeks total 4 hours and 11 minutes.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
IJoel said:
Excuse me for being lazy, but is there a downloadable file with all the files, properly organized? :p
Click to expand...

Nope. But just download all the seperate files as they are - the names keep them organized and in the correct order.
 
D

Deku Tree

Member
I just noticed that new stuff is getting added to the earlier weeks. Like this Herzog is getting filled in all the way back to week 1. It's hard to keep track of all these separate files. I just want to listen to the finished stuff.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
Deku Tree said:
I just noticed that new stuff is getting added to the earlier weeks. Like this Herzog is getting filled in all the way back to week 1. It's hard to keep track of all these separate files. I just want to listen to the finished stuff.
Click to expand...

That's all of the story threads. The Herzog series was released in a different way than the other files.

Each week up on the site now is complete. They are ordered by week and topic in the file name, so you can just right-click and download all of them pretty quickly. It tells one hell of a story; week 8 is really moving and tragic.
 
A

AniHawk

Member
We have two guys who are really hyped for Halo 2... One has a counter on his computer. For another guy, it's like his first time having sex, the last day of school, Christmas, and his birthday wrapped up all into one.

Employee #1: So, are you going to buy Halo 2?
Me: Not at first. ButI'mgoingtogetitfromtheXbox.com/retailwebsiteforeightbucksinJanuary.
Employee #2: Oh.
Me: *Fired* :(

You know, one of the only things I'm disappointed never made it into most Xbox games is the use of custom soundtracks. I would have loved to have integrated some music into Halo (like perhaps the use of some tracks from the Band of Brothers soundtrack). Maybe it could have been an unlockable feature AFTER you beat the game on single-player mode.
 
A

axxxj

Animator in Waiting
AniHawk said:
You know, one of the only things I'm disappointed never made it into most Xbox games is the use of custom soundtracks. I would have loved to have integrated some music into Halo (like perhaps the use of some tracks from the Band of Brothers soundtrack). Maybe it could have been an unlockable feature AFTER you beat the game on single-player mode.
Click to expand...

Marty's gonna kick you in the nuts for talking like that!!!
 
D

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
AniHawk said:
We have two guys who are really hyped for Halo 2... One has a counter on his computer. For another guy, it's like his first time having sex, the last day of school, Christmas, and his birthday wrapped up all into one.

Employee #1: So, are you going to buy Halo 2?
Me: Not at first. ButI'mgoingtogetitfromtheXbox.com/retailwebsiteforeightbucksinJanuary.
Employee #2: Oh.
Me: *Fired* :(

You know, one of the only things I'm disappointed never made it into most Xbox games is the use of custom soundtracks. I would have loved to have integrated some music into Halo (like perhaps the use of some tracks from the Band of Brothers soundtrack). Maybe it could have been an unlockable feature AFTER you beat the game on single-player mode.
Click to expand...

Halo is one of the few games where a custom soundtrack option would be an INSULT.
 
D

Deku Tree

Member
dark10x said:
Halo is one of the few games where a custom soundtrack option would be an INSULT.
Click to expand...

For single player, I agree. But for multiplayer, it would have been sweet to put it in the game. If we'll be playing Halo 2 multi for years, then many people will get tired of the music (no matter how good it is) and it would have been sweet to have the option for custom soundtracks.
 
C

Chi-Town

Member
Deku Tree said:
For single player, I agree. But for multiplayer, it would have been sweet to put it in the game. If we'll be playing Halo 2 multi for years, then many people will get tired of the music (no matter how good it is) and it would have been sweet to have the option for custom soundtracks.
Click to expand...

Halo's multi-player never had any music.
 
D

Deku Tree

Member
Chi-Town said:
Halo's multi-player never had any music.
Click to expand...

Wow I had forgot that. Guess it's a little early in the morning for me. So I guess your saying Halo 2 multi has no music too. But custom soundtracks would still be a nice feature to have in multiplayer.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
metropolis_tankrider_adj_273x400.jpg


station_grunts_adj_273x400.jpg


gasgiant_bansheefightin_adj_273x400.jpg


MP_AscensionBoarding_273x400.jpg


MP_MidshipKing_273x400.jpg


MP_AscensionElite_273x400.jpg



New... something at MSN Entertainment
M3XGhost39 found some odd 'screenshots' over at MSN Entertainment. They're pretty tiny, and they're a mishmash of already-released shots, shots that WILL be released in the next few days (but are currently under embargo), and shots I've never seen before. To top it off, they're in the 'Celebrity Photos' section (I guess there's no 'screenshots' section there). Go look. (No spoilers - at least none you'll recognize as such.)
Click to expand...


http://halo.bungie.org/oldnews.html?item=11102
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
IJoel said:
The color scheme options seem quite varied. I like it! :D
Click to expand...

Yeah, you have both primary and seconday colors, kinda like 'blue with silver trim'.

And in case anyone missed it in the quote above, these are parts of screens that become un-imbargoed in a few days; MSN apparantly just posted them when they got them. More media, baby!

:D
 
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