Artless Gamer

Halo Legends

For those of you that didn’t know yet, Microsoft in cooperation with the rest of the Halo gang and globally renowned artists, are making an animated series based on the Halo Saga, Halo: Legends. The first episode was aired today.

Well, today is Saturday and the first episode “The Babysitter” was launched today over the Halo Waypoint on Xbox Live. I am enthralled. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screen shots but if you are a Halo fan then you most likely have an Xbox 360. Assuming that you have a Gold account, just download Halo Waypoint and watch the episode while it’s still available.

Here a quote from Wikipedia:

Microsoft announced at Comic-Con 2009 that it was overseeing production of a series of seven short anime films, together called Halo Legends. Financed by 343 Industries, the animation was created by five Japanese production houses: Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio 4°C, and Toei Animation. Shinji Aramaki, creator and director of Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina, serves as the project’s creative director. Warner Bros. will distribute Legends on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2010,^[70] Six of the stories are officially part of the Halo canon, with the seventh, made by Toei, is intended to be a parody of the universe.

I wonder which direction this series will take once it starts to depart from the known and accepted canon of the Halo saga. Let’s just hope that they stick to it for long enough. After all, Bungie is still working on Halo: Reach.

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Halo Reach Menu

Over on the MLG message boards a user, Tom Morello, has leaked some images of what looks to be the next and final episode of the Halo game saga, Halo: Reach. The images are quite blurry and were presumably taken with a low quality cellphone camera (iPhone?).

Some new weaponry, entirely new environments and a blurry hint at much improved graphics can be gleaned from the images. At least this time around it would be a pretty safe bet to say that they are going to use a new engine. I’d send you to the original post on MLG to see the entire original thread, but the MLG Forum is one of those places that won’t let you read unless you are registered.

Descriptions made by Tom in the thread suggest that Halo: Reach will be featuring “perks” and other additions to the old multiplayer modes we know from Halo 3.

Here the images:

New Assault Rifle?

New HUD with perks?

A Needler Rifle?

Bee Eff Gee

Shortly after the release of the images and some comments on the forum, some arguments started breaking out over the real source of these images. Microsoft remains silent on all this. For some more information on the issue, a few more screen shots and a few silly forum post exchanges, just go here.

Either way, these screen shots are really exciting. I  just wonder how long we will have to wait until Halo: Reach actually reaches us.

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Game Boy Advanced

While looking for new material for our blog in hopes of fooling Google into thinking that we’re actually a quality site with regular updates I stumbled over something awesome.

Yes, follow that link. The grand hand-held hero of portable gaming, Nintendo’s Game Boy, has made it into the Strong National Museum of Play and has taken its rightful place in the Toy Hall of Fame. Apparently, that’s quite an accomplishment. I wonder why Masters of the Universe aren’t there, yet.

Quoted from the Hall of Fame entry:

No video-game platform did more to put gamers “on the go” than Nintendo Game Boy. And go they did—bringing their gaming experience to school, to summer camp, and to the back seat of the family automobile. Over the past two decades, Game Boy has become synonymous with portable gaming fun.

We’d like to congratulate Nintendo on this 1000 point achievement and hope that other ingenious contraptions of endless gaming fun will join its ranks in good time. I still don’t see the Commodore 64 there. Does that even qualify as a toy? The Bicycle has made it into the Hall of Fame and that isn’t purely a toy, either.

What does the Future hold for the Toy Hall of Fame? Looking at the sales numbers of the Nintendo DS, it looks like Nintendo may have another one of their products join that list in about 12 to 15 years. Let’s just hope the PSP Go won’t make it there. What an awful piece of junk.

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A bit short for an ODST

Released and made available on the Xbox Live Marketplace only yesterday, Halo Waypoint lives up to expectations. When I heard of this little tool coming to XBL, I wanted it to combine the entire Halo community, all news, all achievement tracking and ViDocs into one platform.

A few hours ago I downloaded it and was far from disappointed. Here’s a rough overview of what this tool can do for you. Note that those are just the features that I discovered. There may be more as the service is fleshed out with more content.

• Achievement tracking of all Halo titles, including Halo Wars
• Keeps track of your gamer score, only counting points from your Halo titles.
• Offers you all the community news under one platform.
• Brings all the latest trailers, player videos, in-game screen shots and more media under one platform.
• Offers different daily programming, ranging from Spotlights to Behind the Scenes, Machinima, Strategy and more.
• Halo Legends!
• Free Avatar gear!

According to what I understood from the Halo Legends previews, players get to watch the 4 first Halo Legends episodes for free over Waypoint. Each episode will be available for free for the first 24 hours after upload. I am not entirely sure how easy this will be to handle for people in different time zones, but I’ll do my best to catch them when they’re live.

While you’re browsing the Waypoint, it also shows you if there are any buddies currently playing Halo. This way you can quickly jump out of Waypoint and into a match. The interface is not clunky, holds up the overall Halo theme and is backed by a hint of the old epic soundtrack.

Any Halo player should download this tool since there is essentially no reason not to use it. It’s free, it’s small, it combines all the useful community features people have been asking for and it provides you with some very cool unique and regularly updated content.

Click here to head on over to the Xbox.com Marketplace and add it to your download queue.

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