The Forge is one of those features that you wouldn’t naturally include in a console shooter but as the portion of the Halo 3 community who are not spending their time cussing while “p0wning n00bs” or griefing their own teammates on Orbital will tell you Forges’ map redecorating functionality allows for some pretty awesome redesigned Halo 3 combat maps.

To commemorate the growth of the Forge Cafe community over at Bungie.net, a collection of folks interested in taking the tools and sharing tips tricks and creations with each other, hitting its inaugural 75 member mark the organizers have announced their first map making challenge/contest.

Members of the Forge Cafe community can compete to create a themed Halo playground. Seriously a playground built up like a theme park using the tools, items and environments of the established maps. The map design contest is not centered around a playable experience however, merely an aesthetic goal of making a map in Forge that will allow players to see the fun of an Adventureland setting. Details of the contest and a link to the Forge Cafe can be found after the jump.

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Tor Books has announced that the next Halo novel, sub-titled The Cole Protocol, has officially launched today. The new book — penned by Tobias S. Buckell, an award-winning writer and huge Halo fan — will reveal the first days of the Human-Covenant War. The title is derived from the directive issued by the UNSC to hide the Earth and some of its colonies from the coming alien onslaught. However, the plot will focus mostly on a three-man squad sent to wreak havoc on the Covenant from behind enemy lines.

The last two Halo novels were instant bestsellers, so there’s probably no doubt that this one will be as well.
You can pick up a copy of The Cole Protocol at just about any bookstore.

BringIt is setting up a service with a secure site where gamers can compete for cash online 24/7. Any game platform with Internet connectivity can get in on the action.

“BringIt is going to transform the videogame landscape by allowing individuals to compete online for bragging rights and real money through skill-based gaming,” said BringIt CEO and founder Woody Levin. “Gamers have shown great interest and support for competitive gaming, so we are pleased to offer BringIt as a player-driven service that quickly connects gamers, allowing them to play legally for cash while getting a more intense competitive rush.”

Some of the titles in the service during the beta period are Madden NFL 2009, Gears of War 2, FIFA 2009, Halo 3, Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, Rock Band 2, Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart. BringIt will accept PayPal and major credit cards for bets between $1 and $100,000. Read more about the terms and conditions from the press release after the break.

I should think that mixing videogames and betting will seriously up the danger factor for gamers with addictive personalities. It should also make BringIt a lot of money.
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In the weeks leading up to today’s release of the New Xbox Experience, reports circulated on the impact of installing games to the hard drive. While most games a modest decrease in load times, Halo 3, strangely, was performing worse than it did when running off the DVD. Installing to the hard drive requires that you insert the disc of the game you want to play into the DVD drive for the purpose of verifying you actually own the game. The game disc, however, isn’t spinning like usual, so even if loading times weren’t impacted, you wouldn’t have to hear that noisy disc drive while you played.

As it turns out, those reports weren’t erroneous. Bungie is advising people to not install Halo 3 to their hard drive, as internal tests have shown that doing so can increase load times. Because of that, there’s the concern that increasing load times will negatively impact multiplayer games. Longer load times slow down the process of actually getting into games, which means people will begin quitting, which results in more waiting or in lame, unbalanced games.

The technical explanation of what’s causing this is fairly complicated. The full explanation can be found here, but essentially the reason is that Halo 3 already makes use of the hard drive in order to speed up load times by temporarily caching data. Even though the game is now located on the hard drive, it doesn’t know that, so it does the same process but is unable to simultaneously read the data from the hard drive and write to the drive.

The most important detail of this story is whether or not we’ll see a fix — and, unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like one is coming. Bungie engineer Mat Noguchi explains, “While anything is possible, it would be a significant undertaking to try and retroactively patch/update Halo 3 to be optimized to take advantage of the HDD install features of NXE. The risks of doing that and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience.” While he says that Bungie will be monitoring the situation, with Halo 3: Recon and other projects underway, you can’t really blame Bungie for not diverting their time to rectify this problem.

The Halo 3 sound production team was among those who received top honors at the 24th Annual Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards. The team walked away with the award for Interactive Entertainment Sound Production.

Other teams honored at TEC include sound production for Robert Plant’s Raising Sand, The Police reunion tour and The Foo Fighters for the “The Pretender” as well as Universal Pictures’ The Bourne Ultimatum. it’s good to see videogames are finally being recognized for their excellence. It’s not the first time the industry has received kudos with other forms of entertainment, but it does give me hope that eventually videogames will more commonly be thought of as an art form.

As expected, the new teaser trailer Bungie released yesterday has been picked apart frame-by-frame with various details being discovered. One such detail was a message that read, “Maddie, where are you?” While that might not mean anything to some, others took it as a reference to the highly publicized disappearance of young British girl Madeleine McCann last year. The three year-old went missing while on vacation in Portugal with her family and has yet to be found — naturally, this threw some up in arms after the suspicious message was found in yesterday’s trailer.

Bungie quickly responded to a thread made on their official forums. Luke Smith wrote, “As always, all of the characters in our games are fictional. Any similarities between real life and the characters in our games are purely coincidental.” He added, “That said, this is both an unfortunate and untended coincidence.”

With that squared away, there are other details that have been found in the trailer — perhaps most notably a date of 01/06/09, which we could take as a release date this upcoming January. There is also the Xbox Live Marketplace description for the trailer to take into account, which refers to the game as a “new Halo 3 campaign experience.” What do you make of all this?

After an ominous countdown on their website, Bungie has revealed a new teaser trailer for a Halo 3…something. The weird thing is, the video doesn’t really explain what it’s supposed to be about. Really, if it weren’t for the Halo 3 logo at the end, I’d have no idea what this was for at all. The only other glaring clue to what this teaser is meant to show is it’s description on Xbox Live, which reads:

“High action and deep mystery await players in the new Halo 3 campaign experience. Prepare to Drop!”

I’d say that’s a pretty clear indication that some new story missions are on the way for the game. It’s hard ot say how that would fit into the existing story though, so maybe it will be a prequel of sorts? We’ll have to see.

We seem to be on the verge of a major announcement from Bungie, what with the Superintendent surfacing once again on Bungie.net, rambling on about “emergency data corruption” and yielding to uphill traffic. But for today, there’s no puzzle solving to be done — it’s just a straightforward release of new Halo 3 goodies with Title Update 2.

None of the major feature upgrades we inferred might be in the update have turned out to be true, unfortunately. And while, yes, Bungie did shoot down those rumors last month, it wouldn’t be the first time they denied the existence of a feature only to have it show up after all.

Many of Title Update 2’s enhancements are on the backend, meaning you probably won’t see any real impact on the game itself (other than hopefully running into fewer cheaters). As for what you will see, there are two items of significance: playlist ratings and new Achievements.

You might cast off new Achievements as merely something for the Gamerscore whores out there, but you’d be wrong. Three of the Achievements — each dubbed a “Vidmaster Challenge” — will net you zero points to your Gamerscore, but Bungie promises “there will (eventually) be a pay-off. We’re not going to spoil the fun just yet but suffice it to say that gamerscore isn’t everything. There is a pot of gold at the end of the Vidmaster rainbow and it is something you will want. More details later.”

If you take a look at the Achievement list for the game you’ll find more than just the new ten that have been released by Title Update 2 — there are now a total of 79 Achievements for the game, some of which reference unannounced maps, new skulls, and ‘Mythic’ maps. Bungie’s not ready to talk about any of these details yet though, so we’ll have to sit tight and wait to find out what the deal with these is.

Playlist ratings will enhance your ability to track progress in matchmaking. Rather than simply having your Trueskill and global rating (which measure your skill and amount played, respectively), each playlist will get its own individual military rating. This will indicate the amount that you’ve played that particular playlist. Nothing is being lost with this addition; your global rank will be counted on top of the individual playlist ratings.

With all that’s going on in the world of Halo right now, we’ve decided to take a look back at the last year in Halo developments. Look for that and some tasty theories on what this Superintendent business is all about in the coming days on 1UP.

Ever since Bungie flew away from Microsoft’s nest, fans have been wondering just what the studio is up to these days. Well, they may soon get their answer since rumor now has it that they’ll be announcing their latest game next week. This news comes from an industry insider that got in touch with Gamer.tm to drop this juicy bit of info. Unfortunately, that person couldn’t confirm just what sort of game it would be (i.e. “Halo 4″ or not); only that the unveiling would take place at an event in Europe this following week. That same source also revealed that Rare is apparently announcing their next game at around the same time.

So to recap: next week, two big studios, two big game announcements. Unless maybe the two companies have joined forces to make Perfect Dark: Secret Agent Master Chief? I would so buy that.

Via Gamer.tm

Bungie issued a video acceptance speech at the Edge Awards earlier this month which sparked any number of rumors, including the addition of bots and support for Halo 3 single-player objects and NPCs being added to Forge. All of those dreams were shot down this past week as Bungie issued a denial on all of these rumors in its most recent Weekly Update.

Former 1UP News Editor turned Bungie writer extraordinaire Luke Smith issued the following clarification:

There will be no insertion of Campaign objects, enemies or friendlies via the Forge as folks have speculated. There will be no “bots” added to the game. The “set” on Rat’s Nest was designed to appear like a backlot of a film set, a holding area, not some depiction of a brand-new feature that implements Campaign objects into multiplayer. Do consider this issue a closed one. Calm yourselves down, pump the brakes, and take a breath.

There’s no reading in between the lines there; looks like we’re simply not going to be seeing that functionality in Halo 3. On the bright side, we do have a solid date for the second title update to Halo 3 and the September playlist update — the two will be released simultaneously on September 16. Expect to see modified versions of maps, including versions of Epitaph and Snowbound with either zero or a reduced number of shield doors, Sandtrap without the giant Elephant vehicle, and plenty of other changes which you can read about in depth at Bungie.net.