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.

Official Map Contest #1, Category: Adventureland.

Kickin’ off Summer the right way, Forge Cafe members are given the task of creating their rendition of an amusement park. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, ski-ball machines. Whatever you see, we want to see. Make it as big, or as small as you like. Make as many or as few rides and attractions as you wish. It is your creation. Be Creative, be original. The map must be complete and submitted in the forum BEFORE12:00 p.m.CST MAY 12, 2009.That is 2 weeks! IF IT IS SUBMITTED AT 12:01 WEDNESDAY May 13, IT WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED! IMPORTANT!!! Submit map by posting it in the forums under this title:

(CONTEST 1) “YOUR MAP NAME”

NO EXCEPTIONS!

Playability is NOT a factor in this category. To kick things off, we just want to see what you can do. So use all money and objects building the park. Do not consider respawns or weapons a major priority. Theme is number one. Prize for this is secret, and will be given out once all maps have been judged by STAFF. The judging will shift to “member chosen” once we have more members. For the time being, this is the most logical way. No flames. No fuss. Just patiently waiting for our decission. The old fashion way of judging. The contest starts now, Tuesday, and will end in 2 weeks. All maps MUST BE submitted to to the forums with the CORRECT title to be officially submitted. You may edit your map freely after posting until contest ends. I will make a pinned post of the official submissions the day the contest ends. PLEASE, submit the maps on time and correctly, let’s set some examples.

So there you go. Amusement Park. Secret Prize. You have 2 weeks.

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.

BringIt makes competitive console gaming easy, adding only one step to secure online game play. Registration is free and available to gamers 18 years and older. Players can fund their BringIt account via PayPal or major credit card and access their secure account at their convenience. As a special welcome, BringIt will match initial deposits up to $20 for those individuals who register and use the service during the open beta period. Accounts are limited to one per person, insuring player identities are verified.

Players can ‘BringIt’ for as little as $1 or up to as much as $100,000, so both casual players and those who crave the adrenaline of high stakes can engage at their own pace and be assured their BringIt
challenge experience is safe and secure. During gameplay, the collective entry fees are held in an escrow account until the winner is declared and verified, at which point the funds are released to the
winner’s secure account, minus the BringIt service fee. BringIt provides neutral arbitration as well as a self-regulating player feedback system that lets members know an opponent’s standing in advance of initiating a challenge or accepting a match.

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.

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.

You might remember the ‘Believe’ trailer for Halo 3 which showed a lifeless Master Chief being held up by a Brute, only for the Master Chief to raise his head as the video ended. It struck me as quite unusual, as it isn’t the type of thing I would really associate with how you market to the typical Halo fan. (Then again, the typical Halo fan was more than likely going to buy Halo 3 regardless of any advertisements Microsoft released.)

One intrepid fan of Viva Pinata put together a very similar trailer for Rare’s cutesy, pinata-starring franchise which was just way too cool to not share.

It’s strangely moving, likely thanks to those big eyes those damned cute pinata have. How can you not feel bad for them?

via Gamerscore Blog

People who worry that in five years we’ll be facing the impending launches of Halo Tennis 4 Master Chief Racing 2 are completely understandable. It’s the most popular franchise in Microsoft’s catalog, and if you’ve seen what has happened to Mario and Sonic over the years, it doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine terrible spinoff after terrible spinoff.

At Comic-Con last week, Frank O’Connor (Bungie’s former community manager who now oversees the Halo franchise at Microsoft) explained that there are a lot of opportunities to delve into the Halo universe, but they don’t plan on abusing the franchise, reports Eurogamer.

“The Halo universe is really, really big now,” he said. “Literally the Halo games have only covered one year; a couple of months within a year in fact.

“We have a really detailed story bible, we do really have it all planned out. There are so many areas of the universe to explore, the real challenge is picking which is the most exciting area for people. Is it UNSC Marines fighting alongside Spartans against the Covenant? Or is it what happens next after Master Chief’s appearance in Halo 3?”

“We have a well defined, carefully orchestrated, properly planned universe to explore not exploit,” O’Connor continued. “And that’s the tricky part: what are the things people want to do? We have to pick things that people want. That’s what you see with the range of McFarlane toys – people want their armour permutation.

“Give them things they really want and make sure they’re high quality is the formula.”

There are at least three Halo games in development right now between Bungie, Peter Jackson, and Ensemble with Halo Wars. Even as a Halo fanatic, I really don’t want to see too many Halo games released, because I’ve seen what that can do to a franchise. Hopefully Frankie is right and we don’t see Master Chief at the Olympics anytime soon.

For the first time since the last week in January, Halo 3 has regained the its number one spot in the Xbox 360 top Live titles list. The list is based upon the number of unique users playing each game.

Halo has trailed behind Grand Theft Auto IV and/or Call of Duty 4 every week since the week of January 21. The July 7 release of the Cold Storage map (which was free of charge) likely helped, as did the pending E3 announcement about Bungie’s next Halo project — one which never came. Microsoft has said it will instead be showcasing the mysterious new Halo game at a dedicated event where they can do the game “more justice.”

Anyone want to guess if the game will hold onto its lead for a second week? I’m gonna go ahead and guess that it will, based on my expert analysis of absolutely nothing.

Unhappy that the new Halo hasn’t made an appearance at E3? Well, don’t hold your breath for a last second showing to steal the show on its last day — Microsoft is waiting to now show the game at a dedicated event where they can do it more justice, according to Don Mattrick.

Originally clocking in at 2 1/2 hours, the game’s removal from Microsoft’s press conference helped to cut that time down to 90 minutes. “We had an embarrassment of riches,” Mattrick told the LA Times. “We felt we could do this game more justice with a more dedicated event.”

“Two big kahunas were left out of the show, and we were still able to deliver a strong performance,” Mattrick said, referring to the exclusive content Rockstar has in store for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Luke Smith has also posted some answers to the most asked questions over on Bungie.net:

1. OMG! The announce was posted at 7! This is all part of the plan.

The news was broken to us shortly before 7 p.m. and we decided to keep with tradition to make a clean break.

2. Why leave the splash page up if it’s not happening?

We left the splash page up for the folks who didn’t see the message or were planning on tuning in the following morning before the news vanished into Bungie.net’s ether.

3. But Harold Ryan is only a TESTER this has to be fake!

Harold was a tester, but assumed the position of President a while ago. Crazy Wiki’s and their misinformation.

I get the feeling that we’ll be hearing more about this new Halo once Sony starts building up more buzz as we get closer to the release of Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet.

Don’t color me surprised — but you can color me as pleasantly surprised. Wait.

Damnit.

You may have noticed the lack of anything Halo-related at Microsoft’s press conference earlier this week, as well as Bungie’s sudden backtrack on their website regarding an announcement they were planning to make at E3. The message above was posted on Bungie.net’s splash page by president Harold Ryan, apologizing for the lack of any announcement. Combine that with the unusual wording — “our publisher” and not “Microsoft” like you’d expect — and it was unclear what was going on.

But in an interview with MTV, Stephen Totilo managed to get word out of Microsoft exec Don Mattrick that Bungie is at work on a new Halo game separate from both Halo Wars and Peter Jackson’s Halo project.

The explanation Mattrick gave for why the game was absent from the press conference was that Microsoft felt they already had more than enough to show, and a new Halo game wasn’t needed.

Maybe, but as someone who remains a Halo fanboy at heart, it would have made me a very happy camper to see what Bungie is working on.

Joystiq has come in receipt of an image from Wal-Mart’s intranet which shows a listing for something called Halo “Blue.” The image comes by way of what they call a “trusted Wal-Mart source,” so it’s unlikely that this is just some fake, Photoshopped image.

Still, what could something called Halo “Blue,” really be? It’s not much of a name, that’s for sure.

In what could quite possibly be related news, Joystiq is also reporting on a rumor that the next Halo game will be a tactical game; “a cross between Ghost Recon and Gears of War” that will be “darker [and] grittier” and won’t be focused on everyone’s favorite Master Chief.

I’m actually hoping the two aren’t connected, and that Halo “Blue” turns out to be a re-release of the original Halo with jazzed-up graphics and online co-op. I’m certain that’s not what it is, but it’s nice to dream.

Either way, we’ll likely be finding out in just a few hours.

Via Major Nelson

Monday is July 7 or 7/7, which has long been Bungie Day. This year you can expect a new, free map — Cold Storage, a revamp of the original Halo’s “Chill Out” level — and free gamerpics and a theme that will only be available on Monday. Bungie’s also trying to get the total number of kills in campaign mode up to seven million, so if you want to contribute, hop on Halo 3 and blast away some Covenant and Flood. But that’s not all:

Beginning on July 7, there will be a 48-hour long seven-player FFA playlist in Halo 3’s Matchmaking where you can turn the calendar back to 2001 and control Rockets, Invis and Snipe.

For now, Cold Storage will be implemented in regular rotation in playlists that require the Legendary Maps. To avoid confusion, playlists that previously required the Legendary Maps will now remind players that they need “all Maps” to participate, and since Cold Storage is free, it shouldn’t be a big deal for you to grab the map on July 7 and then return to your regularly scheduled business in SWAT.

Additionally, on 7/7, Microsoft is dropping the price of the Legendary Map Pack from 800 spacebucks to 600 spacebucks. That price drop does mean that purchases after 7/7 will no longer include the Bungie Pro bonus.

Note: the conversion rate of spacebucks to Microsoft points is 1:1.

It’s potentially a candidate for delisting, but Freeverse will still be releasing a new downloadable content pack for Marathon: Durandal on Wednesday. The new Jjaro Map Pack will go for 250 Microsoft points and includes a collection of 12 maps from both Marathon and Marathon Infinity.

A pair of new achievements will be included worth a total of 30 gamerscore points, but you’ll need to buy the DLC in order to get them.

You can check out some video previews of the new maps at 360Sync, as well as check out the achievement images if you’re really that utterly obsessed with achievement whoring. (Get some help.)

Bungie has now revealed the sixth book that will take place in the Halo universe with Halo: The Cole Protocol. This book will apparently reveal the location of the Spartan Grey Team explore a specific conflict during the Human-Covenant wars. The book will be penned by Tobias S. Buckell, who has won numerous awards for his past works in science fiction. According to Frank O’Connor, franchise development director for Microsoft:

“Buckell continues an excellent tradition that’s now a solid aspect of the Halo novels, bringing a fresh new perspective to a limitless universe and bringing his prodigious writing talents to bear in ways that will surprise and engage fans of the series and newcomers alike.”

More information, including release dates and such, are expected to be revealed soon.

Via Bungie.net