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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Desirai and John met while playing Halo in 2004, and come January 2009 they will be getting married. While this seems like nothing out of the ordinary, Desirai suggested that they have a Halo themed wedding with a guy dressed as Master Chief officiating. Now how cool is that guys?

The invitations have a Halo theme, instead of a first dance they will host a Bride vs. Groom Halo tournament that is open to the public. Desirai even considered dressing up as Cortana but instead will wear a more traditional wedding dress.

You know, its nice to see gamers sharing their love of each other and gaming with their family and fiends. Let’s all wish them the best of luck.

You can read more details on this and see pictures of the happy couple over on MTV.

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.

Steam in its current form — a PC game store and Xbox Live-esque community service — does a lot of what Microsoft talked about doing years ago. But like the Live Anywhere concept, Games for Windows Live has largely drifted by the wayside. Yesterday, Microsoft released an update to GFW Live to improve upon the lackluster interface that has, so far, not come to be the unified PC gaming platform Microsoft hoped it to be. According to Shacknews, Microsoft will be releasing another update in the next few weeks that will add support for downloads of demos, videos, and DLC through a true GFW Live Marketplace application.

Microsoft has more in store than just that, though, as we learned in an interview that Shacknews had with GFW Live GM Chris Early. He said:

When we get to the place where we do distribute games digitally, will we have a digital rights management system? Maybe. Or maybe we’ll just continue to support the industry leaders in that. Because it is a hard thing to do. You talk to any of those companies, and that is their whole company, is doing digital rights management.

Asked about that first bit — regarding when Microsoft begins distributing games digitally — Early admitted, “Clearly it’s on our road map.” That initiative will come once they’ve fully rolled out their plans for allowing DLC through the Marketplace.Early believes this was the right order to release things in, claiming “this is something that you can’t do today on a PC, right? You can buy digitally through a bunch of places.” While that’s not entirely true — just look at Bethesda, who has offered DLC for games through its website — a unified place for DLC on PC isn’t a half-bad idea. Whether this means we’ll begin seeing more premium DLC on PC is unclear, but we can hope that the mod community will manage to keep that in check or, at the very least, make sure we don’t see any companies trying to sell us a set of horse armor.

The release date for Halo Wars got a bit more specific today as Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 exclusive RTS will be released worldwide in February. Naturally, given that it’s a Halo game, you’ll get to dish out some extra cash for the Limited Collector’s Edition which is full of Halo goodies. Just don’t expect anything quite as substantial as a helmet for a small, cat-sized animal of your choice.

Among the contents of the collector’s edition is Halo Wars: Genesis, a graphic novel detailing a mission involving the Convenant’s interest in Harvest; a unique Honor Guard Wraith for use in-game; early access to the three new Halo 3 maps that comprise the Mythic Map Pack; and two other slightly more ambiguous items. One of them is the Spirit of Fire patch, which the press release explains lets you “start the journey as an official Spirit of Fire crew member.” The other is a collection of six Leader cards — that’s not a particularly clear description. We know Leaders are essentially the game’s Hero units, but it’s unclear if these are simply trading cards with the Leader units plastered on them or something more significant. We asked Microsoft and they let us know they’re simply trading cards and that they won’t have any impact on the game.

This package will run you $80 — not a terrible deal if this actually gives you the actual Mythic Map Pack, since that’s likely to cost $10 on its own. As an extra incentive to preorder, certain retailers will offer a download for a unique in-game Warthog sporting flame decals. That seems a bit out of place in a Halo game, but people do love them some flame decals.

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.