Steve

Thought I'd remind/inform folks that Halo Waypoint is now available on Xbox Live for everyone, and not just participants of the Dashboard beta, for the low-low price of Free. You'll need to download the app (~100MB) for it, link for which should be in with the other "what's new" stuff. Once downloaded, you can launch it out of your Games library.

Waypoint acts as an "Achievement" aggregator, looking at all the 360-based Halo games (so far Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars) and showing what Achievements you've attained so far in all of them; then, based upon the number of Gamerscore points you've gotten from them, will unlock Avatar awards. (Again, for no charge.) My Avvie is sporting an ODST t-shirt and has a pet Monitor now.

Waypoint also acts as a news aggregator of sorts for Halo stuff, though that's still in the early stages.

Most urgently, though, Waypoint will also grant free viewings of some of the episodes from the upcoming Halo Legends anime collection DVD/BR... but only for 24 hours each Saturday. Today the short "Babysitter" is running, in which an ODST team acts as support for a SPARTAN-II on a mission behind enemy lines. Next Saturday, a "behind the scenes" documentary on "Babysitter" will run. Saturday after that, another short, then another "making of" doc, and so on.

So if you want to see the video you'll have to download Waypoint really soon.

-- Steve's looking forward to seeing the vid when he gets back from work.

Another lousy night's sleep, dammit. However, this morning the coughing's subsided to the occasional dull rumble and the sinus congestion's nowhere near as bad as it was yesterday so I think I'm over the hump. I plan on going out today for groceries, and also to make a trip to the mall to a) make sacrifice to the VISA gods and take away their anger (especially given that "DK" is on this bill) and b) make a run to El-Booze-o's, as I haven't had a glass of wine in over a month and given that I want to do a roast tomorrow a dollop of the red would be nice. It'll also serve to head off an incipient case of cabin fever.

I forgot to mention, but last week my freezer tried to kill me. I came home sick on Wednesday night and opened the freezer door to put my gel pack in (handy for keeping frozen food frozen in the lunch bucket) and one of my pork dinners fell out on me, narrowly missing my toes before literally smashing onto the kitchen floor. The plastic container shattered, leaving the frozen food (and not-quite frozen BBQ sauce) on the floor. *sigh* Just another thing to make last Humpday even more awesome.

On the ODST front, this morning Hedgemony on HBO pointed out an Official Xbox Magazine (Aus) interview with Joe Staten, writing lead. In it he gave a very light taste of what the glyphs mean; the inverted "Y"s are silhouettes of Forerunner ships. *D'oh!* It's so obvious now that it's pointed out... but the full meaning is still elusive.

-- Steve'll break for now and go off sniffling for breakfast and More Coffee.

Firstly, since my headset doesn't have a mute button I'd have hacked and coughed and maybe evne wheezed horrifically into everybody's ears. Yeah, I think I progressed a stage in this illness or something.

Secondly, I sucked. Absolutely abysmal scores in campaign mode... dunno if it was the coughing distracting me, or if I was just slow reflexes and a general case of poor concentration skills or whatever, but man would I have been a drag on a team.

-- Steve made it worse, possibly, by trying too hard for some Achievements on this run. Oh well, there's always next time.

Hee.

I'd been just about to give up on the audio log hunt and use a map to find it, starting at the Uplift Preserve square and moving north, and I stumbled upon the last audio log on the way. I don't think I'd ever taken that road before, and that log was off the road, through a concealed door, and had a Jackal sniper camped over the payphone and two Engineers hovering about as distractions to boot.

But I got it. All by myself.

-- Steve's just about to finish off that campaign and then break for supper. After that, dunno.

Here's a brief documentary including a deleted scene from the live-action TV ad for Halo 3: ODST, as well as showing some of the props creation and animating the inserts.

-- Steve's impressed.

Well, technically right now it's 28 out of 30 audio logs recovered in Halo 3: ODST, but I know where the 30th is... I just can't access it until I find #29. Grrrr... So somewhere, out there in the rubble of New Mombasa, there's one payphone or ATM or newspaper stand that I've managed to miss.

I got the one that can only be found by jumping up onto the roof. I got the one that's behind a door and down an alleyway. I got the one in the hotel's circular parkade. All of those I found tonight in a systematic sweep of the ruins... well, mostly systematic, as Covenant patrols kinda interrupted my box search every now and then.

One. Friggin'. Phone.

Gah.

-- Steve's giving up for the night, and debating whether or not to finish this game and start afresh later... perhaps with campaign scoring on, a Skull or two, and try for the "Good Samaritan" Achievement.

PS: Got my "Naughty, Naughty" Achievement tonight. I feel dirty.

The following post contains atomic-level plot spoilers for Halo 3: ODST and the "Sadie's Story" parallel.

( SpoilerGuarded for Your Protection )

-- Steve really loves how Bungie and crew can sew hidden messages into the liner of a shoot-em-up.

It was a mighty labour, but at last I have downloaded the Halo 3: ODST soundtrack to my Zune.

Alas I didn't pick up a CD of it, as I hadn't been to the right areas, so I downloaded it directly from Sumthing Digital. ($10 for the double album set. Not bad; beats iTunes actually, which surprises me.) Sadly, the Zune software can't find the album information for ODST automagically yet... though I hear this is only an issue outside the US. Also sadly, the metatags associated with the files are terrible, and so badly mangled that Zune or WMP (or iTunes, for that matter) can't disentangle it properly to find album information and attribution. I had to edit the tags by hand... not a pleasant little chore, and it took a good long while.

But it was worth the effort. This is an excellent album, showing off Marty O'Donnell's and Total Audio's talents to their best. The music is different from the other Halo tracks, as the story in the game is more "noir" than "action-adventure epic", but there are enough hints of Halo in the themes to remind you that this is in the series continutity. There is plenty of "noir" in there too, with moody piano and sax, and more than a touch of "James Bond" when the action heats up.

-- Steve is glad to add this one to the collection, and will have it plugged into his head for tomorrow's errands. (Including a badly-needed haircut.)

Gold-level (ie: paid) members of Xbox Live can, for a limited time, (how limited is unknown) download a "Prepare to Drop!" premium theme pack for their NXE Xbox 360 dashboards. For free. Grab 'em while their hot!

-- Steve'll be grabbing this when he gets home tonight.

Spotted via the Halo.Bungie.Org news page... your premier source of Halo news.

Sitting at my desk in Koobikal Hel, with the humungous Halo 3: ODST transparent display box grabbing at my pants-leg every now and then, time grinds forward at a tectonic rate. It doesn't help that it's perilously close to 100% humid today, and that as a result I didn't sleep too well last night. Argh. Eight more hours to go...

It was a remarkably quiet pick-up; I was the only customer at EB, one of eight folks who hadn't picked up their Collector's Edition pre-order yet, and checkout took something like three minutes. The bus was early, the store was open early, and service was fast; so I had time to raid the Timmy's in-mall kiosk for breakfast before poking back over to HMV only to find that they're opening at 10am today. *shrug* Oh well, that just means I'll get the soundtrack album from Sumthing Digital tonight online.

The CE looks very nice. I did poke through the instruction manual to see the flash fiction enclosed and read up on any changes to the control scheme. (Not much; other than the "x" button being remapped to control the VISR instead of equipment it seems to be identical to Halo 3. Well, VISR and the lack of dual-wielding.) I picked up my Sgt. Johnson card but other than the plain-text description there didn't seem to be any special bennies. I haven't had a good look at the controller yet but it does look purty.

-- Steve also printed out a fan-made "ODST" recruitment poster Boxer put up over on HBO: here's the full-size graphic under a cut.

( Caution: LOLHeug graphic )

Okay, just writing down my plan for tomorrow's ODSTage to make certain my brain retains it...

8:00am Awake, shower, etc.
8:30am Bus to the Mall, arriving between 8:45-8:50
9:00am Store opening, pick up copy
addendum: if there's time, check HMV across the way for the soundtrack album
9:20am Catch the #13 Bus to work
9:45am Arrive at work bus stop, catch breakfast at Timmy's
...
Insert wage slavery here, while The Shiny sits under my desk
...
7:00pm Leave work
7:15pm Catch bus home from downtown
7:30pm Arrive home. Nuke something and eat
8:00pm Start ODST
11:00pm (No later than) Stop ODST and get some sleep

-- Steve's hoping he can stick to that.

http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/east_king/kir/news/59493472.html

Bungie Studios made the police blotter.

Back on Sept. 2, one of the Bungie staff was carrying a Halo prop made by WETA back to the studio after showing it at a local event. Well, a citizen looked out his/her window and saw the prop, and since it was a replica of the game's sniper rifle took a certain amount of alarm and called the police that someone was roaming the streets Kirkland WA with an "assault rifle".

Hilarity ensues.

It all ends well, though; Kirkland Police rather quickly figured out what was going on and simply cautioned the studio to transport props in containers instead of in the open in the future.

-- Steve can't really blame the anonymous citizen for calling the cops; that's a mighty big prop gun, and WETA went to town on it to make certain it looked real.

PS: It amuses me to see Harold Ryan referred to as the "President of Halo" in the blotter report.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=ODSTViDoc3

Bungie has released a new "ViDoc" featurette on the design of Halo 3: ODST and in it I just noticed an interesting... reference? nod? schtik? game mechanic? Apparently as you're walking through the abandoned city some of the payphones will start ringing, and if you pick up you get placed in contact with a damaged AI. Sounds... familiar. *grin*

-- Steve's looking forward to lots of nostalgia coming a week from today. (?!?!)

Cribbed from Major Nelson's Flickr stream (and rehosted on my Photobucket account to spare bandwidth) which I found courtesy of the Halo.Bungie.Org news page.

-- Steve's getting excited over this again, which is a pleasant change.

PS: Alas, I probably won't be able to pick up my preorder until the morning of the 23rd as I'm scheduled to work right up to 7pm that day, and the store (which closes at 8pm) is 45 minutes away at best...

It's just been brought to my attention that Bungie has released a 30 second long MP3 of exerpts from David ("Sgt. Johnson") Scully's recording session for Halo 3: ODST. To recap, if you pre-order ODST you'll get a code to unlock a player skin for Sgt. Johnson in the game's "Firefight" cooperative multiplayer mode... and the skin includes custom in-game combat dialog to suit. See above for examples. (Be advised, this is an audio file and does contain some mildly adult language... PG-13 stuff at worst, really, but possibly NSFW.)

-- Steve doesn't know if these are out-takes or if they'll be in the game, but it's classic Scully/Johnson.

The following post contains what some may consider spoilers for Halo 3: ODST, though since they're being announced by Bungie Studios themselves and don't disclose actual plot points I don't. Still, for those who would:

( Spoiler-Guarded for Your Protection )

-- Steve can't wait to go looking for this himself.

edited to add: In plainly non-spoiler territory, xbox.com's ODST promo looks to be interesting, putting you in the role of an ODST recruiter/personnel officer going through candidate dossiers with a few puzzle-unlockable bennies... others have enjoyed it so far, but I haven't had a chance to explore it yet.

IGN launched their own trailer for Halo 3: ODST today, very much in the vein of the "Believe" campaign for its illustrious predecessor crossed with the Neill Blomkamp "Landfall" shorts. It is good. Really good. It takes some artistic license, but in the interests of exposition for those unfamiliar with the series so I'm willing to grant it.

Go watch. Now.

-- Steve's looking forward to the Sept. 22 release date... even if he can't actually play the danged thing until that weekend, dangit.

Well, I went in to preorder my copy of Halo 3: ODST last night. As I wanted the version that came with the controller (the controller that came with my console is starting to get a bit wonky, and the Collector's edition is cheaper than buying a regular copy plus a boring-plain wireless controller) that meant returning to that wretched hive of scum and villainy, my local Electronics Boutique. A pox on exclusives, I tell you...

Remarkably, though, it seems that in the nearly two-and-a-half years since I've last been there they seem to have made some changes in staff and business practices. The people behind the counter were much more professional in attitude, much less prone to trying to "slam" the sale with extra and unasked-for crap, and, well, presentably hygenic. Assuming (and that's a relatively big assumption) they don't screw up this order I may return to having them in my shopping loop instead of relying upon HMV and Future Shop for my gaming needs.

-- Steve's Collector's Edition preorder also includes the Sgt. Johnson skin for "Firefight" mode. Feet first into Hell, just to light a cigar...

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&link=ReconHunt

For those unable to participate in the Bungie vs. the World playlist but still wanting a crack at earning Halo 3's Recon armour permutation, try the link above.

-- Steve thinks it should be like old times for ARGers... though he isn't certain that the puzzle is intended to be a collaborative one.

Alright, as gripes go this one is fairly trivial, but I do want to get it off my chest.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Halo 3: ODST game and likely will buy it upon release. (Sept. 22 this year, FYI.) Indeed, there's no reason I shouldn't pre-order it to reserve a copy, and a very good reason to want to; there's a bonus offered by participating retailers to include in pre-ordered copies a code for a Sergeant Johnson skin (with combat dialog!) usable in the game's cooperative multiplayer Firefight mode. For those who have played the Halo games, you know exactly how awesometacularly fun it would be to play.

Alas, so far as I can find, no Canadian retailers are yet participating.

-- Steve's wondering when, or if, someone around here will drop sufficient testicular endowment to be worthy of my pre-order dollars or if they're all going to be ball-less maggots.

PS: It'd be nice if the stores would even mention the possiblity of stocking the Limited Edition, with it's themed Xbox wireless controller, too. So far, none in Canada seem to even know of its existance.