Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

I Love Bees Anthology DVD Legally Available Online

Posted by Zonk on Thu Nov 11, 2004 11:33 AM
from the buzz-buzz-buzz-buzz-bzzzzz dept.
XBox (Games) Media
celerityfm writes "In case you missed some or all of the I Love Bees alternate reality game promoting Halo 2, Elan Lee (one of the creators of I Love Bees) recently announced the approval of electronic distribution of the I Love Bees anthology DVD that was originally given away to the most hard-core I Love Bees game players at the end of the game! The DVD contains very interesting stuff for any I Love Bees or Halo fans out there as it contains the entire 5+ hour audio story plus behind the scenes looks and other extras. So with that in mind: Gentlemen, start your bittorrents!"
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

I Love Bees Anthology DVD Legally Available Online 36 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
      • Not to mention that way back when /. started its subscription service, they made it clear that they would allow advertisers to pay them to post articles. Nobody seemed to complain too loudly back then.

      • Re:Not wishing to sound niggardly.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by g_adams27 (581237) on Thursday November 11 2004, @12:43PM (#10789467)

        > This "I love bees" garbage is the new era of advertsing.

        Garbage?

        For those who participated in it, "I Love Bees" was great fun. You got to solve puzzles, run around answering pay phones to open up more of the story, occasionally talk to the live actors themselves in-charachter, and work with other people piecing the plot together. In the end, ILB was a 5-6 hour drama taking place in the Halo universe, all leading up to the events of Halo 2. If you didn't care about Halo, you probably still could have enjoyed the fun of the game. And if you had any interest in Halo, then it really got you interested in Halo 2.

        Was it marketing? Of course! No-one was blind to that. But if you think that should immediately disqualify the game from being any fun, let me ask you this:

        Have you ever downloaded a game demo? Did you enjoy playing the 1 or 2 levels they provided for free? Did it make you interested in buying the game?

        Well, guess what? You were the victim of marketing! You poor fool - you didn't realize that you were just a pawn of the cynical megagame corporations! You may have thought you were having fun playing a little 1-2 level game, but in reality, you were being used!!!!

        Or not. Maybe you were just taking advantage of a freebie given out by a company hoping you'd like it and would then buy the full game.

        That's exactly what happened with "I Love Bees". Some of us who played will buy Halo 2. Others who don't really care about computer gaming won't. But everyone had fun. And in the end, it doesn't matter if Microsoft was behind it, or Bungie, or just a couple of guys in a basement. It was fun. That is all.

        • You know, I'm going to risk Karma and says this, in part because I believe in some of what the parent poster was trying to say:

          I Love Bees is not marketing garbage. In fact, of all the ways of marketing a game, ILB seems to be the best I've seen. Not only did you have puzzles, hidden puzzles, live character interaction, and a story about it, but you also had an in-depth, ongoing radio drama that was, on the whole, separate from the puzzles, and separate from the game ILB was supposedly shilling for.

          ILB
    • It's free, it's well done, and it's science fiction theater? What's not to like?

      • Re:Not wishing to sound niggardly.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by g_adams27 (581237) on Thursday November 11 2004, @12:48PM (#10789534)
        > It's free, it's well done, and it's science fiction theater? What's not to like?

        Exactly! Nobody who played "I Love Bees" for any length of time was unaware of its Halo 2 association. And nobody was scandalized to learn that Microsoft/Bungie were behind it.

        So what? Microsoft and Bungie put out Halo 1, and I actually paid money to play it! Does that make me a_pawn of faceless corporate overlords? No, it just means they put out a fun game, and I agreed to give them money so I could play it.

        So if that was a reasonable transaction, how much better a deal was it to play "I Love Bees" for $0.00 ? I had fun, they got publicity for Halo 2 - everybody wins!

        • Compared to a lot of other science fiction radio programs I've heard it's well-done. Compared to Shakespeare, maybe not. Anyway, it's free and if the acting and specific dialoge isn't Oscar-level, the story is at least somewhat original and interesting.
  • This anthology has been on suprnova for at least 2 days. It just moved from the front page yesterday.

    The torrent link [66.90.75.92]

  • NO! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wylfing (144940) <brian@[ ]fing.net ['wyl' in gap]> on Thursday November 11 2004, @11:42AM (#10788721) Homepage Journal
    I've said it before and I'll say it again. Downloading DVD movies off the Internet takes food off the table of Hollywood stuntmen. Do not participate in this crime!!!

    • They didn't pay me anything and I am not affiliated with I Love Bees/etc :P

      I was just surprised that this hadn't been posted to /. (another poster pointed out that its has been out for a few days and I acknowledged that with "recently announced") so I threw the story in to the submit queue after seeing it posted on Shacknews [shacknews.com].

      The bigger news is that this is, to my knowledge, the first time a mass produced DVD has been allowed to be distributed electronically in its entirety. The fact that the creators endo
  • Games: I Love Bees Anthology DVD Legally Available Online

    I have to chuckle to myself when I read article titles like this. The times we live in.... :)
  • Originally my submitted story began "Attention Neal Stephenson! [slashdot.org]" The link pointed to the /. interview where he mentions that he is a fan of I Love Bees.

    I guess the editors actually DO edit story submissions, despite the volume of comments suggesting otherwise :) Cool stuff.
  • I could get this sans BitTorrent? I believe my university, within the last few days, has opted to block the BitTorrent tracker ports, due to an extremely high volume of contraband moving across that channel. I'm disappointed, mostly because I rely on torrents for my linux distribution ISOs, and game demos, among other things. I'm also disappointed because this ILoveBees DVD is a completely legally downloadable media. When downloading the World of Warcraft open beta client yesterday, my traffic was absolutel
  • ...then we can filter out the bees stories like those wacky JohnKatz articles.
    • Here is what you seek [the-junkyard.net]- They go over all the items on the DVD in semi-detail.

      But basically yes its a culmination of all the audio files, in order, and includes screenshots of webpages and other relevant stuff. I'm still DLing the DVD (on hour 25 now, but I've uploaded 3.5gb to the cause atleast).

      Hope that webpage helps you on your decision to invest the time to dl this thing. Get it while its hot and seeded!
  • I was really, really into ILB for a quite some time. Back when the story was a real puzzler, it was a lot of fun in a sort of new media meets Agatha Christie kinda way.

    Once the Axons went hot, that all changed. The few puzzles that remained were complicated for a single person, but for the ARG community they were solved before most people knew they existed. There wasn't much left to the game except people who had the time/inclination/gas money to go answer pay phones.

    Eventually live conversations were
    • I think we're artificially limiting the popularity and growth of one of the most exciting new art forms in decades if we chain it to logic puzzles.

      Obviously something needs to engage and challenge the individual audience member, and hard, abstract, barely-justified-by-the-story braintwisters are of course the first thing that would occur to, well, game developers... but are there any other possibilities?

      Is there any way to attach game progress or story progress to, say, having to interact with and figure

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.