Bungie Celebrates 2-Year Anniversary Of Halo Release

Thanks to Bungie.net for their feature commemorating the second anniversary of Halo's Xbox debut. The piece starts: "What started life as a pseudo real-time-strategy game for the Apple Mac has turned into the number-one-selling Xbox game of all time and a driving force behind much of the console's overall success", and goes on to elicit Ed Fries of Microsoft's remembrances of the scary moments ("Our first E3 press event went REALLY bad. The Xbox didn't even power up. Halo was the grand finale and we had some serious framerate issues and hiccups"), and the Bungie developers, fans and media's favorite anecdotes ("Halo rage is a beautiful thing. My plaster walls are free from damage now, but the amount of controllers I go through is atrocious.")

Ugh

[aphexbrett]

This serves as a bitter reminder of how bungie used to be before being acquire by M$. Instead of continuing their tradition of super-kick-ass indy games (started at first by marathon and eventually myth), they ended up selling incomplete games (Oni) and putting all future effort towards lining M$'s pockets in a sector of the market they shouldn't even be in. And now they are gonna release Halo for the PC? Please. Releasing Halo now is a slap in the face.

Re:I was playing it today...

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo is so utterly repetitive and tedious. Oh, wow, another corridor exactly the same as the last corridor with Flood jumping out exactly the same air conditioning vents! How exciting!

If you want a good FPS, play Medal Of Honour or Call Of Duty.

Re:I was playing it today...

[AlexMax2742]

I agree. The single player isn't so hot.

But in all seriousness, those who hate Halo's multiplayer mode have probably never played it with a large group of people. It is an absolute BLAST!.

Re:When's the next app for Xbox?

[bigman2003]

But see- here is the thing that a lot of people fail to understand.

Xbox Live is WORTH the $50.

Going online with Live is easy, seamless, and painless. It works.

Having a DSL connection is more expensive than dial-up. But I pay for it because it is worth it.

I could get television reception using a standard antenna- but to me Dish is worth it.

Sometimes its okay to spend a little money to get something that's good.

Good grief.

[superultra]

Please. Lest us forget that $ony and, um, $intendo aren't exactly laissez faire either. They've done their share of buying out (and not just console devs), and while certainly not as noticably large as either Bungie or Rare, they are guilty as charged. I guess what you're saying is that Microsoft should stick to PC applications, right? Well, Sony should stick to walkmen, and Nintendo to playing cards. Welcome to the video game industry jube. Maybe if you'd bought more dreamcasts, we wouldn't have lost the only pure video game hardware maker. Oh wait, you're a PC l33t gamer. Just know that Dreamcasts were cool, and that you should've bought more.

And so M_S_ bought out Bungie. Whoopie. I'd think Bungie far more qualified to decide what's best for Bungie than, say, you, and Bungie doesn't seem too upset about the whole deal. In fact, they've said in every interview I've read with them regarding MS that MS leaves them well enough alone, save for random visits by Ed Fries and Ken Lobb who just walk around with their jaws on the floor and then leave. Which seems to work out fairly well, since Take 2/GODgames bugged the hell out of Bungie and the result of that was the abysmal pre-MS Oni.

Microsoft saw an opportunity to snag a great game franchise, and they took it. Why is that inherently evil? Wouldn't anyone else have done the same thing? Don't think for a minute that someone at Sony wasn't kicking themselves in their proverbial business casual slacks for not having bought Bungie first.

What's the difference between super-kick-ass indy (sic) games, and super-kick-ass non-indie games? If both are super-kick-ass, what's your problem? Shouldn't good game developers like Bungie be rewarded with the big bucks only the big dogs can cough up? I'm all for indie gaming (hey, I bought Mutant Storm and Starscape), but I'm more for indie gaming developers making it good than indie game developers making $1000 a game. So should you. Return to your comraderie of anti-M$ fanboys at main.slashdot.org, and save the karma for gamers who care about the games. And thanks in advance.

Sucks = 85%?

[superultra]

If by "sucks" you mean an overall 85% rating [gamerankings.com], then I guess you're right. I'll concede that the PC version needed some work, but I think sucks is too strong a word. Add in whatever you mean by "improvements" and the co-op to Halo PC logistically means re-writing the entire code for the single player campaign. Essentially, you're looking at at least another year in development, which is to say another year of PC fanboys whining. And I would venture to say that nearly every single one of those reviewers would completely disagree with your assertion that Unreal 2 kicks Halo's ass. My guess is that you just haven't played Halo. And I also guess that means that by Unreal 2 kicking Halo's ass, you mean getting a %78 percent at gamerankings. Whatevs.

A note. I beta tested Halo for the PC and had somewhat of an inside look at the process, and it was a bitch to port. People have been whining about how their PC is soooo much better than Xboxes since before the Xbox even came out, but the fact of the matter is that the GPU within the Xbox is so well tailored to pixel shaders that it made porting the game from the Xbox to PC extremely difficult. Bungie did a great job with Halo, but they did do it rather quickly, so unraveling all the Xbox code for PC was a monumentous task for gearbox that they pulled off brilliantly. I wish you could see how far they came from the original alphas.

Good Grief Part II

[superultra]

At the risk of repetition, "Good grief." You act as if "this business of console makers buying large, successful developers/publishers outright" is a new thing. It's not. It's been happening since day one. You've suddenly noticed it because you're most likely (as I once was) solely a PC gamer, and this is the first notably large buyout of a PC game developer. If you're not, than you haven't been paying attention. My guess is that you haven't noticed this spirit of aquisition up to this point because the video game industry was largely dominated by Japanese companies who bought out - surprise - other Japanese companies. Microsoft, obviously coming from a much more PC-knowledgable position - *"bought out" Bungie. As far as being "locked out," welcome to the console world. Again: a day one behavior (biggest case in point in recent history: GTA3 - why is releasing that once exclusive PS2 game on PC not an insult, but Halo is, btw?).

I would specifically argue that developing for one console actually enhances creativity, not stifles it. It's easier to develop for a single platform than it is to target 2 or 3, or in the case of a PC technically an infinte number of hardware configurations That's a best case scenario, of which I think Bungie exemplifies. The worst case scenario is that the now-bought-out-company produces crap (say, that crappy Microsoft first party psuedo-RPG that started with an A). Basically, I think it would be fair to say that a creative company will create more creative games, and a non-creative company will inevitably create crappier games. Ooooo.

So sure, it's all cool and hipster to have indie game houses, but let's be frank. It's all about the benjamins. These indie guys would like nothing more than to do what they're doing, but to have driven to work in a Dodge Viper rather than a 1985 Ford Escort that's 3rd gear works only half the time.

Two more things. First of all, who died and made you Ms. Cleo of Bungie? How do you know that Bungie's "glory days" are behind them (Oni-cough-cough)? Halo was fantastic. If Halo 2 completely bombs, I might agree with you. But since neither of us has played that, I doubt you can justifiably say that. Bungie and MS have both said that they leave each other alone, so Bungie is doing what they would've done, except that a) it's for the Xbox, and b) they drive to work in Dodge Vipers. Why is that bad?

Secondly, if you're so adverse to playing good games merely because they might be on a certain console, consider yourself a shameful PC fanboy. You might be slightly more articulate than the forum fanboy trolls (that is to say, using multi-syllabic words and not using wtf once), but the spirit is the same. Shame on you. Good games are good games, whether they have Microsoft on the front or GarageGames. Get over your indie-fetish and have some fun.

* Isn't it odd that it's always MS doing the buying, not Bungie doing the selling? Maybe - and stick with me here - maybe Bungie wanted to be bought out and have lots of cash for doing something they love. Just a thought.