9.1.00

Well the latest Iain M Banks book is here. While not as action packed as some of his other books it's ending is quite amazing... And with that dear friends I'm off. I'll leave the page up for an archive but there doesn't seem much point in doing a Halo story when there's absolutely no info available about it ^_^

Unless you've been dead, you have undoubtedly heard of the Bungie/MS aquisition. This has some folks up in arms, but I'm guessing this was a necessary move for them to complete Halo. And that is a good thing, because Halo promises to be the most tooth and nail space opera military game of all time ^_^ (hence this site ^o^) But alas, Halo seems at least another year away...As I recall the original date was projected for this year but oh well. Hence is the way of the cosmos.

Anyone looking for something to play in the meantime...Deus Ex is one hell of a good time. Otherwise at this point everything is on consoles...more specifically Dreamcast. Recently I took the plunge and got a PS2 to play the latest chapter of the Gun Griffon series. It's pretty damn amazing ^_^

So in a word bye +_+

7.19.00

Bungie/Microsoft confirms Halo coming to Mac. I feel vindicated ^_^

6.23.00

Good time, bad times...well let's start with the good. At next months Bungie Gathering of Fans in Macworld NYC Studio Grey and The Marathon's Story page in conjunction with Bungie(thanks for letting us use THE Marathon logo Matt!) will release a ltd edition of 4 dozen Marathon Story t-shirts. 2 sided, white ink on black shirts they are quite fine. ^_^ We spent over a month going back and forth making sure it was perfect. Click here for our little advert.

Now for the bad news...Unless you've been dead you had to know about the Bungie-MS merger. While the merger itself doesn't concern me in the slightest, well I'll admit I was pissed at first but hey...they don't call us evangelists because we take a back seat to our platform :P

Anyways the big news is Halo may no longer coming to Mac. Sign this petition and let your voice be heard! Demand Halo for Mac/PC!

5.16.00

Scoop and double scoop!

Here's the back cover of the new Iain M Banks book:

It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from those first ancient deaths has reached the Culture's Orbital called Masaq'. For the Hub Mind, overseer of the massive bracelet world, its arrival is particularly poignant. But it still may be eclipsed by events from the cultures more recent past.

When the Chelgrian Ziller, a composer of galactic renown living in self-imposed exile on Masaq', learns that an emissary from his home is being sent to the orbital, he fears what he assumes to be the worst, that the Chelgrians want him to return.

But the composer is far from being the only thing on the Chelgrian emissary's mind. His mission has another purpose; one so secret he does not know it himself at first. Discovering its nature will take him on a journey into his past and the haunting memories of another terrible war whose legacy threatens to be much more than just an unfortunate diplomatic incident.

Look to Windward is Iain M Banks' most powerful novel to date and an extraordinary work of the imagination. Ferociously intelligent, wildly original and hugely enjoyable, it is a masterpiece of science fiction.

And here's the contents of an email I sent to Marathon's Story page regarding a short interview I did at E3 with some of the Halo guys.

Well E3 has come and gone and I got to see the new Halo movie/tech demo. It was very impressive ^_^ but of course left a whole bag of questions to be answered.

Afterwards I got to pull aside and talk with Zartman, Jamie and one of the artists, I think his name was Andrew(long hair aroudn 5'8"), for a few quick questions.

Due to a malfunction in the Olympus voice recorder I was using I can't quote directly but...

The first thing I noticed were that you were the only marine of your type in the film. All the other human soldiers seemed to be unmodified traditional grunts, via the USCM from Aliens. I was pretty surprised considering that all of the screenshots we had seen up this point showed many "cyborg" marines and no humans...Then there was the now famous line "Cortana told us there was one of you on board..." delivered by a wounded marine as he's evaced. hmmmmm

This led to my first question are you in fact the only mjolnir marine(I definitely said mjolnir ^_^) and I was told "no comment" but that many of the single player elements were still in the works so comments might be misleading.

Coincidentally almost all of the shots so far have been taken from the purely multiplayer game and I was told that reading "too much" into them might be "misleading" to "myself" ^_^.

I also found out that the game, which is planned to be extremely non-linear, will have the player on his own most of the time though he will be able to aid and fight with other human units if he/she chooses to. This was a shocker for me as I assumed you would always be working with a small A-team of some type based on the guerilla warfare theme of the game. More and more like Marathon whereas I expected it to be a more action type Myth set-up...

I also enquired about the other 2 covenant races. We've seen 2 different classes of the one alien family (officer and grunt) but none of the others. Again I was told things change in the development process and left it at that...perhaps there will now be a singular alien race?

I enquired about some of the influences, especially the sci-fi guru Iain M Banks, and was told that he was definitely among the influences of the game but more importantly that there was a list of books handed off to Jamie to check out when he joined the team! However being that I was without pen/paper/voice recorder I didn't even bother to ask for a list...perhaps in a future email interview ^_^

Some other technical considerations I got were...

On the halo itself will have many different climates and have different times of the day.

Some other things of note, while Joe was doing a weapons, movement demo he zoomed on the marine and turned on bump mapping. You could clearly see and antenna mounted on the marine's shoulder. This had been a point of contention a few months ago on halo.bungie.org.

I enquired about the use of standard case bearing ammo as opposed to caseless which ideally suited for specops type stuff(lighter, can carry more, etc...) Initially I was told it was an aesthetic decision but like all the technology in Halo it will all be rationalized...aka why are they driving around in jeeps when they obviously have V/TOL type technology for things such as the drop ship.

And that's it for now I guess.

Whew! I also brought back some of Bungie's little flyers but I have misplaced them. Will look for them and try to scan/post them for everyone to see ^_^

As for E3 I think Halo wasn't quite the game of the show. As is customary with these events somebody trumps everyone else's technology...this year it was Konami with Metal Gear Solid 2. However as it was also video only, but rendered in game like Halo, it was definitely a bit sharper however the gameplay is more akin to close quarters fighting, etc...unlike Halo.

For playable stuff this was Sgea's show. Ecco the Dolphin, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Grind Radio (formerly Jet Set Radio), Shen Mue, Fur Fighters, Sonic Shuffle, Sonic Adventure 2, Grandia 2...the list goes on. They didn't show almost a single game that didn't look better than every other PS2 title except Metal Gear Solid 2. In fact MGS2 was so much more advanced than every PS2 game on the floor one has to wonder the amazing talent they have brought on at KCEJ! I mean to be up and running with what they had so soon was unparalleled. Perhaps they were all LINUX fans ^_^

5.08.000

My god I've been so busy lately...I can't believe I didn't notice this until I saw it on the Marathon's Story page.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

This happens to be the opening quote from Consider Phelbas. It's from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The story page also notes that T.S. Eliot has also been quoted in the Cortana Letters.

If only I had the liberty to quit working and focus on this full-time ^_^

5.06.000

I must've been dozing here since Hammish at Marathon's Story page pointed out to me that:

Take a look at the cover background. That's taken on an orbital!!!! Like Consider Phlebas.

Now that's sci fi Banks style! ;-)

Well nobody's perfect ^_^

5.06.000

The cover has just been released for the new Banks book Look to Windward. Here's a thumbnail. Click here or there for a larger version.

Not particularly sci-fi looking but Banks is not one for convention ^_^

E3 is just a few days away and while rumors of a new Bungie game spread from an article on Daily Radar.com they were promptly quashed by Matt Soell. Seems like Bungie's not tipping their hat quite yet on that one. I'm trying to guess what's up next for them? Perhaps an RPG of some type? It's one of the only genres they haven't touched.

5.01.000

Today...Oni bites the dust. From Gamespot's preview:

The plan is to ship Oni simultaneously for three platforms: Windows, Macintosh, and now, PlayStation2. While we're not specific about dates at the moment, obviously it wouldn't happen before the PS2 becomes available in the US. The expected timeframe for that launch matches our development schedule quite well.

PS2 is presently scheduled to ship between September 4 and November 15, 2k in the USA.

I can't tell you how much it saddens me to see this game "slip" again. Aside from the fact that I now have to wait longer to play the game, it's like Bungie is falling into the Ion Storm, Valve, Shiny, (fill in the blank name) club of developers that take so long to release a game by the time it comes out it looks/plays dated.

• Team Fortress 2. Over 3 years late. Looks amazing. They keep tweaking the gameplay and making it "better". I have no doubt they want it to be perfect, but quite frankly the excitement is gone. They could have the game actually reach out and hit me now and I still wouldn't be impressed.
• Daikatana. What can be said about this game....Well thank god Deus Ex is shipping soon so they can recoup the losses on this one.
• Messiah. I was so excited for this one when it was announced for X-mas 3 years ago. Now...we get a buggy, dated, but nonetheless entertaining action game. Wow.
• Oni. What blew my socks off 3 years ago the first time I saw this on video in Atlanta at E3 now...well now it just don't rock my world after seeing Halo.

I'm not saying that I'ld have them ship Oni prematurely and then have the patch the hell out of it, actually one fo the best things about Bungie games is that they get it right out of the box so we don't have to download a thousand patches to get the game to run on our machines ^_^

Maybe Oni should be just a console title?

They certainly are easier to develop for. Fixed hardware in itself makes life significantly easier with new 3d cards shipping every other month these days.

What I'm getting at is since Bungie is super top secret about everything anyway perhaps they should consider being even more, I can't believe I'm saying this, tight lipped.

How am I gonna feel in another 9 months when Oni potentially ships?

Thus endeth the rant.

Read news from 3-4.00here.
Read news from 2.00here.
Read news from 1.00here.