The Halo 3 soundtrack has been announced, and it is coming November 20. Amazon has revealed it will be selling the game for the nicely low price of $12.99 for a 2-disk set, performed by a full orchestra. Considering that all day yesterday as I played Halo 3, my wife kept talking about how amazing the music was, I pretty much have to get this thing.
Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP has been released with some minor updates, and missing one major thing: A Windows Genuine Advantage Check. Microsoft has removed the anti-piracy tool, so that users running non-Genuine versions of Windows can still install IE7.
Microsoft decided that it was more important for pirates to have the heightened security of IE7 than to discourage pirates by sticking them with the old software. Many of Microsoft’s software updates require a WGA check so that pirates can’t use them, but the threat of botnets of zombie computers infected because of an insecure IE6 was so serious, Microsoft removed the piracy check. Good for them, and good for everyone, since IE7 is a pretty good upgrade.
Microsoft has decided to open up the code for its .NET Framework, though not as an open source project. Microsoft is releasing it under a Shared Source license, specifically the Microsoft Reference License, that allows developers access to all the source code, but only to look, not to change it. Microsoft wants to be more open, but it wants control of its own specs, so this license allows it to be a little more open with the community, while retaining control.
Microsoft should consider taking it further, spearheading a big scale open source project, like an open source version of a property of its that isn’t going anywhere, or an open source update to an aging piece of Windows infrastructure, as an experiment. If all goes well, the next version of Windows could ship with a component that has been completely updated with open source code under an open source license, and it could be a first step towards making the company a little more friendly.
Read some thoughts on the change at Mary Jo Foley’s blog.
So, turns out this Halo 3 thing can move some units. Who knew?
Yeah, Halo 3 sales have been nice, as expected (and possible better than expected), so here’s what we know:
Estimates are that Halo 3 sold 2.48 million units on its first day, totalling $170 million in money earned. It is believed that translates to 1.6 million copies of the $60 standard edition, 694,000 copies of the $70 Limited Edition and 187,000 copies of the $130 Legendary Edition. Expect going forward, most sales to be of the cheaper edition, as the people apt to drop extra money on this game got theirs on day one.
Go on eBay if you want to buy the Legendary Edition’s bonus materials without the game.
Total sales for the first week were $300 million, giving Halo 3 the most profitable first day in the history of all media releases, as well as the most profitable first week. Sales of the Xbox 360 console itself doubled the week the game was released (to about 277,000), a nice jump that helps Micrososft further extend its lead on Sony.
In Australia, 70,000 copies of the game were sold in the first week, 50,000 sold on launch day.
Halo 3 was actually number one in Japan its first week, selling a respectable 58,672 copies in that country, better than any other game. Looks like the few people who actually bought the console in that country knew it was worth picking up the big game as well. Microsoft also sold a lot of new 360s, about 11,000.
After that big first week, sales dropped off dramatically, though that’s almost to be expected. Microsoft sold 1,547 consoles, and the game itself completely dissapeared off the sales charts in its second week.
Some other stuff:
Apparently, you get to unlock different armor for your character through certain in-game achievements, decking out your character however you’d like, if you unlock the cool stuff. This website has an armor generator you can use to see all the combinations, like this one:
To get everything you see there, you’d have to earn 1000 Gamerscore in Halo 3, unlock the “Mongoose Mowdown” Achievement for splatter an enemy with a Mongoose in a ranked free for all playlist, complete The Ark level on Legendary and collect 5 gold skulls.
Finally, in big news, Microsoft announced it was splitting off Bungie, the developers of all the Halo games, as an independant company. Microsoft was setting Bungie free, despite its success, because if it kept Bungie and made them make Halo games into eternity, the most talented employees would have just left, so Microsoft unleashed them instead.
Microsoft owns Halo, Bungie gets to make whatever games it chooses. Bungie will partner with Microsoft (and Microsoft still owns an equity stake), so you can be assured that almost anything they make will be on the Xbox 360, though not necessarily exclusively.
Microsoft has updated Windows Live SkyDrive, apparently making it a sub-service under Windows Live Spaces. They’ve doubled the amount of free storage space to one gigabyte, and they’ve added RSS feeds for public storage folders. They’ve also made it easier to share folders with groups of people you know, letting you add both contacts from your contact list and any email address you enter.
I wonder if there’s a way to share audio or video files in a public folder and the RSS feed acts as a podcasting feed.
Microsoft launced Windows Live Events, a new service underneath Windows Live Spaces that lets you schedule events, invite your contacts and handle who’s coming.
When you click to create an event, you have to choose the type of event, which in turn give you a Live Spaces-like page template, completely ready with everything you’d normally want for an even of that type. In other words, you get a fully detailed page, customized to your type of event, with a single click.
Template types are:
Anniversary
Baby
Bachelor/Bachelorette Party
Birthday
Club/Group
Cocktail/Dinner Party
Family
Farewell
General
Holiday
House Party
Night Out
Religious
Sports
Wedding/Engagement
Those are a lot of templates, and hopefully they’ll keep adding new ones, like a few missing religious events, and maybe someone will remind them that any wedding I get invited to online is a wedding I might not want to go to. Seriously, have you ever gotten an eVite to a wedding?
Anyway, besides choosing a template, you choose the date, time and place. Not only do you list the place, but you can add a Windows Live Map showing the exact location of the event. You enter the address and the map is automatically created, but if you don’t like where it places the pushpin and you want something more accurate, you can move it on the map to the exact right spot (like for a barbecue in the park).
You also get to choose a personalized web address of the style eventname.events.live.com. Talk about making it easy to remember and share the website!
Once your event is created, you can start inviting people, including sending it to your entire Hotmail contact list and anyone else. You can start customizing the page, including showing local weather. Events have a link to add it to Microsoft Outlook, Apple’s iCal, Yahoo Calendar or Google Calendar, as well as blog it to Windows Live Spaces. There’s a discussion board and space to upload photo albums.
If your page template doesn’t have a module you want, you can click to add it while customizing the page. You can add music and video, a blog, custom lists, custom HTML and an RSS feed. If you really want to get into it, you can do some serious editing and customization of everything on the page, or you can create a pretty advanced page with about twenty seconds of work.
If you’d like to see my fake barbecue event (there’s actually a real BBQ I’m holding at that time and place, but I don’t think you’d be interested), go here and see what a typical event listing is like. Feel free to invite yourself to see how it works.
Looks like a very powerful, yet very easy to use service. Considering the popularity of Windows Live Spaces, and the ease with which you can create a powerful page, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a big success. Check it out, and you’ll probably find its more worth using than eVite, and a lot of the features make it worth considering over Facebook.
Just shy of eight hours, I finished playing Halo 3. I took some breaks, taking ten hours for my eight hours of gameplay, but mostly I played it as straight as I could, and the whole game was completely worth it.
All in all, Halo 3 was a fitting end to the trilogy. More movie than game in some ways, the story, the cinematics, the characters, the dialogue are all the star of this game. The graphics, while spectacular, are not what you will be talking about later.
All through the last third of the game, I kept feeling that it could have ended, and when it didn’t, I was sort of dissapointed that I still wasn’t finished. And yet, as soon as I reached the end of the next story part, that dissapointed was turned into amazement, as the story sucked me right back in and made me realize that I just wanted to see more.
How does it end? Obviously, that’s a SPOILER, so if you don’t want to know, get the hell out of here.
If you want a comprehensive description of the story, Wikipedia’s got you covered. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and not a Halo player, and you just want the short version so you understand what’s going on, here goes:
Halo, the titular word, refers to a space installation that murders everything in the galaxy, in order to prevent the spread of the Flood, a parasitic infection. Similar to cutting out a tumor, except in this case, to prevent the cancer, you shoot the patient in the head. Naturally, this is bad, so in the first two games, the hero, known as Master Chief, fights to prevent Halo from being activated.
In Halo 3, the Covenant, an alliance of alien races that has a religious tradition to activate Halo, discovers a portal on Earth that leads to the Ark, an installation outside the galaxy, where Halo can be activated remotely, killing everyone in the galaxy except those in the Ark. It’s a lot like Noah’s Ark in that sense. Master Chief, along with allies who have defected from the Covenant, and even the Flood itself, fight and ultimately prevent Halo from being activated.
At this point, the Flood infection is mostly contained at the Ark itself, and they discover that the Ark installation has built a new Halo ring, to replace the one destroyed in the first Halo game. The heroes realize that they can activate this new Halo and it will wipe out the Flood and destroy the Ark, but it will not kill anyone in the galaxy, since the Ark is outside the galaxy.
They activate Halo, and before it does its thing, they attempt to escape back through the portal to Earth, thus surviving Halo while the Flood dies. Turns out that the activation of Halo messes with the ship as it is halfway through the portal, cutting the ship in half, with the front half making it back to Earth and the back half being stranded, years away from any civilization, in the dead of space.
Master Chief is stranded on this broken ship. On Earth, they hold a memorial for him, believing him to be dead. In space, he goes into suspended animation, content to wait until someone finds him. If you don’t sit through the credits and watch the scene after the credits, you never learn this.
If you complete the game on Legendary, the hardest difficulty, you see an expanded version of the scene, where we see that the ship is drifting towards a planet with life on it.
Here’s the final ten minutes of cinematics, the entire climactic sequence:
And here’s the last three minutes you’d see if you were on Legendary (the last thirty seconds are the only exclusive footage):
Is this game worth it? Without having touched multiplayer, or the map editor, or the saved videos, or the community features, or really played co-op, I’d still say it’s worth $60. If you think I’m only half right, well, add the half of the game I haven’t touched and its still worth your money. Of course you should buy it, it’s Halo, and it’s worth playing if only for that.
If you want an entertaining game, a uniquely exciting and fulfilling experience, you should pick this up. Even if it isn’t the greatest game ever, there is no experience like it in any game on any console, making it a worthwhile addition to any collection.
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