The iconic Halo 3 theme (more specifically the track titled Mjolnir Mix on the Halo 2 soundtrack) is now available as a playable track for Guitar Hero 3 on the Xbox Live Marketplace for the low low price of zero Microsoft Points (or zero dollars). So, if you like the theme (and my wife loves it), you can try it out and see how well you can “play” it yourself in the plastic musical instrument game. Hopefully they’ll add it to Rock Band as well.
By the by, the Halo 3 soundtrack, a two-disk set for $10-13, went on sale yesterday.
This video shows what the Halo theme/Mjolnir Mix looks like in Guitar Hero II as a custom track:
Apple’s is running a pretty smart website ad, one that puts a banner atop the page and a video in the sidebar. It’s another in the series of “Get A Mac” ads (you know, “I’m a Mac” “and I’m a PC”), with the video interacting with the ad at the top, and it’s kind of funny. Here’s a video of the whole page in action:
While I kind of like the ad (even if it contains the same smugness and inaccuracy of the entire ad campaign), it isn’t working out so well for Engadget. The ad has been causing audio problems, browser crashes, and wasting system resources, which appears to have caused them to take down the ad today. Microsoft should run an ad about how Apple sits around claiming everything they make is perfect and flawless, but tends to come riddled with stupid little problems.
Sorry, just clearing my throat. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, saying everything your company does is perfect is just stupid, since no one can create perfection. Microsoft screws up, Apple screws up, but only one of them claims to be just perfect. It’s becoming a bad joke at this point.
Microsoft has released a new Microsoft Math add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007. It adds enhanced computational and graphing capabilities to Word, letting you do this:
Plot a function, equation, or inequality
Solve an equation or inequality
Calculate a numerical result
Simplify an algebraic expression
Get it as a free download from here. Using it as simple as pressing “Alt-Equals sign” to create a RichEdit math object, type the equation or expression and right-click it to get solving and graphing options.
Microsoft has gotten XNA Game Studio, its tool for creating games that run on both the PC and Xbox 360, out with the first beta of its version 2 release, showing the fast maturation of the platform only a year after the first version. New features include support for Visual Studio 2005, multiplayer games that use Xbox Live or System Link, among the usual refinements and enhancements. Users of the free XNA Studio Express can get the beta and run it side-by-side with the free 1.0 by following the instructions here.
Doritos’ Unlock Xbox competition has ended, with fans choosing the the fan-created Doritos-themed game that will be released for the Xbox 360 next year. The promotion, where fans sent in game ideas and had the best of them created into simple online games, then everyone voted on the best one which would become an Xbox Live Arcade title, certainly turned up some strange game ideas, especially the winner.
The winning game is Doritos Dash of Destruction. In the game, designed by Mike Borland, you race a dinosaur and a Doritos delivery truck. The truck must make its way out of the city, while the T-Rex must catch the truck and eat it (presumably because he likes eating Doritos, not trucks). When you absolutely have to create a game based on a chip company (and you can’t use the creepy Burger King as a crutch), this is what you get. I bet the game will be at least somewhat fun, and certainly worth checking out at its price of free.
Expect to see Dash of Destruction as a fully realized Arcade game by Summer 2008.
