Chronique:BWU 24/02/2006

Posted by Frankie at 2/24/2006 4:43 PM PST

This week's short update contains nothing you can't find in your own belly button lint, but it does have a 360 formatted Mister Chief to customize you dashboard with. And still no date for the soundtrack! Hurrah!

Short update today, so no whining please. Somebody handed me a copy of the Xbox 360 for Dummies yesterday. I was all, "How much of a dummy would you actually have to BE to not know how to use a console." Of course, the first page I opened had a handy tip that I never knew was possible. If you plug in a compatible device with an image on it, you can set that as your desktop pattern. How rad is that? I also didn't know you could customize the blade colors, or the little submenu that comes up when you hit the Guide button. And it wasn't just me. A chorus of "whhhaaaaaas!?" went up when I demonstrated. There's probably a ton of other useful info in the book too.

So with that in mind, I customized a favorite Mister Chief for you. He's the right size to use as a backdrop in your 360 Dashboard. To get him, right click the image below and choose, "Save Target As" and copy that to a portable device (or even a CD). Now insert that into your 360 and go to "Media."

Choose "Pictures" and select either whatever you copied the picture to. When the previews and folders show up, find the pic you want. Now here's the sneaky part. When you highlight a pic, you can simply press "X" to select it as your backdrop. Bam! You're all set. You can eject your device since the pic is permanently copied to your 360 if it has a hard drive.

Anyway, that's got nothing to do with anything.

Everyone is preggers or out snowboarding today, and I am trying to FTP stuff. I hate FTP-ing. It's stupid. It is the fax of the internet. Nonexistent error messages, or error messages that look like success. Today is sucking. But don't you worry; I will take it out on soccer moms by flipping them off when they cut me off in traffic while using their phone.

We're in the process of getting some new AV equipment together for Bnet – and we're looking at HD cameras and capture cards to mate with our Mac setup. We need something that will do broadcast quality, because we're planning on ramping up video (and maybe even audio) content on the website. Especially after the success of the video update from last week, where only 14% of you said I was fat.

Tom G (Achronos) says we're upgrading the site to the new version of .Net, and that means rebuilding it. That should happen invisibly to you, but it will mean fewer weird bugs in forums and searches and so on. Which brings me to another point. Since we're working on a new game , we're also going to have to make significant changes to the site to add both the new game and some info about the Windows Vista version of Halo 2.

If we announce our new game, we'll add a section for it, but we're already looking at a more major redesign to take all these things into account, and support say, new types of stats and content. That stuff is a way off, but an interim step involves making it easier for us to change the content on the site and add to it, so some of the dustier sections will be upgraded and we'll have lots more content. Especially if our plan to add a new writer comes to fruition. So at some point, you're going to see a mini-relaunch.

The saga of the soundtrack drags on and on. But we're about 48 hours away from final approval on the packaging, which means that Volume 2 of the halo 2 soundtrack is almost here. I reckon we'll have an actual release date next week, so I'll let you know as soon as I can.

I was -blam!-ing at Lars, one of our new Multiplayer designer guys the other day, that he hadn't invited me to certain "tests" of certain "things." So he diligently invited me to them every day this week, and of course I was too busy each time. So it turns out I'M the jerk. Anyway, I did make it to one session where we played something in a social setting and it promises to be a classic example…of this type of thing. And it was all new.

And speaking of social gatherings, we're having a Bungie LAN party tomorrow at UI guy Colm's pad. Old school bring your own Xbox 360 and TV. And we're going to be playing a lot of PDZ, Quake 4 and Call of Duty multiplayer. We need a break from Halo 2. There will also be pizza and adult sodas. Beer, not Zima.

Next week's Humpday Challenge is going to have a celebrity air to it. Somebody with a Pirate connection threw down a Pimp-y gauntlet, so we're stepping up to the plate . Although that might be the wrong sports metaphor. It should be fun. You'll find out who it was on Thursday.