Chronique:BWU 03/07/2008

Posted by lukems at 7/3/2008 9:13 AM PDT

A bit of a Summer-y mix of housecleaning, stone-cold truth and good news (good news) in this week's pre-July 4th-done-and-posted-a-full-day early version of the Weekly Update. If it were a beverage for adults in the U.S.A., it would be one where all of the delicious, mind-easing parts of it have collected at the bottom.

The Bad News First

Recently, we've seen a moderate influx of things appearing in File Shares that don't belong there. Some this is just tweaked content from Halo 3 that has been uploaded in sundry and illegal fashions. In fewer cases, there have been a relatively small number of incidents of folks uploading inappropriate non-game content to the File Share.

Fair warning: Users who have modified content on their File Share - regardless of who created said content - will be subjected to the full power of the Banhammer's thrust. This includes some never-before-unleashed technology that will effectively terminate your Halo multiplayer experience online in every imaginable facet. In fact, the ban is so thorough that simply calling it the Banhammer is a complete understatement. I just couldn't come up with a more hyper-exaggerated term that had the same feel. Banplatform? Banpocalpyse? Banmageddnon? None of those did the trick.

Your Cause is Righteous and We Salute You

Seven Billion kills in Halo 3's Campaign before July 7th? Well, four days before July 7, ya'all are about 120M dead Covenant/Flood short of your lofty goal. If those were weekdays, I'd still have my doubts - and mathematically, it's going to be pretty tough to get done - but it is a holiday weekend on U.S. soil, so maybe, just maybe, the Internet will pull it together and turn that six in the billion column into a seven.

Note: I asked Rocketmoose if we could tweak the database to make it look like great success for the Internet, but he said I did enough lying on a daily basis that he was unwilling to enable further mistruth. I tried!

Sounds of Science

The next episode of the Bungie Podcast has splorted out of the sausage machine. There's a whole lot of meat ground up and encased in an mp3-formatted intestine and it will make its way from the Internet to your ears on 7/7, barring unforeseeable, inconceivable levels of tragedy.

Guests include: Lars Bakken, Shishka, Producer Allen Murray, Security Expert Jerome Simpson, IT Manager and Podcast Engineer Steve Lopez, Producer Joe Tung and Mission Architect Chris Carney. The room was full of men.

Save roughly 95 minutes of your day on Monday for the Bungie Podcast.

Cold Storage: Priced, Dated

By now you've hopefully read Sketch's Humpday against the Wonder Triplets, you've probably seen some Cold Storage screenshots and checked out the overhead perspective of the map. That seems like pretty much par for the map reveal course and next week, we'll have a Q&A with some of the mapmakers to commemorate Cold Storage's release.

Cold Storage will be available for free beginning on July 7, Bungie Day, on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Additionally, don't forget to grab the one-day-only free gamerpics and theme on 7/7.

Beginning on July 7, there will be a 48-hour long seven-player FFA playlist in Halo 3's Matchmaking where you can turn the calendar back to 2001 and control l Rockets, Invis and Snipe.

For now, Cold Storage will be implemented in regular rotation in playlists that require the Legendary Maps. To avoid confusion, playlists that previously required the Legendary Maps will now remind players that they need "all Maps" to participate, and since Cold Storage is free, it shouldn't be a big deal for you to grab the map on July 7 and then return to your regularly scheduled business in SWAT.

Additionally, on 7/7, Microsoft is dropping the price of the Legendary Map Pack from 800 spacebucks to 600 spacebucks. That price drop does mean that purchases after 7/7 will no longer include the Bungie Pro bonus.

We're trying to churn one last thing out today regarding Cold Storage, and we hope to have that for you folks later this afternoon. We're just squeezing it through the download system this morning. If something cataclysmic happens and it doesn't get out today, I'll stop drinking beer and consuming grilled meats over the long weekend and get it up for ya'all.