Chronique:BWU 14/10/2005

Posted by Frankie at 10/14/2005 4:33 PM PDT

Bungie Weekly Update : October 14th, 2005

This week's update dances glibly from topic to topic, never stopping to catch its breath or get bogged down in details like, erm, detail. But read it anyway, because it doesn't cost nothin'.

We're still settling into the building. Alta, the Bungie Princess, has been trying to make the place "softer" more "livable" and "prettier." Very diligent, is our Princess, and so she even came over to my dark little hellhole to ask me what I wanted to soften up my "area." Alta's not stupid. After about thirty seconds of me just staring at her, she wandered over to Noguchi's desk where she felt she could get more sympathy for her cause. Noguchi has been told to stop stabbing people, so she probably felt safe.

Noguchi has hired a new assistant, and we'll be interviewing the poor suck…eh, new employee next week. Look out for that.

Alta's next priority, at least as far as the building is concerned, is decorating the space. Right now, thanks to a 96% dude ratio, it's just a big building full of our stuff. I hate to say it, but it badly needs a woman's touch. Or maybe a soft-skinned Cananimator's gentle caress.

Our Princess is in another castle! Or more specifically, another house. Alta successfully bid on a new house in Seattle. Congrats Alta. As a matter of fact, she joins a huge swathe of Bungie employees who all live in roughly the same neighborhood, which we shall now refer to as "Little Mombassa."

Our new building still has some teething troubles, like the odd network oddity, or weird electrical stuff. I had a bad case of TMI (Too Much Information) the other day, when an employee wandered up to Alta and explained that the motion-detecting light in the bathroom stall goes off after five minutes of inactivity, and anyone sitting there, has to flail wildly to make the lights go back on. (Shudder.)

Barrett brought in his very own Street Fighter 3: Third Strike arcade machine. So our little arcade is growing slowly, but surely. My plan to add a little working train track to make it more like Silver Spoons is being met with, at best, suspicion.

The matchmaking playlist change – the addition of Team Hardcore – is still on target to deploy next Tuesday, October 18th, so head in there if you want to dish out or receive a spanking.

Pete Parsons and Joe Staten are, as I write this, in New Zealand, at WETA, with Peter Freakin' Jackson, where they're brainstorming the Halo movie, and more importantly, walking around in a starry-eyed haze, marveling at Orc costumes, Centaur swords and giant gorillas. Every ten minutes or so, uberfanboy Pete will instant message me with some new bulletin, like, "OMG I just saw Andúril, the Flame of the West!" Or, "Oh wow! I stole some soft leather green point-toed boots. I am Elvenshod! See how I prance, as light and airy as an Elf in his aerie." Yep, that is just how Pete rolls.

Pete's geekiness is well-known, but whatever social filters he had, have been smashed by his proximity to so much nerd-food. Hopefully those guys have been having productive discussions with Mr. Jackson and not simply losing their minds.

I expect both of them will have some more constructive information for me when they return. And if it's available to the public, I promise I will share.

Lots of buzz about some alleged scans of an alleged female Spartan in an alleged fighting game. The game in question is Tecmo's DOA 4 for the Xbox 360. We're NOT Tecmo so what would we know about their game? Anyway, more news on that later.

Speaking of Xbox 360, it's only 40 or so days ‘til the system comes out, and already the Bungie geek collective is getting itself primed and ready. 5.1 systems are being tweaked, HDTVs are being bought, but only Marty is rich enough to buy the Omega bundle.

I already have space cleared in my gaming rig for the new system. I won't tell you which console I shelved to make room for it, but room had to be made. I also heavily reconfigured my cabling and now every single one of my consoles can go through component, since the 360 lets me use an otherwise redundant VGA port on my TV.

Leaderboards are going away. Sorry. The rank-whores, modders, boosters, cheaters and assorted scumbags have so polluted the Leaderboards that they were basically becoming an official list of America's idiots anyway. There are a few genuinely brilliant players up there, and to them we apologize. To the rest of the folks on the Leaderboards: Tough. Enjoy your hard-earned anonymity.

If you live in Eastern Washington, get down now. I mean it, flat on your belly. Harold is out there hunting with his new gun. He's taken a week off to go into the woods Rambo-style, and he claims he has a "people-license" and a roof rack that can accommodate "folks." Not sure what he means, but I have cancelled all of my hiking for the weekend just in case.

The most common question I get asked is, "Where is the Halo Soundtrack Vol. 2?" Well, I just went over to the very fount of aural pleasuring, Mr. Marty O'Donnell who looked me straight in the eye and with a glint of wry, grandfatherly wisdom said, "The soundtrack is done, and mastered and ready to be shipped off to the factories. It is not being held up by me, Nile Rodgers, or by any of the artists signed by Nile Rodgers, contrary to internet rumors." With a twirl of his cape and a tip of his top hat, he rapped his cane and bid me good day!

I was then left to assume that the Soundtrack is being held up for the usual reasons of legal stuff and logistics. Hopefully it will be sorted out before Vol. 5 is due.

We got a ton of request for Humpday Challenges and we can't answer them all individually, but we do look at them all, and we pick based on whatever we feel like picking at that particular moment. So you never know, you may be picked. Until then, we're just poppin' collars with Phi Kappa Tau.

Next week we have some cool stuff lined up for you, including a look at Bungie's top secret number-crunching laboratory, where we pick apart the weirdest, coolest, saddest and happiest numbers we can find, about Halo 2 online.

And finally, a reader asked me what Mister Chief would look like if he was poppin' collars. I had to look up "poppin' collars" to find out what that in fact was.