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That is when something is going to happen over at Bungie.net.  It seems Bungie is doing things their own way this time, and is not using the spotlight of the E3 Press Briefing to their advantage.  Instead, during the briefing, Bungie.net went down and has now been taken over by the SuperIntendent.  Just before that happened, the SuperIntendent corrupted the Cold Storage banner on the Halo 3 pause menu (look at the top right).

There are also reports today that Walmart’s internal Internet service is listing a title by the name of “Halo Blue” as releasing on September 30th of this year, and is rated M.  Many believe this to be some sort of expansion disc for Halo 3, including DLC that they can’t deliver without a disc (like added armor permutations, etc.) plus much more.

Back to Bungie.net though, if you look at the front page of it, there is a countdown in the bottom right, and it ends at 7:07am Pacific Time (9am central/10am eastern) on Wednesday morning.  A huge revamp to Halo 3’s online system could be less than two days away.

There are also reports of strange happenings over on Bungie.net, banners corrupting and leading to strange pictures and numbers, etc.  Basically the entire community has been plunged into chaos, and it’s going to stay that way until Wednesday morning at the least.

Update - 12:10pm CT: The pre-show is live and the briefing starts in less than 20 minutes.  Click here to watch it. (Don’t use Firefox 3).

Update - 12:15 CT: Since G4’s live feed is absolute garbage, a working one has been found by reader LG.  Click here for that - http://www.mogulus.com/gamertagradio

Update - 12:20CT: GameSpot.com has been down for the last 20 minutes at least as well.  Maybe they should have used some of that bribe money to buy better servers?

Update - 12:25CT: If you can’t get any streams to work, you can watch Major Nelson’s twitter for live-blogging updates.  http://twitter.com/majornelson

Update - 12:30CT: It has begun.  Click here to watch another feed from G4 which is actually working.

12:50pm - Resident Evil 5 dated for March 13th, 2009 - Worldwide launch.

1:00pm - Gears of War 2 demo and dated for November 7th Worldwide.

1:07pm - ABC and Universal Studios announce content for XBL Marketplace.  IGN.com, Xbox.com, and GameSpot.com are all down.

1:11pm - The new Xbox 360 Experience has been shown.  New dashboard, new interface, everything.  Essentially a new Xbox via software.

1:18pm - New UNO game announced - UNO Rush.  Xbox Live Primetime/Avatars/8-person dashboard partying up announced.

1:20pm - Geometry Wars 2 announced to release August 2008 exclusively for Xbox 360.

1:21pm - Galaga Legions (Galaga sequel in the vain of PacMan CE) coming out August 2008.  New Portal levels and achievements coming to Xbox Live Arcade in the fall.

1:25pm - Netflix partnership finally announced.  You can even stream and share movies with people in your Live party this fall.

1:35pm - Bungie.net is offline, preparing for something most likely.

1:37pm - Bungie.net is back up … or is it?  Announcement imminent.

1:40pm - Lips announced.

1:50pm - Harmonix, developers of Rock Band 2, now on-stage.

1:55pm - Square-Enix now on-stage.

2:05pm - Final Fantasy XIII announced for Xbox 360.

2:06pm - It’s over.  Bungie.net’s countdown ends at 7:07am Pacific time on Wednesday morning.

The countdown is on!  Tomorrow afternoon at 12:30pm Central, the Microsoft Press Briefing will kick off E3 2008, and many things are rumored to be announced.  There’s likely to be at least one surprise Xbox Live Arcade release (Geometry Wars 2 and/or Duke Nukem 3D).  There’s also the confirmed news that Bungie will be making announcements during E3, with one of the most prevalent rumors being that they will announce a new project that is a tactical shooter based in the Halo universe.

One alleged fact revealed is that this new Halo game will be a decidedly more violent take on Human/Covenant war  Its action and tone is supposedly akin to the Neil Blomkamp short films.  Spartan-117 would not be in the game either.

Besides a new project, Bungie is set to announce major changes to the Halo 3 Online experience.  We’ll also be seeing lots of Halo Wars gameplay at E3 2008.

Update 4am: A demo for Too Human is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Halo: The Cole Protocol will be the sixth novel set in the Halo Universe. Tobias S. Buckell, author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin will pen the novel, which reveals the location of the Spartan Gray Team and “takes readers into an unexplored conflict of the Human-Covenant War where unlikely alliances are formed and shattered…”

Bungie expatriate and Microsoft’s Franchise Development Director Frank O’Connor had this to say on the upcoming book, which is slated for a Fall 2008 release, ” Buckell continues an excellent tradition that’s now a solid aspect of the Halo novels, bringing a fresh new perspective to a limitless universe and bringing his prodigious writing talents to bear in ways that will surprise and engage fans of the series and newcomers alike.”

About Gray Team: 

Gray Team is the designation for a mysterious team of three SPARTAN-IIs that are said to be “on battlefields too distant to be easily recalled” when the SPARTANS received the new MJOLNIR Mark V armor in The Fall of Reach.  The team was later identified (in Ghosts of Onyx) to have been “on a mission far outside the confines of UNSC space, now missing for over a year”.

What is the Cole Protocol? 

The Cole Protocol is a list of five procedures all UNSC ships are to obey if and when they detect Covenant forces.  It was put into place in an effort to stop the Covenant from ever finding Earth or any other Inner Colony planet/human population center.

For the full definition, click here.

About the Author:

Tobias S. Buckell exploded onto the science fiction scene with Crystal Rain, (Tor 2006) a debut that combined a unique mix of Caribbean culture – where Buckell was born and raised – and hard SF adventure elements. Buckell’s unique and groundbreaking work won him acclaim from peers and the literary community, who called him “a dazzling new voice.” His second novel, Ragamuffin, (Tor 2007) was a 2007 Nebula Award nominee for Best Novel; a 2008 Prometheus Award finalist for Best Novel; and a Locus “Best of 2007.” He is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and was a first-place winner for the Writers of the Future, as well as having been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Buckell’s blend of hard science fiction with character-based action adventure and forays into classic SF pulp won the admiration of both Tor and Microsoft. Buckell is also a big Halo fan who has played every incarnation of the game.

There’s six new songs out for Rock Band today, and three of them are from Disturbed, but here’s a way to get two of them for free!

Go to http://disturbed1.com/xbox
Enter 1lfa89 and click submit.
Enter the code you receive into your Xbox 360’s Dashboard for the songs “Indestructible” and “Inside The Fire”

I’m not sure how long this is going to last or if it’s permanent or not, so get it while you can!

He’s best known as Frankie, and has been the main guy the Bungie/Halo community has heard from for the last five years or so, ever since Halo 2 was announced, he’s been there delivering weekly updates, every Friday, on what Bungie is up to.  He’s one of the few who knows Halo more than anybody out there, and now he’s leaving Bungie, but everything is not as it seems.  Here’s Frankie’s goodbye letter, posted in today’s Weekly Update:

“Dear Bungie Fans,

It’s not you, it’s me.

In many ways, you’re too good for me. You can find someone better. Maybe a little hairy dude. Maybe a Hungarian Unicyclist. I just know that I don’t deserve you, and that this is just as hard for me as it is for you.

Yours truly,
Frankie.

I am leaving you. I am off to work more closely with Microsoft on the Halo franchise, so I shan’t be too far away, but I wanted to take this last  chance, appropriately enough in a Weekly Update, to tell you a very fond thanks. Thanks for being the most energized, enthusiastic, loyal, faithful, creative, imaginative and incredible community any video game could ever have.

Thanks for being patient when things went wrong, when playlists didn’t work, when matchmaking broke, when bugs were being fixed. Thanks for the mail, the screenshots, the movies, the machinima, the models, the paintings and the sheer enthusiasm and talent you’ve shown me over the years.

Thanks for not following through on the death threats.

Thanks for sticking with us through thick and thin and thanks for the loyalty you’re going to show Bungie over the coming years.

And on that note, let me tell you a bit about the coming years. It was very hard for me to make the decision to move on, but one thing that made it just a bit easier, was seeing the amazing work that’s coming down the pipe. I was busy working on a story for one of our next games, an experience that is destined to surprise, amaze and entertain like nothing we’ve ever made before. That game has an amazing team invested in it, and one that will be tasked with building the Next Big Thing. You should see what they’ve already achieved, you truly should.

And there are other things rumbling at Bungie, just as secret, just as epic and just as incredible. And the thing that turns all that rumbling into incredible gameplay experiences is, has always been and will always continue to be, the people. The brilliant, talented, industrious gang of geniuses who brought you everything from a monochrome Pong clone to the staggering vistas and vision of Halo 3.

Artists, engineers, musicians, designers, writers, administrators, producers, managers, even our security staff are Bungie people, through and through. They are all, every last man, woman and Bob, the very essence of the spirit of the company and the thing I will miss most of all.

There are too many to name. More than 120 now, more than double the number than when I first started, about halfway through Halo 2. Amazing to think that I am Old School Bungie, when I never felt like anything other than a wide-eyed child in a moonlit candy store.

So thanks again. And look forward to all that candy. They’re making it for you.

Goodbye, thanks for all the Photoshops today - and don’t eat stuff off the sidewalk.”

Here’s one of my favorite videos of Frankie, it’s a video tour he did of the new studio Bungie moved into in late 2005.

In last Friday’s Bungie.net update, they talked about Ascendant Justice, which is a blog someone put together outlining the Forerunner story that is revealed in the terminals of Halo 3.  It also includes some story from the newest Halo novel, Contact Harvest, but not enough to spoil the whole book if you haven’t read it yet.  I just read through it, and it’s beautifully written, and is one of the best Halo-story outlines I have ever read, and anybody who has played the Halo games and enjoyed them should spend the 10-15 minutes it’ll take to understand the 100,000 year history.  It’s very interesting, and will make the Halo story you already know much more rich and deep.

On the right hand side of this side, I have created a page that has all the content of this particular series on The Terminals.  They have also put together some other pages that go into further detail than this series did, and also delve into the Forerunner individuals themselves.

A Voice from the Tomb (Part I, Part II and Part III)

The complete storyline of the historic events which caused the fall of the Forerunner race. This is the backbone of the series and should be read first as a point of reference. You can find the annotated PDF version here, with citations leading back to The Index bibliography.

She Died in Eden (Intro, Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV)

The tale of Didact and Librarian as told by the terminals. This is an in depth look into the lives of two beings that ignited a chain reaction which brought about the events of the Halo trilogy.

The Thunder and the Surf (Intro, Part I, Part II and Part III)

The story of Mendicant Bias, an AI construct through whom the galaxy was both lost and redeemed. He is the central character of the Halo trilogy, despite what many would believe, and this article explains exactly why.

The Index

All the text from the Terminals and more.

Earlier today a special Double XP 12-man playlist dedicated to the new Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3 went live.  It’s a 12-man, ranked, free-for-all playlist entitled Legendary Brawl.

Legendary Brawl started today at 2pm PDT and ends 2am Monday morning. To play, you’ll need both the Heroic and Legendary map packs.

Seems like this is the closest thing we’ll be getting to a Big Team game on Avalanche any time soon when it comes to Matchmaking. 

I’m personally very excited for this playlist, because in my first 7 or 8 games with the new maps, I lost every single one, until one fateful game early this morning, where I was left all by myself in the pre-game lobby as all three of my teammates quit out, making the game a 4 on 1 Slayer game on Ghost Town.  I ended up winning my first game on the new maps, alone, and outnumbered, 17 kills to 15.

Screenwriter and devout Halo fan, Stuart Beattie (who wrote the script for the upcoming G.I. Joe movie) has recently written a screenplay for the Halo movie in his spare time, without Microsoft’s knowledge. The screenplay is said to be called Halo: The Fall of Reach and is based on Eric Nylund’s novel of the same name.  The Halo movie previously had (and possibly still has) Alex Garland (of 28 Day Later fame) as a writer, but things seem up in the air now. 

From what I have pieced together, the studios are disagreeing with Microsoft on how much of a cut they should get from sales, and with Peter Jackson’s choice for director (Neill Blomkamp) due to him being a rookie.  Some articles have insinuated Peter Jackson wouldn’t do the Halo movie without Blomkamp as director, but I highly doubt that, given Jackson’s connection with the secretive Halo: Chronicles.

Microsoft seems to still want to find a major studio to help back and produce this movie, but sooner or later, they will go ahead and rent out whatever they need to, and do it by themselves, since the profit is guaranteed either way, and Halo movie will do nothing but increase the popularity in the Halo license, which Microsoft is the owner of.  With Microsoft behind it, Halo’s future is both varied and many, but they are treating it with respect, and are not milking it at every turn. 

As far as today’s news, I’m loving it. The Fall of Reach is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and the depth it brings to the Halo franchise can be found nowhere else.  There is one thing though, Neill Blomkamp’s gritty style seems more suited for a Halo movie that consists mostly of action and thrusts you right into the war with the Covenant. 

If the Halo movie is to take this more prequel-like direction, the Covenant would only come into play about half-way through the movie (if done in the same pacing as the book).  If the movie was long enough though, I could see them getting through the book and the first Halo game’s story, but I wouldn’t mind them breaking it up if it meant better quality overall.

No matter what happens in the future, I hope the movie is at least fun to watch and faithful to the story…I don’t think Bungie will allow it to be any other way.

The long-awaited confirmation of a Halo 3 remake of Lockout has arrived.  Below, I have included excerpts from Bungie.net’s article on this, along with all the screenshots they released of the map.  This map, along with Ghost Town & Avalanche releases on April 15th via the Legendary Map Pack and will cost $10/800pts.  Bungie is currently not aware of any plans by Microsoft to make the maps free in the future.

As its name suggests, Blackout is a remake of the Halo 2 classic Lockout, a cold series of interconnected platforms and walkways. Where Avalanche was retuned, reworked and massaged into something both familiar and unfamiliar, Blackout is a remake in a pretty strict sense of the word.

The setting is a UNSC Antarctic weather station with the completely arbitrary and stupid number z/41, it means nothing. Until the fans write some fictional significance into it and we eventually have to reverse engineer it into our canon. Thanks a lot, fans.

Its predecessor, Lockout, was set on a Forerunner installation. This time around we thought it would be cool to see what a human version of this same map would look like. So we created the fiction of it being a human weather station in the middle of frozen nowhere.

It’s a UNSC research station set in the Arctic, and I am pretty sure that this is also where all of the R&D on military grade Otter Pop rations took place. Early on I thought it was going to be an oil derrick, but that changed over time. We have some cool racks of glacier core samples, Doppler radar and other pieces of research gear strewn about, which makes for a nice touch – and when you look up to see them make sure you notice the beautiful Aurora Borealis in the sky. There were other, more outlandish settings done in the concept phase, but we’ll keep those secret as you never know when we’ll dig into that bag and pull it out for a future project.

What’s changed between Halo 2 and Halo 3 that affected the remake process?

PR: Equipment, field of view tweaks, higher resolution, widescreen, and Forge.

DM: I would guess the main change would be that jumping has changed and it made certain jumps easier to make. I wonder if the Assault Rifle’s influence also changed how the level plays vs the SMG. I think the level plays a little more mid-range because of the Assault rifle.

AM: The general pacing in MP changed between Halo 2 and 3, and the sandbox changed drastically, so that affects all remakes, but for Blackout specifically we wanted to keep things as close as possible to what was built in Halo 2. That means that the biggest changes come from actually gameplay as the way weapons and equipment interact on the map make a game on Blackout so much more different than a Halo 2 game on Lockout.

This is the first time I believe we’ve tried a full-blown nighttime multiplayer map. Originally I wanted it to take place on the back of a giant llama. I’m still bitter about this.

We almost didn’t do it because we already have Guardian, which was similar and ‘inspired by’ Lockout. But when I started up the DLC project we gathered a ton of data from the community, looked at the most played maps on Live and did some very unscientific polls on Bungie.Net and other community websites and Lockout was leaps and bounds ahead of every other map in terms of games played and the public demand. It also fits a need in our overall map portfolio to help round out the small maps that are available in Halo 3 and was a great artistic exercise.

The toughest part of making it was trying to be as faithful to the original as possible while also accommodating the inherent gameplay changes between Halo 2 and 3. The second toughest was getting Paul and the gang to fix their bugs on time and making sure lightmaps weren’t screwed all of the time.

Three more weeks!

The second map has been revealed, and it’s a “remake” of Halo 1’s Sidewinder.  It wouldn’t be wholly accurate to call it a “remake,” but elements of Avalanche are certainly culled from Sidewinder – it has the same familiar U-shape, multiple ways from base-to-base, and a whole sandbox full o’ vehicles to play with. But there are many, many changes too. 

Sidewinder’s new name is Avalanche, and Bungie has posted an interview with some of the designers and artists, along with the announcement that the map pack will be releasing on April 15th, and will be priced for 800 Microsoft Points, (they also point out that they didn’t set the price, Microsoft did).

Below this you will see I have posted all the pictures they have released so far, along with some interesting excerpts from the announcement article.  For the full Q&A session, click here.

Avalanche is a large forerunner power station set on the front of a huge glacial shelf on an under construction Halo installation. The structure is pulling its power out of the densely compacted ice that constantly builds up behind the station before it falls into the ocean below.

The map has a lot more vehicle action now. We’ve included flying vehicle and fast transport vehicles (Ghosts and Mongooses) to the roster. The equipment plays a major role in objective games. In fact, for CTF I would even say that equipment works better in Avalanche than any other MP map.

Q: Why Avalanche instead of [someone from the Internet’s favorite map, here]?

JS:  Honestly there are so many maps I would personally love to see placed within Halo3’s DLC.  And for me and others Sidewinder was one of them.  I think it’s just one of many we really wanted to do.   Not to mention I believe there were allot of folks banging on the door requesting it.

LB: Since the Halo: CE days, Sidewinder has been a fan favorite. Sure it might not be on EVERYONE’S list, but it seemed to be on the short list for a lot of incredibly vocal fans. And hell, it’s HUGE! And we needed more BTB maps.

MB: It just made sense. Looking back at the release maps and DLC1 maps, everyone could see that we needed another Big Team Battle map along the lines of Sandtrap, and with the Community’s love of Sidewinder, it was a great fit.

NS: Two reasons: Sidewinder is one the most requested remakes and we also needed another big vehicle map. And maybe this isn’t the only classic we’re remaking. There’s always hope for said Internet Halo fan.

“Team Slayer, and Team King are good, but the favorite Friday afternoon playtest has become Multi Flag on Avalanche. It’s definitely brought back memories of Halo CE LAN parties. The games are completely epic, and by adding vehicles into that mix, crazy things are guaranteed to happen. Can you say Capture the Flag with a Hornet?”

Just under a month to go until Tuesday, April 15th!