Prepare To Drop
September 22, 2019 6:14 PM Subscribe
Following the cancellation of Neill Blomkamp's Halo movie and Peter Jackson's Halo Chronicles, a team at Bungie had a chance to take Halo in a different direction. First known as "Recon", ten years ago today Bungie released Halo 3: ODST.
Marty O'Donnell has recently put some of the early experimenting that led to ODST's iconic soundtrack on his Youtube channel.
You can find that soundtrack on Youtube, where somebody's mixed the whole thing with ambient rain - 8 hours of it, if that's what you need - and there's making of video for the We Are ODST promotional video as well.
Keep it clean.
Marty O'Donnell has recently put some of the early experimenting that led to ODST's iconic soundtrack on his Youtube channel.
You can find that soundtrack on Youtube, where somebody's mixed the whole thing with ambient rain - 8 hours of it, if that's what you need - and there's making of video for the We Are ODST promotional video as well.
Keep it clean.
I worked in a tertiary capacity on the Halo 4 movie.... yeccchhhhhh
posted by infinitewindow at 7:06 PM on September 22, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by infinitewindow at 7:06 PM on September 22, 2019 [4 favorites]
Halo ODST: we realized this setting could accommodate a plot.
posted by Caduceus at 9:08 PM on September 22, 2019
posted by Caduceus at 9:08 PM on September 22, 2019
I got ODST, played it through exactly once, felt somewhat satisfied and completely uninterested in replay; immediately traded it in. Only game with which I've ever done that.
posted by qbject at 10:03 PM on September 22, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by qbject at 10:03 PM on September 22, 2019 [1 favorite]
"Odie Esty was just one week from earning his retirement halo..."
posted by straight at 12:29 AM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by straight at 12:29 AM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Alien by Neill "District 9" Blomkamp? That's an Alien film I'd like to see, after getting tired with the whole franchise. What happened?
posted by Termite at 2:01 AM on September 23, 2019
posted by Termite at 2:01 AM on September 23, 2019
Alien by Neill "District 9" Blomkamp? That's an Alien film I'd like to see, after getting tired with the whole franchise. What happened?
Ridley Scott, deciding that his big breakout movie was his best chance at an ongoing franchise.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:03 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Ridley Scott, deciding that his big breakout movie was his best chance at an ongoing franchise.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:03 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
My favorite Halo "film" is the 'Remember' trailer for Halo: Reach. It tells this beautiful self-contained story and it's one of my all time favorite video game trailers. It does all of this in 2 minutes and 16 seconds.
posted by Fizz at 5:43 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 5:43 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
I didn't want to cross those streams, but yeah -the Remember Reach trailer is quite good, though quite different from story in-game.
Kat gets a raw deal in both though.
posted by mhoye at 7:25 AM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Kat gets a raw deal in both though.
posted by mhoye at 7:25 AM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
odst was my favorite, because it was a bottle episode and because it had the slow music. More games like that would be a delight.
posted by rebent at 8:47 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by rebent at 8:47 AM on September 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
ODST was a really interesting game. I actually really enjoyed the 'nighttime' half of the game a lot. The combination of the music, the ambience, and the story really resonated with me, though I can see how it might not for others.
posted by Morriscat at 10:56 AM on September 23, 2019
posted by Morriscat at 10:56 AM on September 23, 2019
Loved everything about ODST. The setting, the soundtrack, Nathan Fillion, the Rookie's backtracking trying to figure out what happened. It's the best Halo every made, imho.
posted by longdaysjourney at 5:01 PM on September 23, 2019
posted by longdaysjourney at 5:01 PM on September 23, 2019
Not quite my favorite Halo title, but definitely the most unique, and the last one I got really hyped for (at least until the failure of the Master Chief Collection ripped my fanheart out).
New Mombasa has long been one of my all-time favorite exercises in video game worldbuilding, and I was super jazzed about getting an entire open-world game set in its streets. So jazzed that over on the HBO forums I developed "7heSuper", a pseudonymous fan version of the charming Superintendent mascot who (like any Bungie AI character worth their silicon) spoke in rhyming verse, with a splash of ASCII art. [The complete series: intro - responding to the unexpected delay of the game - a little poem - another poem (with MP3 melody!) - saying they're not from Bungie - fun with acrostics - a pre-E3 poem - explaining 7heSuper's "death" with the longest message of all on the eve of the game - ...and a final Christmas encore]
I was disappointed with the game itself at first because the environment design was scaled way back from the early trailers. In Halo 2 they went out of their way to map the campaign levels to real-world geography, and I'd expected them to recreate the environments already seen and expand them into an open-world city. Instead they used a disappointingly generic and copy-pasted "hub" world, with the campaign missions spun off into disconnected areas explored through flashbacks. This was more than made up for by O'Donnell's moody noirish score, the excellent voice cast, and the challenging gameplay -- your ODST character is notably weaker than the Master Chief and has to stealth around to survive -- but it still nagged at me.
...at least it did until I discovered a panoramic camera hack after finishing the game. To my great surprise, exploring the cinematic environments showed that the Bungie level designers had secretly gone out of their way to fit the entire game environment into both real-world geography and the layout of Halo 2, even matching unseen coastlines to satellite footage and inserting unique architecture that could never be seen during the regular course of the game. AFAIC, that takes the cake for going above and beyond for the sake of canon when it comes to video game level design. And though I've let it fall by the wayside over time, one of these days I'm going to finish my long-running project to unify the 3D files from all the Earth environments into a single consistent diorama you can walk through from one end to the other. Maybe when they remake the whole thing in VR...
Also, I'm surprised the post didn't mention Sadie's Story, perhaps the most ambitious and underrated part of an ambitious and underrated game. Like many titles of the era, it comes in the form of scattered logs you find throughout the city, but instead of random lore or minor side-plots they piece together a cohesive radio drama/visual novel about a Kenyan civilian named Sadie Endesha, her relationship with her father, and her quest to escape the city -- which also thematically echoes the Divine Comedy. (There's a longer analysis on HBO if you'd like a deep dive.)
They may have scattered to the winds over time, but the writers, designers, and artists of mid-00s Bungie will always be my favorite game developers for encouraging and rewarding weird niche fandom loves like this.
d[(••)]T
posted by Rhaomi at 10:24 PM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
New Mombasa has long been one of my all-time favorite exercises in video game worldbuilding, and I was super jazzed about getting an entire open-world game set in its streets. So jazzed that over on the HBO forums I developed "7heSuper", a pseudonymous fan version of the charming Superintendent mascot who (like any Bungie AI character worth their silicon) spoke in rhyming verse, with a splash of ASCII art. [The complete series: intro - responding to the unexpected delay of the game - a little poem - another poem (with MP3 melody!) - saying they're not from Bungie - fun with acrostics - a pre-E3 poem - explaining 7heSuper's "death" with the longest message of all on the eve of the game - ...and a final Christmas encore]
I was disappointed with the game itself at first because the environment design was scaled way back from the early trailers. In Halo 2 they went out of their way to map the campaign levels to real-world geography, and I'd expected them to recreate the environments already seen and expand them into an open-world city. Instead they used a disappointingly generic and copy-pasted "hub" world, with the campaign missions spun off into disconnected areas explored through flashbacks. This was more than made up for by O'Donnell's moody noirish score, the excellent voice cast, and the challenging gameplay -- your ODST character is notably weaker than the Master Chief and has to stealth around to survive -- but it still nagged at me.
...at least it did until I discovered a panoramic camera hack after finishing the game. To my great surprise, exploring the cinematic environments showed that the Bungie level designers had secretly gone out of their way to fit the entire game environment into both real-world geography and the layout of Halo 2, even matching unseen coastlines to satellite footage and inserting unique architecture that could never be seen during the regular course of the game. AFAIC, that takes the cake for going above and beyond for the sake of canon when it comes to video game level design. And though I've let it fall by the wayside over time, one of these days I'm going to finish my long-running project to unify the 3D files from all the Earth environments into a single consistent diorama you can walk through from one end to the other. Maybe when they remake the whole thing in VR...
Also, I'm surprised the post didn't mention Sadie's Story, perhaps the most ambitious and underrated part of an ambitious and underrated game. Like many titles of the era, it comes in the form of scattered logs you find throughout the city, but instead of random lore or minor side-plots they piece together a cohesive radio drama/visual novel about a Kenyan civilian named Sadie Endesha, her relationship with her father, and her quest to escape the city -- which also thematically echoes the Divine Comedy. (There's a longer analysis on HBO if you'd like a deep dive.)
They may have scattered to the winds over time, but the writers, designers, and artists of mid-00s Bungie will always be my favorite game developers for encouraging and rewarding weird niche fandom loves like this.
d[(••)]T
posted by Rhaomi at 10:24 PM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Does multiplayer in Halo PC still exist (i.e. are there public servers and how does one find them)?
posted by neuron at 7:58 AM on September 26, 2019
posted by neuron at 7:58 AM on September 26, 2019
neuron: "Does multiplayer in Halo PC still exist (i.e. are there public servers and how does one find them)?"
There was an unofficial fan project, ElDewrito's Halo Online, that may still be operational in some zombie form after a takedown notice from Microsoft. Good news is it lit a fire under their butts to release the Master Chief Collection mega-compilation on PC (via Steam!). It will be coming out in pieces later this year, starting with the 2010 prequel game Halo Reach.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:36 AM on September 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
There was an unofficial fan project, ElDewrito's Halo Online, that may still be operational in some zombie form after a takedown notice from Microsoft. Good news is it lit a fire under their butts to release the Master Chief Collection mega-compilation on PC (via Steam!). It will be coming out in pieces later this year, starting with the 2010 prequel game Halo Reach.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:36 AM on September 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
any update on the planned release date for PC Madda Cheeb edition?
posted by rebent at 1:31 PM on October 8, 2019
posted by rebent at 1:31 PM on October 8, 2019
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"Peterson, you're a genius!"
posted by seraphine at 6:41 PM on September 22, 2019 [5 favorites]