"Halo 2" engineers admit mistakes
Bungie "miscalculated'" with "Halo 2," developer says
"Halo" developer Bungie "screwed up" with its follow-up to the smash Xbox first-person shooter, staffers told British gaming magazine Edge.
"We had about four to five weeks to polish 'Halo' at the end ... [but] we had none of that for 'Halo 2,'" Bungie engineer Chris Butcher told Edge. "We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that. So 'Halo 2' is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that. It kills me to think of it."
The ending to the single-player story was disappointing too, Frank O'Connor, who writes the Bungie.net weekly update., said. "We drove off 'Thelma & Louise' style," he told Edge.
"Even the multiplayer experience for 'Halo 2' is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right," Butcher told Edge. "I fucking cannot play 'Halo 2' multiplayer. I cannot do it."
"Halo 3" will be a significant improvement, the team told the magazine. "We now have a system for when I want to come in and do something crazy, for making it all work," design lead Jaime Griesemer said.
"Now I feel like we've got this incredible framework and we can just go nuts and do anything we want to with this really solid foundation."
Pope hates on violent games
Violent and sexually explicit games are a "perversion" and "repulsive," Pope Benedict XVI said last week. The criticism came as part of a speech for World Communications Day called "Children and the Media: A Challenge for Education."
"Any trend to produce programs and products - including animated films and video games - which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray antisocial behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion, all the more repulsive when these programs are directed at children and adolescents," the pope said.
More expensive PlayStation 3 on the way
Sony must not be worried about selling its PS3 at $200 more than Microsoft's Xbox 360 and $350 more than Nintendo's Wii, because the company just announced a new version on the way that may carry a price tag estimated between $1,600 and $2,500. The new PS3 is more multimedia-oriented, reports say. It will feature an anti-vibration mechanism on the Blu-ray disc drive, 512MB XDR memory, a more advanced power supply unit and two HDMI connectors to divide audio and video data.
Meanwhile, Sony's third quarter earnings report cited a 50 percent loss from last year, financial news service Bloomberg's Young-Sam Cho said. Sony CEO Howard Stringer failed to "fend off Nintendo," Cho said.
In other interesting Sony news, its PSP Connect Web site recently slapped the text "Gran Turismo 4 HD" over a screenshot of "Project Gotham Racing 3" for Xbox 360 on its homepage. The image was taken down soon after the mistake was recognized.
Six Flags to feature Wii
Six Flags will soon be giving its visitors one more reason to say "whee" - or should we say, "Wii." The amusement parks will soon have Nintendo Wii's scattered around the park to play for free. Wii has been named the official game system of Six Flags and Nintendo.com plans to host a national Six Flags promotion. The Scene hopes Six Flags and Nintendo will make Wii puns-a-plenty.
