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Hear Five Minutes of the Latest Halo Novel, Narrated by Guilty Spark
Halo: Primordium, by Greg Bear, released just after the new year, and if you’re curious what the book’s all about, Macmillan has provided Kotaku with this five minute clip from the novel’s audiobook version. Narrating this clip is Tim Dadabo, the voice of 343 Guilty Spark.
By Owen Good Published February 3, 2012 -
The Well-Spoken Horror of Video Game Novel Audiobooks
If you need help sleeping tonight, why not curl up and listen to a man with a very proper accent read you a novel based on a video game about men with giant necks shooting monsters in the face. If Gears of Wars’ Jacinto’s Remnant doesn’t do it for you, you could try Halo: Cryptum,…
By Luke Plunkett Published February 2, 2012 -
Halo’s Creators Pass the Bungie.net Baton to 343 Industries on March 31st
Bungie’s not making Halo games anymore. That’s not news. But they’ve still been administering the servers which hold all that precious multiplayer data. Y’know, the place where all your Forge maps and deathmatch stats live. However, the studio just announced that their stewardship of Halo data will end on March 31st, as the final part…
By Evan Narcisse Published February 1, 2012 -
Microsoft Moves to Seize Fake Halo 4 Beta’s Domain
Whether motivated by trolling or delusional wish fulfillment, some guy tossed up a page pretending to be a registration site for a Halo 4 multiplayer beta last week. 343 Industries, the game’s developer, quickly branded that as a fake, and the site was taken offline. That’s not good enough for Microsoft. The company has filed…
By Owen Good Published January 28, 2012 -
Anyone Can Sing the Halo Theme Underground. And Sing it Damn Well.
Welshman Jonny Mason was exploring some abandoned oil chambers with pals when one of them thought, yes, these acoustics are just perfect for a rendition of the Halo theme. And what do you know. They totally were. Underground Halo Theme Performance of the Day [TDW]
By Luke Plunkett Published January 11, 2012 -
How Halo has Spawned a “Type of Animated Pornography”
It’s called “Machinera”. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of yet another painfully funny post over on parody site Christwire By the end, you’ll see Halo revealed for what it is: a “Nietzschean New World Order” recruitment tool, played by dehumanised robots on their Xbox shooting consoles. You’ll also see how the Covenant…
By Luke Plunkett Published January 10, 2012 -
Greet the Morning With Fantastic Blizzard, Halo Fan Art
Artist Toby Lewin, who took third place in 2011’s Blizzard fan art contest, wondered if we’d like to share some of his other work. Sure Toby. We’d love to. While he does his own proper concept art and design work, it’s his fan art we’ll be look at this morning, which in addition to Blizzard…
By Luke Plunkett Published January 4, 2012 -
New Halo: Reach Figures Capture Tiny Little Flags
Next month, McFarlane will release what feels like the 117th series of Halo toys, this time based on the characters and bad guys from Halo: Reach There are Spartans with multiplayer colour schemes, actual character Spartans from the game with no helmets on, giant aliens, human pilots and, my favourite, a pack containing multiplayer accessories…
By Luke Plunkett Published January 2, 2012 -
Halo‘s Graphics Guru Talks The Problems of the Future
Way before you pick up a controller, the first thing lots of folks think about when they think video games is how it’s going to look. This generation of gamers isn’t so enlightened that they’ll overlook shitty graphics in lieu of anything a game presents. Yet, graphics need to be balanced against various systems’ processing…
By Evan Narcisse Published December 27, 2011 -
Copying Your Character and Following You Around is the Sincerest Form of Creepy Flattery
Commenter KingKellogg the Waffle Haggler encountered a Single White Female situation while playing online the other day, and wonders if you’ve ever had the pleasure of attracting creepy online dopplegangers in today’s Speak Up on Kotaku. So here I was playing Halo when one of the people who added me as a friend requested I…
By Mike Fahey Published December 23, 2011 -
Watch the Epic Halo Film That Was Made in the Game’s Single-Player
It seems like everyone’s making machinima, right? Recent riffs on BioShock, Super Mario Brothers and GTA IV might even make the act of making original narratives from pre-built video game engines look easy. You just need to capture some footage and invite some buds talk over it, no? It’s a lot tougher than that. How…
By Evan Narcisse Published December 20, 2011 -
Master Chief is an Asshole
Bungie and Microsoft may have led you to believe that Halo’s Master Chief is a paragon of virtue, but that’s a lie told only on storyboards and over-wrought cinematic cutscenes. A man can only be judged by his actions, and in most people’s experience, Master Chief is a dick.
By Luke Plunkett Published December 15, 2011 -
Video Game Awards Show Host Gets Teabagged. This Ain’t the Oscars.
If you win an Oscar and ramble through your acceptance speech, the orchestra will drown you out and the cameras will cut away. But, if you’re a game developer and you prattle too much at the Spike Video Game Awards, you might have a man drop his crotch on our face. It’s called teabagging. It’s…
By Stephen Totilo Published December 10, 2011 -
Halo Goes 2D Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper
In development since 2010, Halo: Out With a Whimper is a fan-made project looking to take the franchise’s frantic 3D gameplay and transfer it to the world of 2D platformers. Going a little beyond your standard demake—of which there’s been plenty of Halo offerings previously—this is going all out, promising a “story driven campaign”, “the…
By Luke Plunkett Published December 5, 2011 -
Reviews
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary: The Kotaku Review
Despite only visiting it once in my adolescent years, I’ve never forgotten the Cradle of Aviation Museum in the suburb of Garden City. Row after row of majestic aircraft stood next to each other, shiny but defunct evidence to the pivotal role that Long Island played to the science and practice of aeronautics in the…
By Evan Narcisse Published November 21, 2011 -
The Voice Commands of Halo: Anniversary Fail at the Wrong Times
“I’m sorry Chris, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that” Until I hear those words coming out of my Xbox, (preferably right before it tries to kill me or something) I’ll be resistant to believing claims of voice functionality working with games. Halo:Anniversary tries it’s damnedest to make voice commands work. It’s not a…
By Chris Carolan Published November 17, 2011 -
Jilted Boyfriend Hocks Engagement Ring for Halo Armor
When his fiancée suddenly dumped him, Eric Smith of Geekadelphia decided that simply selling off the engagement ring he bought her wasn’t good enough. The cash from that transaction also had to be expurgated as well. Thus Smith used it to acquire a suit of badass Spartan MJOLNIR armor to shield his heart from the…
By Owen Good Published November 16, 2011 -
How Do Game Reviewers Feel About Playing Halo: Combat Evolved All Over Again?
Before the folks at 343 Industries can prove to us they are a worthy successor to the Halo development throne, they must first show us that they respect the franchise’s roots. This has been accomplished by dying those roots to make them a little less gray. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary has just hit store shelves,…
By Mike Fahey Published November 15, 2011 -
Let’s Look at the Facelift Halo Gets for Its Anniversary
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Splinter Cell Trilogy … there’ve been plenty of HD re-issues for beloved games over the last few months. But, in the video above, I’ll show you why the work that 343 Industries and Saber Interactive has done on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary outclasses all…
By Evan Narcisse Published November 14, 2011 -
Should You Buy Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary ? No.
It’s been ten years since Bungie gave Xbox gamers the first Halo game, a console first-person shooter that didn’t feel like the weak sister to the genre’s PC alpha dogs. From that single title grew blossomed one of video game’s most successful franchises, one which reshaped what it meant to play video games with other…
By Evan Narcisse Published November 14, 2011