As we enter the holiday season, we find ourselves wrapping up a crazy year and certainly an emotional roller coaster for many in the community. Despite worldly pandemics and game delays, there are a few nice experiences we got as Halo fans. Among the hundreds of responses we got to our Halo Wars 2 prize pack give away, MCC coming to PC and including Halo 3: ODST Firefight were large highlights alongside the Halo Infinite gameplay reveal back at the Xbox Games Showcase in July. Lastly, we’ve had such a supportive community as we launched our Patreon and continue to grow our follower and subscriber base on Twitch for our live streams. We hope everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays as we look forward to 2021 and the launch of Halo Infinite!
Winding down a crazy year of 2020 and we’re hit with the largest piece of Halo Infinite news since the Xbox Games Showcase back in July. The studio took to Halo Waypoint with their latest blog regarding the state of Halo Infinite development to share their thoughts on the response from the game play demo and the community’s concerns over the graphical fidelity and armor coating system. Needless to day, there’s some exciting things coming with Infinite based on the few words from Joe Staten and the interviews with the art and live teams in the studio. Give the update a good read over and put some of those fears at ease. Also, for Fortnite fans, Master Chief also dropped in there during The Game Awards with Blood Gulch as a creative environment in the game.
We’re back with Machinima Monday and taking a detour from pure machinima, we have a fully animated, cinematic trailer for an upcoming episodic machinima titled ‘Halo Grimfall’. While the trailer is something that is approaching Blur levels of quality, the actual machinima itself is slated to be in Halo 5: Guardians as seen on images from their Instagram page.
‘Halo Grimfall’ sets out to fill in narrative gaps left in the Reclaimer Saga and tell interesting new fan-made stories in episodic form. While we don’t know the extent of animation/machinima mix there may or may not be in the series, you have to admit, the trailer sure gets you hooked. The description provided for the episodic tales from the trailer is below:
A unit of the UNSC’s newest Spartan IVs are forced into an impossible choice when they are ordered to assist in a potentially galaxy changing mission by a shadow organisation not ready for peace.
There’s no release date that has been made available, but as the trailer notes, the group creating the machinima is looking for help. More details about that can be found in the video’s description.
After a week of for Thanksgiving, it’s time to see what’s happened in the world of Halo. While Halo 4 has completed the Master Chief Collection on PC, 343 isn’t done yet with bringing more bug fixes and features next year. With the ongoing support and Infinite slated to release in 2021, it should be an interesting year for Halo fans. A new Halo novel was announced, Point of Light, and we got the final installment of the ONI archives. Make sure you check out Haruspis’ blog and Halo Canon’s video summing up the ONI Comms Officer’s conversations.
One of the oldest communities, even older than Podtacular has the mission of being the knowledge source for everything in the Halo universe. Tackling such a large feat is Halopedia, a fan-managed wiki that encapsulates so many facets of the franchise that you’re bound to run across something you didn’t know. Two of the staff members over at Halopedia, CIA391 and Dab1001, join us for this interview where we talk about the history of the site and community, how it helps ensure accuracy of the information users add, how squishy the universe lore actually is, and a secret little function of the website that they decided to share with our listeners. If you catch the tip at the end of the show, let us know what you think of the effect.
Halo 4 has finally landed on PC joining the Master Chief collection and for a game that has really kicked off a lot of how we got involved with the Halo community, it’s only fitting that we talk about what really speaks to us about the game. It introduced new story telling and features to the franchise that has helped shape the last decade of Halo and while no game is perfect, it brought a lot of things we hold dear to our Halo experience. We’re excited to see new players get to experience the franchise in a whole new way as PC players continue to fill in and experience these later Halo games first hand.
Machinima Monday is here once again to bring the Machinima fun to all Halo fans. This week we’ve got a blast from the past. Originally airing in 2005 and featuring the fan favourite game Halo 2 is ‘The Codex’.
‘The Codex’ is a 20 episode Halo 2 Machinima that was very much so loved back in 2005. Whilst the sentinel beam scope as the camera and 240p resolution might put some people off by todays standards, it was the standard way to make Machinima back then. It certainly does make some of us older Halo fans realise our age that’s for sure.
Back to the series itself though, it’s long. Due to its 20 episode length, a summary would be quite difficult, so I’ll let the description of the first episode do the talking. The description for episode 1 of ‘The Codex’ is as follows:
The Praetor, a high-ranking Covenant general, is brought before the Council to be interrogated after he rushed in to investigate a signal he believed was coming from the ancient Forerunner structure known as The Codex. His failure to alert the proper religious authorities made him the subject of great suspicion, but he is able to prove himself innocent of malicious intent.
Due to his legendary skill, he is given command of the invasion of the planet Ariaos II and the capture of The Codex. Meanwhile, the Spartans detect the Covenant invasion force en route, and begin to make preparations for the defense of the planet.
With such an in depth plot and many of characters involved, it’s understandable that it’d take more than a few episodes to cover. ‘The Codex’ really is an example of classic Halo machinima, because the quality, storytelling and effort is all clearly visible, even by todays standards.
Unfortunately, the Codex Crew as they were formally known don’t make Halo content anymore. The uploader of the Machinima, Edgeworks Entertainment, doesn’t focus on Halo content these days, but it’s nice to see that ‘The Codex’ is still up for us all to enjoy.
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