PREPARE TO DROP - An in-depth look at the new Bungie Teaser Trailer

OBEY POSTED LIMITS!

Bungie has finally revealed (a little) what their next Halo themed project will be. The teaser trailer appeared on Bungie.net yesterday, the One Year Anniversary of Halo 3. And boy howdy, it did not fail to impress me. It was short and at first glance not too much to see, but there actually were a lot of goodies in there to look at, if you knew what you were looking for, and this fanboy would like to think that he does.

I'm going to give you my interpretation of what things in the trailer mean using what I know of the story, the timeline and what has already been disambiguated on the intertubes. If you haven't already, go get the video and watch it. It's on Bungie, but I think the best place to watch it is from Xbox Live Marketplace. It's in HD and you can pause and rewind at your leisure.

Let's start at the basic premise and background. Required reading includes the first two posts from the mysterious Superintendent which were laced with clues. Read them HERE and HERE. Who is the Superintendent? Well he appears to be a City-wide AI. It does not appear that he is a "Smart AI" like Cortana, but an AI that is in control of a city's infrastructure. Not at all sentient, but knows how to keep the lights on and the services active like communications, water, the garbage trucks, etc. And speaking of communications, this is where the Super gives the first clues, in his monitoring of various transmissions.

The first communication is a transcript of a classified Office of Naval Intelligence transmission possibly between someone on a UNSC Prowler (Prowlers, electronic intelligence gathering ships, are run by ONI) and the "URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE A.I. [SUPERINTENDENT]". It doesn't go well for the human trying to communicate with the Super. The Super is not making any sense. There appears to be a problem of some kind, an apparent malfunction and the communication doesn't go well. We can tell that there is some kind of metropolitan emergency, possibly a Covenant attack, and that according to the Comm Officer on the prowler, help is on the way.

But what kind of help? Help for what?

It looks like the second intercepted transmission sheds more light on those questions. Again, a classified ONI conversation, this one seems to be between the commander of the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name and an unknown Captain, possibly on the ground requesting more troops. The crux of the conversation is that the Captain is trying to get the ship commander, an Admiral, to release or approve the release of more ground support. The problem is that the Heavy Cruiser is clearly in the middle of an intense space battle. The Admiral is trying to fight this battle and command, at the very least, his ship, not to mention that an Admiral is probably responsible for dozens more, possibly an entire fleet. Understandably the Admiral is essentially telling the Captain to go away, that he has bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

However, in the middle of this, the seemingly nonplussed Captain on the ground merely states that he doesn't report to Fleet and that neither do his men for that point. That can only mean that they are ONI or that the Captain has the authority to take troops for ONI missions that supersede FLEETCOM orders. The other clue to this is that the Admiral refers to them as "you S1 Types", presumably - ONI Section One

from Halopedia:

"ONI Section One -
The main intelligence-gathering section, and the foremost provider of electronic intelligence for the UNSC. Covenant ship movements and force deployment, evacuation notices for colonies, deletion of data for secrecy purposes, and much more are all done by Section 1. "

Reluctantly it seems, but with approval once it's revealed that the Captain is from S1, the Admiral agrees to the request.

Guess who's coming to dinner...

Now we look at the Trailer itself. Up to this point all we had to go on were all the disjointed messages from the Superintendent on B-net before E3 and then these last two, much more substantive communications.

The trailer opens with a shot of a cityscape and then jump cuts to a fiery falling object in the upper atmosphere. You get to see this for a second or two then it jumps back to the city and seems to cycle through a few stationary security cameras. The city is New Mombasa. We know this because of two clues. One - in the wide shots you can still see the space elevator stretching up into the sky. New Mombasa was one of two confirmed locations on Earth for Orbital Space Elevators. The other being Havana Cuba. The second clue is more obvious and more of a 'duh' moment if you pause the video. In the 2nd security cam shot, at street level, there is a sign that says City of New Mombasa. But you can only see it paused and in Hi Def.

For those who have paid even a little attention to the Halo 3 story, you'll know New Mombasa is just about the most significant location on Earth during the Human-Covenant war and was a prominent setting in both Halo 2 and 3. In Halo 2, Regret knew that there was something special about that area, but before the Master Chief and Earth forces could get to him, he initiated a slipspace jump in the atmosphere to escape, but the rift caused by jumping in the earth's atmosphere, destroyed Most of New Mombasa. In Halo 3, we now know that what Regret uncovered with the Slipspace jump and what drew him there was the portal to the Ark. Truth came to finish the work Regret had started, but thought that the portal was the Ark. We all know how that ended...

The trailer continues with the Superintendent (presumably) zooming in on many objects falling from the sky at great speed. Probably many of the fiery objects we saw up close at the beginning. As they reach the city level there is also a huge shockwave of some kind that is sweeping through the city. When this reaches the camera, it all goes black. after a few seconds we see the Super coming back online and he cycles through all of his now familiar responses:

Please Remain Calm (in English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese)
Expect Delays
Road Closed
Yellow Means Yield
Obey Posted Limits
Pardon Our Dust
Maddie, Where Are You?
Proceed With Caution
Danger: Flood Zone
Final Notice: Bill Past Due
Keep It Clean

The one of these that took me by surprise and was hard to find was: "Maddie, Where Are You?". I have never seen this one before. I can only assume that the Superintendent is trying to communicate with another AI. Possibly the AI that controls the Orbital Elevator. We know from Contact Harvest that it's possible that there could be separate AI's to control city-wide duties and elevator control.

Once the Super gets the cameras back online, we can now see that the city has been razed. The street scene is now one of total destruction and the cityscape is now smoke filled and the buildings are clearly severely damaged. What caused this? Based on the fact that the Orbital Elevator is still intact, this may be the Slipspace event that first destroyed the city in Halo 2, which gives us pretty concrete evidence what the timeline is for this game.

And finally, the video concludes with one last drop pod falling into the city and seemingly landing on the camera lens sending the video to black. That's right I said DROP POD. It looks like the cavalry coming to the rescue are those crazy Feet First Into Hell, Helljumpers - the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.

I'm pretty sure at this point that the mysterious ONI S1 Captain, convinced the Admiral on the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name to release his squad of ODST's, to take care of whatever Covenant ground threat is left over after Regret turned tail and ran.

The ODST's are bad-ass. There are no two ways about it. They are the toughest, craziest, meanest sons-of-bitches in the entire UNSC and the only thing tougher, is a Spartan. Unfortunately there's not too many of those to go around, so the real work in this war will be done by you presumably taking command of a freshly dropped squad of ODST's and taking it to the Covies on the ground. I'm guessing yet again that it could be like a Ghost Recon, or Republic Commando experience, which would be totally cool. Needless to say I am looking forward to that!

The Elevator is still intact so I am expecting that to be a big set-piece of the game, as at some point we know that it has to come down. Pieces of it can be seen from the first time you set foot outside of Crow's Nest in Halo 3 all the way to Voi and the Portal to the Ark. Watching that fall to Earth should be pretty breathtaking. Finally one of the last things you see as the video ends are the words: PREPARE TO DROP. Not sure if that hint can be any more blatant, but it works just fine for me!

Want to learn more about the ODST's and you haven't read any of the books? Check out this handy reference from Halopedia:

Halopedia: ODST

I hope you are as jazzed about this addition to the Halo universe as I am. I can't wait for more to be revealed so I can stop guessing and get to the real content!

Thanks for reading and please leave some comments or thoughts!

|)3V!|_

In Memory Of

Richard Wright

LONDON — A Pink Floyd spokesman says founding member Richard Wright has died. He was 65.

Richard Wright, a founder member of Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 65 after battling cancer, his spokesman said.

Wright played the keyboard with the legendary band and wrote music in classic albums such as Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here.

His spokesman said: "The family of Richard Wright, founder member of Pink Floyd, announce with great sadness, that Richard died ... after a short struggle with cancer. The family have asked that their privacy is respected at this difficult time."

Wright's spokesman did not say from what form of cancer the star had been suffering.

The self-taught keyboardist and pianist met fellow band members Roger Waters and Nick Mason while at architecture school. He was a founder member of The Pink Floyd Sound in 1965, and the group's previous incarnations, such as Sigma 6.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, Wright, along with Syd Barrett, was seen as the group's dominant musical force. The London-born musician and son of a biochemist wrote and sang several songs of his own.

The Great Gig In The Sky, and Us And Them, both from 1973's seminal Dark Side Of The Moon album, were his most well-known compositions. He also made essential contributions to Atom Heart Mother, Echoes and Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the tribute to former band member Barrett.

After his relationship with Waters became increasingly difficult, he left Floyd following sessions for the album The Wall. Wright was retained as a salaried session musician during live concerts in 1980 and 1981. In 1983, Pink Floyd released the only album in which Wright does not appear - The Final Cut.

Wright played with the surviving members of Pink Floyd in 2005 at Live 8. He also performed at a tribute concert to Barrett last year, but Waters and Gilmour, who famously fell out more than 25 years ago, appeared separately. Wright had performed on every Pink Floyd tour.

He officially rejoined Pink Floyd following the departure of Waters and contributed vocals and keyboards to the 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. In 1994, he co-wrote five songs on The Division Bell album, singing lead vocals on the track Wearing The Inside Out.

(article copied from http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hWIGm5l-yoyRo6pTklrXqJB3BnmA)

Milestones and Memories

Some time ago, Merlin, Devil, Domino and myself used to get together every so often on Fridays to play Halo. We coined the name "Halo Friday" and an idea was born. If you are at all familiar with www.halofriday.com, you are well familiar with the story. I will not retell it here.

This weekend I was playing Halo III and nearing several in game milestones for myself. As I came closer to some of the marks, I sat and remembered the good old days of gathering at someone's home and playing Halo, eating pizza/wings, drinking beer and doing shots of George Dickel. I really miss those days. They were some fantastic moments.

The whole idea of Halo Friday was for good friends to get together and have a good time for a few hours. When we all got X-box 360s the hope was that it would be even easier to get together because we could do it from the comfort of our own homes and not have to drive anywhere to get together. Early on it was great. Every Friday we would join around 8:00 and play for several hours and have a good time. Lately, its been hit or miss and we have been lucky to get two or three guys together for more than one or two matches.

But enough about memories. On to my milestones. I know some readers will look at these and say - "That's all you got? You SUCK!" Well - these are my milestones. I'm a casual gamer playing to have fun more than anything. So here goes (note these are only for RANKED matches):

Milestones
TOTAL KILLS - 4000
DOUBLE KILLS - 200
KILLING FRENZY - 1

Almost Milestones
KILLING SPREES - 48 (50)
BEAT-DOWNS - 970 (1000)
ASSASSINATIONS - 186 (200)
SNIPES - 48 (50)
GRENADE STICKS - 286 (300)

I was very happy to get my first killing frenzy. It took me a very long time to get it. The very next match I had a spree of 9 - so I almost had TWO in one day. But oh well.

Now, I am laying out a personal challenge to MERLIN, DOMINO and DEVIL to match my milestones!! OR even surpass my milestones!! Can you do it??