Halo 3 Planet

In the most recent Bungie Update, Frankie sheds some light on the anticipated new Downloadable Content.

There are three brand new maps in their “Content Complete” stage as of now, meaning that they are all technically finished, and just have some testing to go through before they are ready for release.  We recommend reading through the udpate yourself, but here’s a quick run down.

Note:  These are the codenames for each map.  Final Map Names have been decided, but have not been announced according to Frankie.

Cottonball

• Very Large Map.  Unless you’re playing a Big Team Snipers game, it would be a joke to play without vehicles.
• Set on a Halo Environment.
• Symmetrical (for the most part).
• Best played on Assault and CTF Game types.

Purple Reign

• Somewhere between Small and Medium sized.
• Going out on a limb here, but to me this sounds similar to a remake of “Prisoner”.  Obviously from the text, not an exact remake, but holds very similar concepts.
• “Verticality” is an important aspect of this map.  There are lots of ways up, and bridges connecting gaps between opposite sides.
• “Central Hub” which will certainly be fought over (Remind anyone of rockets from “Prisoner”?  Again, totally making assumptions here, and I’m not even good at predicting these sorts of things.)
• One way glass to see incoming enemies.

OK Corral

• Medium to Large.
• From the description, sounds like a worn down city landscape of sorts.
• Confined spaces make vehicles only worth using in emergencies.
• High and Low Routes on the map make it tough to know where you’re enemies are coming from.

We’re already foaming at the mouth for more information.  The maps still seem quite a ways off, but they sure do seem promising…

I think pretty much everyone has been suffering from this Xbox Live hiccup, and at this point, I don’t believe there is a cure-all solution to the situation (it seems to be a server capacity issue on Microsofts part).  It’s caused a lot of commotion across the internet, a lot of people to at least pretend to cancel their account, and has even caused a class action lawsuit against Xbox Live (don’t see that going anywhere though).

However, we have found a few things that have helped us play [tag]Halo 3[/tag] (among other titles such as Call of Duty 4) during the holiday season. You may want to at least TRY some of these things before you give up hope of playing online.

• Clear your [tag]Xbox 360 Cache[/tag] - It’s really simple to do. In the Xbox 360 Dashboard, go to the System Blade, and then go to memory. While hovering over the Hard drive, press “Y”. When brought to the next screen, DO NOT SELECT EITHER OPTION, but instead enter in the following combination: X, X, Left Bumper, Right Bumper, X, X. If entered correctly, you should be able to clear your 360’s cache.
• If you’re being disconnected from games, or if you’re unable to join games and invite players to your games, you might want to try a real simple fix that has worked a few times for us. While in Halo 3 (lobby/menu/anywhere…) Click your Guide button, and Press X to sign out. Once signed out, sign back in. Give it a moment to load your settings and friends list. For some reason this seems to cure problems with not being able to invite friends 1 out of 3 times.
• Call 1-800-4-MyXbox. I’d use this one as a last resort. All of Xbox support representatives seem to actually have very little knowledge about the 360, or [tag]Xbox Live[/tag]. Instead, they sound like they’re just reading standard responses from a script 99.9% of the time. That said, they usually can help you with some basic problems you might be encountering. I personally haven’t been helped by them, but who knows… maybe you’ll find out that your NAT settings aren’t set to Open or something…
• Speaking of NAT, make sure your [tag]NAT[/tag] is set to OPEN! You can find out if your NAT is set to open by running a network test from the System blade. If its status is set otherwise, you’ll need to find out how to properly configure your network (or you’ll need to check to see if you’re even running on compatible hardware).

Other than that, you’re basically just going to have to wait it out. If you’ve found that anything else has worked for you, please be sure to post your findings here!

I’m not quite sure what to make of this whole “Xbox Live Hiccup” over the past few weeks (I’m going by an overall count… for me personally, the service was acting fine up until maybe a week ago).

Yes, it is a paid service, and yes, the service is apparently down in many regards (ie: We can’t exactly play). But is it fair to expect a flawless service 100% of the time? Does all the good in Xbox Live make up for this small anomaly?

Online services have problems.  There is no question in that.  Microsoft has done quite a good job overall (I believe) with their [tag]Xbox Live[/tag] service, and the fact that their servers apparently were not ready for 10 Million subscribers doesn’t come as a surprise to me.  They’ve made it pretty clear that they are working on solving the problem through folks like Major Nelson (who also announced how Microsoft is planning to compensate for the downtime), but I think the thing that is becoming bothersome is that this solution is taking quite a while to implement.

It’s important to understand that these sorts of problems can’t just be fixed in a matter of hours.  Server capacity probably has to be GREATLY increased (not just to solve the current situation, but also to prevent this from happening when there are 15 Million, or 20 Million subscribers), and even after all the hardware is setup, it takes time to test these sort of things in order to prevent other problems from developing.

Personally, I’d rather see the service come back online when it’s ready, rather than have some quick mop job on the whole service for a quick fix.  It does suck that we can’t get our daily dosage of Halo, but we are being given a free Xbox Live Arcade game as compensation.

Besides, with all this extra time me might get a chance to explore that strange place outside of the house for a change.