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[Damascus]

 Possible new Halo3 ARG?

[dontpanic42]

not 100% sure i belive this. looks like someone just clipped the trailer with titles. or was there something i'm missing?

[Melthris]

Well that is definatley NOT an official Halo 3 ARG at all. Both of the Halo 3 movies are too poorly done to even consider them being for an official Halo 3 ARG. It could definatley be for a fan fiction Halo 3 ARG or Halo related to do with the Cortana Letters that are currently not canon according to Bungie so either way I am pretty much going to dismiss this. Sorry man, it looks like a joke or a fan fiction ARG for the Haloverse. I would be interested to see what comes of this though

[Kain211]

I wasnt involved in the orignal ILB but i heard it was amazing. im going to follow along, and play, this if it is an ARG...and if it is, which to me it seems to be, then I've but one thing to say. Once more into the Breach my freinds.

[userhck]

well i looked and it wasnt there. i googled for it and found another video, i think its the one you guys are tlaking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BKrEOkdSGM

[userhck]

theres a site that it links to, its a blog. wierd.

[thebruce]

well at the very least it's made me curious to check the frame by frame of cortana and see if there really is text blended into the background which the stills near the end in the video seemed to be hinting at...

[JohnLockeGuy]

Weeeeelll userhck is right. That link he posted does lead to a very official-looking Halo3 ARG trailer. (That background music is so... INSPIRATIONAL!) I'm not so sure about the whole Darwin Files thing, though... It seems too forced for me. I wasn't a part of ILB but I think they were better than this. I can tell you one thing, though. The person who made that video most likely did NOT make the blog. They're totally different.

I'm gonna be paying attention. just in case.

[JohnLockeGuy]

I just went back and watched it again, and on the Wikipedia screenshots they're not on Cortana but Curtana. That's how they got Charlemagne. I don't know the significance of it, though... I doubt Wikipedia is going to be in-game. The folks over there have a hard time letting people change things to suit ARG purposes... remember the Valenzetti article in TLE?[list=]

ETA: Just checked out that guy's myspace. It's like no other myspace I've ever seen, to be honest...[/list]

[thebruce]

considering myspace allows custom CSS formatting, it's possible, ideally, to customize every part of your page with enough research. sections can be visible or invisible, relocated, etc.
Still, it's interesting. I highly doubt it's by 4orty2wo entertainment, but if it is an arg, well I'll just leave it at that

[JohnLockeGuy]

Yeah, it's kind of basic for it to be 4orty2wo's work.

[krystyn]

[JohnLockeGuy]

I'm not trying to be selectionist, but I think if someone is going to try and slurp off the success of ilb, they'd better do it well. And being officially hired by microsoft would help. A lot.

[thebruce]

Edit: gah! sorry the comments in the attachments don't wrap so the thread is overly wide now

Well see, the other thing about Bungie is that they like to fill in easter eggs in their productions and such. Even the background of one of the menus I believe, with what looked like blocky lines and designs were actually sentences with the letters shifted fairly randomly higher or lower, and only a thin strip of the result was visible - making what appeared to be random blocks actually portions of letters for a message that was just put there for fun. I don't have any references to its discovery at this point, but in my frame-by-frame scan of the trailer (which I'm sure must have already been done), what I found isn't obviously something to be 'solved' as much as maybe, sure, there's some story behind it.

Anyway, I'm attaching the images I've snapped from the video that are at the very least, interesting, related to cortana here.

The only ones I'd say are worthy possibly exploring, if one is that curious, would be #2, 6, and 8. Though I'm pretty sure this isn't an ARGish rabbithole, as much as just Bungie (at best) having fun with their graphic department...

edit: because I hate scrolling pages, here are the comments removed from the attachments - Rowan
trailer1-random.jpg: appears to be what might be a pattern in the markings like binary, but likely just randomness

trailer3-4-hand.jpg: a composition of two clips which shows cortana's hand

trailer5-image.jpg: a mysterious single frame scene that doesn't seem to fit - perhaps just a random photo from Bungie's office? *shrug*

trailer7-noise.jpg: seen a few times through Cortana's appearances - most likely nothing at all

trailer2-text.jpg: one of three distinct appearances of a text-style background texture behind Cortana - this the most common appearance

trailer6-text.jpg: one of three distinct appearances of a text-style background texture behind Cortana - this showing the most coverage, but extremely faint

trailer8-text.jpg: one of three distinct appearances of a text-style background texture behind Cortana - this the clearest, which makes the text appear to be strings of fairly random characters, some repeated

[oraclle]

Hmmm - well I just watched the video...

First, a disclaimer:

I don't like to pick holes in things and be a totally pedantic b*ard.


The text in the video starts off promisingly enough; "This is the way the world ends". At this point I'm cautiously optimistic - though this is a sentence from the Halo 3 trailer itself so it should be good.

However, we then get "With Bungie's Halo 3 trailer release, some questions are answered". This disappointed me as if it is truely an ARG then it has fallen at the first hurdle by declaring the game universe to be part of something that is owned by a games company and therefore part of a game(what is the first rule of making an ARG? This is not a game! What is the second rule of making an ARG?...).

"But far many more have been posed..." *starts weeping quietly to himself* "far" and "many" really ought to be mutually exclusive in that partial sentence. The writer has also changed tenses from present to past which is irritating because it shows that ether the writer hasn't proof read the text or they don't see a difference.

Most of the video is the E3 trailer for Halo 3 interspersed by desktop motion capture of the writer browsing wikipedia...

What has moved me to send this really critical and unhelpful post, though, is the total lack of effort that has gone in to making this video coupled with the inclusion of:"In the style of I Love Bees comes yet another challenge from the makers of the Halo trilogy"

...If I was Bungie I'd kick this guy's a**e

Fan fiction is all very well and I would not have commented on the lack of professionalism if that is all that the video had claimed to be - I can be as bad as anyone for making mistakes(I'm sure there are a few in this post). In this case, however, the maker claims to be from Bungie and that really isn't cool because this is a completely half-a**ed attempt at making a game.

[/rant]

This was just my tuppence, I'm sorry if it offended anyone or made it seem that I was trying to spoil anyone's fun. I was so incensed that I felt the need to vent my frustration over engineering majors who can't even be bothered to attempt to use the English language correctly.