Unless you only started following the video game ‘scene’ in the last couple of years, chances are you know already who Ed Fries is.

The popular industry exec was one of the original visionaries behind the first Xbox, and was loved by gamers for bringing about some of the system’s biggest and best franchises.

One of them was a little game called Halo. Back in our classic 2005 video interview with Ed, he tells us a bit more about the story behind that one – but today we’re not looking at Halo, its sequels or the upcoming Halo: Reach. That’s because Ed Fries is back with a “new” Halo you never expected: Halo 2600.

The title, developed by Ed in his spare time over the last six months, imagines what it would be like to have created a Halo game back in the days of the ancient Atari 2600 console.

Understandably, we were endeared to the project as soon as we heard about it, and earlier this evening fired off an email to Ed to see if he’d let us in on the story.

“The memories it brought back were more like, ‘Hey it’s fun to make games!’ And ‘Hey, I can still do this’”, he told us in the email.

“The 2600 is very difficult to program, and so it presents a really interesting and fun kind of challenge. Very good development tools exist these days so I really enjoyed the whole experience.”

Here at VGD we typically feel upbeat about games these days, with all the innovation that’s going on all the time. But occasionally, you can understand some gamers’ views about lack of originality in games when they talk about too many sequels or whatever.

So does Ed think developers should maybe think back to what made games fun in the 2600 era?

Who says Atari 2600 games can't fly off the shelves these days?

“It’s funny but I was thinking about it in the opposite way: ‘Have we learned anything over the last 30 years that would make games more fun if we could go back in time and live under the same constraints as existed in the old days, or have all the advances just come from the hardware getting more capable over time?’ I’m not sure Halo 2600 answers that question or not but it’s fun to think about.”

OK, so we’re guessing Ed still has a few contacts at Microsoft, despite leaving the company around more than six years ago. Why doesn’t he see if they’d like to put Halo 2600 out on Live Arcade or as a hidden easter egg in Halo Reach?

“If they want to do something with it they are welcome to it”, he explains.

“I tried to keep a few people at Bungie and at Microsoft in the loop during development just in case they were going to get upset about what I was doing but they never discouraged me, so I just kept plugging away.”

I'd rather play Halo 2600 than Halo Reach right now...

Find out more about Halo 2600 at the official site here. Meanwhile, though, what else has Ed been up to? As always, he’s always working on something:

“I’m doing some stuff with 3D UI through a cool company called Canesta, and that makes me think that the combination of 3D (Kinect-like) UI combined with 3D vision could be something really new and compelling.”

We look forward to learning more about that. But if 3D seems too expensive and Atari-era graphics aren’t quite your thing, then head here to find out what Bungie might be working on next back on planet earth…

Continue to page 2 for Ed’s “About Halo 2600″ document which has a ton more info.

If you set any store by the predictions of the Wedbush Morgan group, or the businesslike tone of Bobby Kotick’s investor conference calls, the monthly subscription shit may be about to hit the online console shooter fan. And by ‘fan’, of course, we mean Call of Duty fan.

WM’s Michael Pachter (never far from a headline) opined to Industry Gamers this month that it was ‘incumbent’ on Activision Blizzard to ‘monetize’ the multiplayer scene, as the largest fish in a pond lately ruffled by sales slumps the analyst part-attributes to the lasting success of Modern Warfare online.

While there’s no real proof that Activision intends to charge for online offerings in future, despite the efforts of bogus videomakers, the actions of other companies may force matters to a head. Electronic Arts recently introduced an ‘Online Pass’ system for several major upcoming North American sports titles, under which users must fork out an additional $10 to access key multiplayer functions. Sony, meanwhile, has rolled out a top layer of paid-for PlayStation Network content in an indication that the glory days of free network services may be drawing to a close.

Taking a stand

These are Dark Times, readers. But lo, a ray of light doth burst through the gloom! A ray of light fired from the muzzle of a Spartan Laser, wielded by the men and women of Activision’s latest and greatest development partner, Bungie Studios. All you Slayer fanatics, yell ‘hurrah!’ All you money-grubbing CEOs, yell ‘IT BURNS!’

Yesterday, VGD braved the labyrinths of London’s Churchill War Rooms to chat with Halo: Reach Campaign Designer Niles Sankey and Bungie Community Director Brian Jarrard. Among other things, we asked them what they thought of subscription models for online shooters, and were relieved to hear that while the pair consider the issue an ‘interesting dilemma’, there are no plans to pull a World of Warcraft on Bungie titles.

‘As a gamer, I don’t know,’ commented Sankey. ‘I obviously have a limited amount of income to spend on stuff, whether it be a Live membership or the game itself. We’re fortunate that we’re able to create all these core features and make them a part of our game, and a lot of that is provided to us by Xbox Live.

‘But you know, to be fair,’ he conceded, ‘we do have a paid service that’s a part of Halo – it’s our Bungie Pro video rendering, a hardcore niche feature. In the case that somebody has an in-game saved film and they want to render it out to the web and have it become a high res video they can share on Youtube or something, that’s an incremental workload on us – we have to have a server farm for it, we have to have additional bandwidth, instruments…

‘That’s an example where for someone who’d like to do that we’re going to have to charge a small amount of money to accomplish that. But we feel it’s a fair trade.

‘I think our philosophy is probably always going to be you should never have to pay for core entertainment, for core enjoyment. In that example, the rendering – not doing that has no impact on your ability to fully enjoy all that Reach has to offer, that is an outlying hardcore feature. I don’t think we would ever want to start dissecting core components of our game and making it so that you have to pay to enjoy the full experience.’

A Spartan shouldn't have to pay to teabag Elites, dang it.

Asked whether he thought Pachter’s argument that paid-for online shooters are vital to industry growth held water, Sankey was dubious, observing that a monthly fee might bind a player to a particular game at the expense of new releases.

‘I mean, I think DLC’s been adding incremental online revenue for a long time, and it’s become even bigger now, but I don’t know – I feel like as a gamer, from my personal perspective, it’s a fine line, because if you’re into a game like World of Warcraft, you’re heavily invested in it, you’re paying a monthly fee…

‘It certainly starts to impact your desire and ability to play other games, and I do think it’ll start to cannibalise itself in some ways, because people only have so much time and disposable income, and once you start putting money into something you’re going to feel obligated to stick by it and keep doing it, to get that return on the investment, and you’ll be less likely to play other games.

‘It’s been my personal experience in some of the games I’ve played with. It’s an interesting dilemma, because everybody wants to get a piece of the pie, and it can only be carved up in so many ways.’

No fate but what we make

Bungie will be watching all the pie-carving closely.

‘I’m sure the industry will test a lot of those bounds, you know,’ said Jarrard. ‘The process of natural selection, learning from the mistakes of others or yourself… I’m not concerned about the industry in general. Obviously there’s a lot of exciting things happening.’

‘It’s really up to consumers right now,’ Sankey concluded. ‘It’s a pretty incredible time. If people try it and consumers buy into it, then suddenly that’s going to become the thing that everybody starts to do.’

There you have it, readers. The power’s in your hands. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on Halo: Reach (which releases on 14th September) shortly. Sneak preview: break out the awesomesauce.

Among the big numbers at Spike TV’s Video Game Awards last night was the first Halo: Reach trailer. It’s silly, gritty and melancholy all at once. Classic Halo, in short.

That skull-face helmet is very Army of Two, don’t you think?

The game’s out in 2010.

Last week’s spicy news nuggets laced with the bittersweet herbage of half-arsed cynicism.

Cast a leisurely eye over the last seven days and you could be forgiven for thinking that all consoles and PC were designed exclusively to run Modern Warfare 2, all retailers founded in order to sell it, and all of human life ejected from the womb in order to play it.

Yep, Infinity Ward’s megaload of a gigaton of a killer app is responsible for most of the headlines, with Gamestop labelling the game’s 11th November release the biggest entertainment launch of all time. Not all news is good news, though – digital download operators Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamerGate are refusing to stock the title over the mandatory inclusion of Valve’s Steamworks software. Infinity Ward was also obliged to pull its controversial “F.A.G.S.” trailer on Monday after much anti-homophobic uproar over the weekend, and to top things off the first pirate copies found their way internet-wards on Tuesday.

Outside the Call of Duty bubble, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford won this week’s trash talk trophy by labeling Valve’s antipathy to the PS3 “childish and narrow-minded”, and Bungie’s launch of the Halo Waypoint Xbox Live hub was comprehensively overshadowed by the maybe-possibly leaking of Halo: Reach screens.

DICE followed up its popular adherence to the dedicated server model by announcing a PS3-only multiplayer beta for Bad Company 2 (fortunate news indeed for those of us who evidently can’t play it for shit), and Epic declared open season on Unreal Engine 3 dev kits.

The financial news desk is awash in doom and gloom, with Ubisoft, THQ, Konami and – yes – even Nintendo coughing up negative statistics of one kind or another. Still more upsettingly, Rockstar wants pictures of your facial hair for its rootin’-tootin’ open-worlder Red Dead Redemption. Form an orderly queue.

Enjoy the weekend.

"Can you smell burning?"

As the title pretty bloody obviously implies, Weapon Drops are short, sharp homilies to new, old and upcoming FPS weapons. If it blows shit away plenty good (and sometimes even if it doesn’t), you’ll find a corresponding entry here.

Halo is remembered for a lot of reasons. FPS Gamer history buff Kristan Reed has been known to gibber about its “groundbreaking AI and dynamic combat system”, while others might talk fondly of upwardly curving vistas, chunky physics-enabled vehicles or the way Covenant buildings shatter like lumps of purple meringue when you fire a rocket at them.

For my part, it was all about the Covenant plasma grenade, or “sticky grenade”.

The sticky grenade’s triumphs are twofold. First off, this cloying variety of handheld explosive threw open the process of grenade-throwing to the unwashed masses. No longer would amateur grenadiers have to worry about accidentally lobbing the device straight between the victim’s legs, or glancing it off his shoulder, or bouncing it off the wall behind and straight back into their faces. By dousing the grenade in glowing alien glue, Bungie had “democratised” it, transforming the weapon from holy tool of the moderately autistic elite to something any damn fool could use if he was capable of leading a target.

Secondly and most importantly, the sticky grenade is designed to encourage sadism.

Think of the many times you, dear reader, have been plugged by one. Worlds live and die in the second or two between contact and detonation. There’s the shock of the gaseous blue ball hurtling towards your torso, the frenzied instant of self-scrutiny, the horrible realisation that the other player is back-pedalling like mad, the desperate attempt to salvage a little honour by suicide-bombing the bastard, and the gloomy sight of your own corpse doing its very best Superman impression.

Now swap roles, and recall the satisfaction of seeing exactly this torturous thought process running through the eyes of another.

Good old Covenant know-how. Here’s some footage of a sticky grenade specialist in action.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX315pexy4o[/youtube]

Got an implement of warfare you’d like featured? Let us know.

When Bungie invited us to “finish the fight” back in the winter of 2007, only a madman would have believed that we had seen the last of the Covenant. You simply don’t take the biggest triple A single-format series of the decade outback and shoot the cash-cow in the head. Tasking itself with creating a follow-up to “the biggest entertainment launch of all time” Bungie have sidestepped a full-blown sequel along with the weighty expectations and budgetary requirements that come with it, instead focusing on a leaner, more focused view of Halo’s grand narrative.

As the title implies, this is an expansion of Halo 3, and as such the focus will be on the new. There can be very few Xbox 360 owners who aren’t intimately familiar with Master Chief’s antics, but the titular ODSTs (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers or Helljumpers to give them their punchier nick-name) have been given little screen time in the Halo series so far. What do they bring to the table?

The Rookie inspects his fellow ODST's handy-work.

Much has been made of their inferior abilities when stacked up against the Chief, but in reality they barely alter the battle-tested Halo formula one bit. Yes, they may not be able to jump as far or move as fast, but the game’s design accommodates this. Yes, the recharging shields that Halo turned into a near industry standard have gone, but the stamina gauge works so similarly that players will rarely stress over having to grab one of the many medikits dotted around the environment.

Perhaps the ODST’s greatest addition is the VISR (Visual Intelligence System Reconnaissance) HUD that not only changes the way the game is played, but really defines ODSTs distinct visual presentation. Essentially night vision goggles of the future, one touch of the X button draws beautifully stylised colour-coded outlines around everything onscreen, allowing enemies to be targeted effectively in the dark, drawing attention to important story-driving items, and most strikingly, adding an amazing depth of field to the game’s beautifully war-torn environments. While clearly not as progressive or well executed as Metroid Prime’s array of gameplay driven visors, it gives ODST a stunningly abstract visual quality that clearly separates it from its prequels. The VISR is introduced subtly, with early uses limited to exploring the game’s night time central hub, with each flashback pulling you further and further into the night where its application becomes essential.