Halo Wars at Leipzig: Assistant producer Bill Jackson sent us daily updates of how the show was going, together with some photos. On their first work day our team did nine 30 minute demos, each with at least four journalists, before lunch. It was Bill’s opinion that the feedback was amazingly good and that the “strategy crazed” German press was being convinced, one by one, that a strategy game will work on a console. During lunch MTV came to the MS booth specifically to see Halo Wars and pulled designer/write Graeme Devine off for a TV interview. After lunch they did eight more 30 minute slots and Graeme did another TV piece for XBOX Live. Bill was particularly pleased to hear several people who had come in somewhat skeptical completely turn around their opinion. Our guys were also told that Halo Wars was the most requested game at the front desk (the game could only be seen by appointment by credentialed journalists).

The second day went as well as the first with the exception that more people were allowed in for each session to accommodate demand. For the second half of the day many of the sessions were packed with standing room only. The general procedure was for Graeme to give an introduction to the game and a basic primer on controls, and then let journalists get a chance to play. Bill was very pleased to note that many people needed almost no instruction to get going. It was fun for our guys to just sit back and watch the play. For a few groups they bumped up the difficulty rating. Unfortunately, in many sessions there were too many people for all to have a chance with hands-on play. Bill estimated that over 130 journalists came by during the show.

Our team celebrated the end of their responsibilities at Auerbach’s Keller, a famous cellar restaurant in business since 1538 and mentioned in the play Faust. They loved the food (wild boar; prepared something like pot roast) and beer.

Here is a photo Bill took of Graeme in a typical demo setting from the start of the show.

Halo Wars All Hands: Studio head Tony Goodman has announced that at least for the near term the entire studio will be working on Halo Wars. We have done something like this for most of our games over the years, so this is not unusual. It is not just finishing this game in a timely manner that is important, but also getting the content, balance, and polish to the high quality standard that we expect for all of our games. So for the next several months, probably, work on our other prototypes slows to a crawl. We believe that Halo Wars was very well received at both E3 and the Leipzig Game Show, and we want to deliver on the expectations that we have set.

Halo Wars Media Coverage: Producer Chris Rippy passed around info on recent coverage. First, the new issue Game Informer magazine puts Halo Wars in their list of “Top 25 Games of E3,” including a full page review.

Second, there has been some great feedback on the new screenshots we released- “Every time we see a new screenshot of video we’re reminded of how brilliant Ensemble’s Halo RTS is looking.” This type of comment is just more incentive to deliver the goods.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=195971

Age of Empires Board Game: I touched base with Glenn Drover, the designer and publisher of this game, and a colleague from a past life when we both worked for Microprose in Maryland. The board game has been reprinted and will soon be available in international languages in Europe; there will be a total of 28,000 copies in print. On the game site Boardgamegeek.com the game is currently rated #26 out of over 4000 games (7.91 out of 10 with 2100 votes). It has maintained that lofty rating for well over a year now.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/22545

ES Chatter: While we focus on finishing Halo Wars, other stuff grabs the attention of people during the day and provides a little break from Spartans, Warthogs, etc. One thread started with some photos of the new Pixar offices. Our guys loved the open spaces and the statues of characters from their films, and several wondered if these were too late to influence design of our proposed new space.

http://www.officesnapshots.com/category/pixar/

Another thread was kicked off by designer Dave Pottinger passing on the link to the album list for Rock Band 2. He noted “some greatness” on the list, which most of took to mean some heavy metal, coming from him . Others wanted albums from Santana, Led Zeppelin, and Tool, and this set off a flurry of YouTube links to some really forgettable performances. Here is the original article at Kotaku.

http://kotaku.com/5042915/new-full-albums-announced-for-rock-band-2

Halo Wars Builds: Yesterday I counted nine work builds (first at 4:47 AM!), two editors build, and four archive builds (last was #910). Today archive build #912 has already gone by.

Vacation Quiz: My wife and I are off soon on a long planned vacation that will take us to places again linked to some of the early Age games (last year we went to Egypt). I hope to have a few photos next time as a quiz about where we went.

Bruce Shelley