With just a couple of days more for us to enjoy Ensemble’s swan song, Halo Wars, Microsoft has released the next dev diary, or ViDoc as Bungie christened them, to get the hype train rolling for the next game set in the Haloverse. After introducing us to the Spartans last time around, the new diary focuses on how the team focused on developing a strategy game that was exclusive to the consoles, including working with the vast amounts of material available in the Halo universe, getting the controls just right for “consolification” and meeting all the expectations of the fans and (former) skeptics such as myself.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice! And if that fails, an inexpensive GPS, Google Maps and front-row tickets could probably do wonders. But how do you get to Jaspreet Bindra, the man holding all the strings to Microsoft India’s Entertainment & Devices Division? Well, after trying for over four months through the usual PR channels, we finally decided to use my Xbox MVP status to try and spend some quality time with the newly appointed Country Manager and ask some really hard hitting questions that were just burning to be answered. So, last Wednesday, with a lot of help from the absolutely adorable Abhishek Kant – Community Program Manager for Microsoft India – we managed to burn up the telephone wires for the better part of an hour with the warm and very approachable Jaspreet and the Assistant Product Manager for the Xbox 360 – Sanjoy John, getting down to brass tacks about the Xbox 360 and the Games for Windows platforms in India.

We were originally supposed to schedule a video interview with him sometime next week, but with Vijay and Reggie rowing the slave galleon pretty hard next week (not to mention how every spare moment in Vijay’s life is now spent playing Gollum And Its Precious with his Leader Class Bulkhead action figure), we decided we’ll just roll with what we have for now and do the video interview when the stars are aligned just right. One note about the following interview, when you see text marked out in italics like this, that’s just me inserting my thoughts on what’s being said or just being the kooky klass klown. Consider yourself warned.

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With the game having gone gold and set to take players back to the Halo universe come February 27th, Halo: Wars is all set to start building the hype all over again, this time with the demo coming up on 05/02/2007, featuring two tutorials, the first two campaign missions and a multiplayer map. And if that don’t whet your appetite, here’s three ultra-high-resolution screenshots of the game featuring lone Warthogs and massive battles between the UNSC and the We ♥ Purple Covenant forces. Click on the thumbnails below for the full-resolution images. Don’t say we didn’t warn you though – they’re huge.

       

After having finished the fight last September, rabid fans of the Halo franchise had to be content with sticking their friends with grenades online and waiting for the next game set in the Haloverse, the first RTS in the series – Halo Wars. Though the continuation of the story (or rather, the prequel) was expected long before Halo 3 wrapped up (or not) the Master Chief saga, few expected it to take the form of a real time strategy game that Bungie, in collaboration with Age of Empires legend Ensemble Studios are expected to spring on us later this year. RTS games on the Xbox 360, like Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars before it, have always been iffy, what with the level of control and freedom that a conventional keyboard-mouse combination offers, but Ensemble Studios, like every other console RTS dev before them, have claimed to have worked out the nuances of controlling the game using a standard Xbox 360 controller without frustration levels peaking into the red-zone.

While we wait for the official demo of the game to check out the control scheme for ourselves and speculate on the possibility of wreaking havoc with the Covenant war machine, one of our friends over at Microsoft, like many of us from time to time, developed a case of verbal diarrhoea and slipped us some really interesting information. Now, while we are never in the habit of starting rumors, this one comes from someone on the inside who swears on its authenticity on pain of death, and we’ve been sitting on this one for almost a couple of weeks now, trying to verify it before we say anything about it.

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