PAL and NTSC Halo 2 builds 'play nice'
Bungie's latest weekly update gives us reason to be cheerful: we can definitely kill foreigners, and the process might throw up some slow-motion action.
Here at Eurogamer, we often find ourselves worrying about NTSC-to-PAL conversions, and in particular whether the process of refitting games for our eyes might ruin our prospects of killing people on different continents. (Side note: Ladies, we're in the phone book.) So it's always a relief when developers get in there first and manage to allay our fears before we've even had a chance to wake up in a cold sweat screaming about borders, slowdown, incompatible lap times and bodged up cut sequences.
Bungie, for example, whose latest weekly update touches on the dev's plan to make the European/Australasian experience entirely compatible with the American and Japanese battle. In-between discussing the combat dialogue ("we recorded more unique lines for one character than we had in all of Halo 1") and mulling over the team's favourite E3 experience ("The new Zelda looks damn cool. Link is a total badass."), this week's update hopefully eliminates any lingering concerns that Halo 2 might not be the seamless worldwide shooting gallery that everyone expects it to be.
It'll be better, in fact. "We're doing cool stuff with the PAL versions to make them look good and play nice with NTSC over Live," the developer states. Apparently the team is currently working on time control for the PAL and NTSC builds. It sounds techy (and indeed is), but "it might let us do some cool in-game slow-mo features if we so chose," says Bungie, although "only if they were implemented in some cool, non-clichéd way." Here's hoping.
Halo 2 fans interested in widening their window into the Halo 2 dev process would do well to read the rest of the weekly update (located hnar). We understand it's a regular event.