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This is the theme that you hear as soon as you find Cortana. In the file it will show parts for the violin, cello, and of course the piano.

UPDATE:I have changed a few errors, added some missing notes and adjusted the tempo of the song. By the way, the tempo is 120 for an eight note. I haven't quite figured out how to show that on the page so if any one knows then please let me know.

Note: I have the violin and cello's midi set as string ensemble to sound much more like the original piece. If you would like to play it normally, click "window" at the top of the page and select instrument list. You can change the sound from there.

As always, the file is only for .mus (Finale Notepad 2009). If you don't have Notepad 2009 then use this link to get it:

http://rampancy.net/blog/spartan182/12/11/2008/Opening_MUS_Files_0

OK, for starters any sheet music that I will be posting from now on will only be in mus. This blog will show you how to get the program to open these files.
You will need the program Finale Notepad 2009.

Don't have Finale Notepad 2009? Download it for free by following these steps:

First of all, if you have not registered for an account on rampancy and VERIFIED it... then don't even continue reading this until you do.

Step 1: Create an account at finale.com. The account is free. Use this link to begin signing up:

https://www.finalemusic.com/store/newaccount.aspx?t=%2fstore%2fmyaccount.aspx&

Step 2: Once you have finished signing up, you can download the demo version of Finale Notepad 2009. The demo gives you all of its features for 1 month (30 days) for free. Click on the link below and then select Notepad2009 to download the demo:

http://www.finalemusic.com/store/demos.aspx

The installer should appear on your desktop. Now that you have Finale Notepad enjoy your music! If you are still having problems with the file please leave me a message or a comment

I will post a link to this blog every time I submit sheet music in the future. If you are still having problems opening the file, then please send me a message or a leave a comment on the transcription page.

HBO and the HBO forum have both provided links to an editorial by "William Usher" at Cinema Blend about how Halo is killing console gaming.

So now that this specious attempt to nab page hits has worked, there can be little further damage that I can do except to examine the author's premise and see if it holds any merit. For the most part, it doesn't.

When you have to start off your article by saying "this isn't Halo bashing" it's not a good sign. Not because Halo doesn't deserve thoughtful criticism. It does. It is not a perfect edifice placed on Earth by some deity for the entertainment of humanity.

 Click here for the complete text.

GamesIndustryBiz has put up the second part of an interview with Bungie's Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard and Luke Smith. Here is part one.

Sketch remarks therein that Bungie has complete freedom to choose the publisher and platform for their new intellectual property-- property that Microsoft does not own. Microsoft does own Halo, and Bungie has a team working on the Halo 3: Recon expansion, due out next fall.

I'll do some spin right now: just because Bungie can choose a different platform and publisher doesn't necessarily mean that Bungie's next non-Halo game won't be published by Microsoft for the Xbox 360, but it doesn't mean that it won't, either.

Bad Cyborg covers some interesting techniques for tackling Tsavo Highway on foot. This is a lot of fun, if you've never tried it, you're missing out. A level that with vehicles and support troops is a quick breeze through the trees with a couple of thorny spots becomes a nice challenge all the way through.

GameCock, famed interrupter of awards ceremonies, holder of funerals for tradeshows, and publishers of games by Wideload such as Hail to the Chimp, have been acquired by SouthPeak.

SouthPeak published last year's Two Worlds RPG on the PC and 360, a game that was widely criticized for failing to live up to the high standards set by Bethesda's similar game, Oblivion.

Liveblogging the Microsoft keynote address from the Tokyo Games Show in Japan, Major Nelson says that Microsoft has shown the announcement trailer for Bungie's next Halo game. It's a prologue to Halo 3 called Halo 3: Recon, and as the rumor mill has long anticipated, it is a story told from the perspective of ODST marines.

Head over to Bungie.net for the announcement trailer.

UPDATE: The game is expected out in Fall of 2009, little more than a year away. That might be less time than some expected, and more than others did. The "Halo 3" moniker on the game, as well as the "new campaign" tag in the trailer indicates this uses the Halo 3 engine, although there's no way to tell yet whether this will be extensive DLC or a new boxed title. The trailer itself runs quickly through most of the content in the teaser trailer, then shows an ODST that survived the drop and the explosion and is now being hunted by Brutes dropped off by a Phantom.

GameDaily has an interview with writer Stuart Beattie, who is taking Eric Nylund's Halo novel The Fall Of Reach and adapting it into a film script.

Beattie was the writer on Pirates of the Carribbean and G.I. Joe, and wrote a Gears of War script last year.

Okay, first of all, I know, there's no such thing as official Mythic difficulty in Halo 3. That's what people call playing solo, legendary, all skulls on (HSH calls them SLASO to create more acronyms).

Daniel "Tyrant" Morris has posted over at HBO a walkthrough for this mode that makes this possible, and it's fantastic. If you haven't read it and you're a campaign junkie, it's an absolute must.

UPDATE: Author corrected from Asmodeus to Daniel "Tyrant" Morris.

According to the intertubes, Microsoft is forging ahead with Halo using a new internal studio. Forming the team are Ryan Payton, formerly of Kojima Productions and the producer of Metal Gear Solid 4; Corinne Yu, former technician at Gearbox; and at least two former Bungie employees: writer Frank "Frankie" O'Connor and animator Nathan "bentllama" Walpole.

Linkdump: Shacknews, Joystiq, GameSpot, GameReviews, HBO, bentllama's HBO forum post, EDGE Online.

This formation puts Bungie's independence in a bit sharper contrast. While Keep It Clean shows that Bungie isn't done with Halo, it is no longer the only thing they are working on. While there were always supposedly other projects in the works while Halo games were in production, none ever reached fruition, and the Halo projects typically consumed the studio's entire attention come crunch time.

That Bungie's Halo project is billed as "Halo 3", indicating an expansion rather than an entire new game, indicates that their commitment to the title will be somewhat less in the past, giving room for new developments.

Presumably the new studio will be 100% devoted to Halo. So the question will become: will fans be just as interested in Halo games not made by Bungie? Will these games be FPS, like the Halo series to date, or something else? Time will tell.

So the teaser that Bungie wanted to tease us with this past E3 is now out for download on Bungie.net in the usual flavors of QuickTime and Windows Media.

Luke Smith's post on Bungie.net calls this a "CG-teaser" and the front page refers to it as being for "one of our current projects".

My general impression is that this teaser is for a campaign expansion to Halo 3 that takes place sometime between the departure of Regret's ship from the Mombasa area and the Master Chief's return to Earth at the start of Halo 3. As such the main character or characters may be other human forces, perhaps marines or ODSTs, and the plot may focus on improvising city guerilla warfare against the Covenant forces in the city.

The most noticeable point of this trailer is that unlike nearly every Bungie game trailer produced to date, it is completely without music.

Without further ado, let's peruse the details the trailer offers.

 Click here for the complete text.

Bungie restarted the delayed countdown from this year's E3 with the Superintendent urging everyone to stay calm and keep clean-- at least until about seven minutes from now. Images on the intertubes (thanks Veegie) suggest perhaps something as dramatic as a trailer for a brand-new Bungie game.

Wideload's Halo-engine zombie game, Stubbs the Zombie, is available for the PC for only five bucks now from Steam. Thanks GameFocus for the heads-up.

Looks like the Superintendent is back. Perhaps one (or more) of the Bungie announcements that were indefinitely postponed at this year's E3 are about to be made public.

EDGE has a feature up here: http://rampancy.net/weblink/bungie/Edge_Interviews_Isla about the AI in the Halo series. They interview AI programmer Damian Isla, where he brings up an interesting concept I'd love to see in a Halo game-- or any Bungie game, really:

There was the well-known example in Halo 2 where your 'hog full of marines would just drive off if you got out. That's actually not that easy a problem to solve because how does the game know you intend to come back?

My grand thesis is, what if you can say: "Wait for me"? Communication with AI has been sorely neglected; you can ask them to charge, retreat, go there, but what about a richer level of communication than just orders? Even just a 'You're doing it wrong' button - literally.

Yes, Damian. Please. Yes.

From source.bungie.org:

This is a minor feature release of Aleph One, which includes Windows improvements and support for the Unimap 2 format. It is network compatible with Aleph One 0.20.x

Go get it.

What started as another one of those rumors within the span of a day became a confirmed truth: following the release of the upcoming Halo Wars RTS game for the Xbox 360 console, Ensemble Studios, known for the Age of Empires RTS series of games for Windows, will be shuttered. A new studio, like Ensemble part of Microsoft Games Studios, will be formed to support Halo Wars. Employees releated to Halo Wars will be offered spots in the new studio; those currently working on the project have been offered extra incentives to continue working on it through release. Those not directly related to Halo Wars are being let go.

This is being called a "fiscal move" designed to "grow" the company's game efforts.

This is a strange move on many levels, and deserves examination in a wider context.

If the staff working on projects unrelated to Halo Wars formed a significant portion of the studio's payroll, then removing them would indeed make the studio less expensive. However, paying incentives to keep the Halo Wars staff makes them more expensive than they are currently, and also negatively impacts morale. So unless those employees were more numerous or more expensive, those gains are long-term and not short term; and that assumes that they were not working on projects that were going to generate revenue, since that potential revenue is now lost.

The timing of the news is also interesting. There's never a good time for someone to hear that they've been fired or laid off, but the gaming press has covered several studio shutterings that occurred right after a game's release; perhaps Microsoft considered that announcing the closure nearer to Halo Wars' actual release date might negatively impact the game's sales, and so elected to do it earlier. Once people have been given their pink slips they can hardly be expected to keep entirely silent, especially with friends in the industry, so there was no way to keep the closure secret for any length of time; hence the quick confirmation.

I've seen several posters on various message boards wonder aloud why Microsoft didn't just buy Ensemble. That's just it. Microsoft didn't have to buy Ensemble. They already owned them. Microsoft's high profile studio acquisitions now have a decidedly checkered history. FASA stumbled and was shuttered. Rare tried to make a shooter to appeal to the Xbox demographic and missed the mark, even though it had the field at launch nearly to itself. Their other title, Kameo, was more in line with titles from their Nintendo days, but also received a mixed reaction. Viva Pinata looks like their strongest Xbox 360 title, but it also sits in a niche by itself amongst sports games and shooters.

Then there's Bungie; the unexpected blockbuster that spawned a hit trilogy and a staggering array of related merchandise, propelling the studio from its position as a critically acclaimed Macintosh developer with occasional financial problems to a mass market juggernaut.

Then they walked out the door, leaving Microsoft with the franchise and industry watchers scratching their heads. The goose who laid the golden egg left one last present, left the farm to hang out its own shingle, and prompty announced it would keep supporting and enhancing the eggs, but that new and as-yet-unannounced golden items would be coming in the future. This kind of thing doesn't happen every day.

This might have convinced Microsoft that the way to continue to build its Xbox empire isn't to acquire good independent developers, treat them nicely, let them keep their own corporate culture, and let them do their own thing, because ultimately when you do that, if they're successful enough they'll just leave. If they keep making games for your platform that's good, but suddenly you're getting only the publisher's take instead of the whole enchilada; and ultimately that independent studio might decide to develop for other platforms, and you've lost exclusivity with your premier developer. In short it makes the entire experience with Bungie look much like what I thought it was at the start: not the acqusition of a studio but the acquisition of the Halo property. Despite all the hot air about Bungie's talent and innovation, what Microsoft wanted, and what they ultimately got and had to keep-- and ended up acquiring on the cheap compared to developers like Lionhead-- was Halo.

Now Ensemble Studios is feeling the repercussions of Bungie's independence. The independent identity of the studio Microsoft bought, Ensemble, is being destroyed, to be replaced by a Halo Wars-focused division of MGS that will help monetize the property that Microsoft was able to rescue from the Bungie departure. It is largely a symbolic move; those people worked for Microsoft before and they still will. What is being removed is the idea of that group as something separate from Microsoft; the knowledge of their history before Microsoft, and the kernel of the idea that just as there was life before Microsoft, there might be life after Microsoft. When the studio is a group just part of a larger team, with a name assigned to them that bears no relation to the studio Microsoft purchased, the risk of those people going independent is minimized.

UPDATE: The above was written before I saw notes at Kotaku that indicate that while MS retains ownership of Halo and of Age of Empires, the new studio that is replacing Ensemble will, in fact, be independent of Microsoft, as Bungie is. This ends up painting a picture in which rather than trying to prevent further defections from MGS, what it in fact is doing is divesting itself of game development and becoming more of a pure publisher-- letting independent companies bear the costs of financing and developing the games.

In the end, the real casualties seem to be Ensemble's PC developers. With Starcraft 2 looming in the future of RTS games for Windows and Microsoft focused squarely on building and expanding the Halo property and continuing to add genres to the Xbox 360's repertoire, there was no room for Age of Empires. No room for the idea of Ensemble Studios, a group that used to make its own decisions and might again someday.

I wonder what is going through Peter Molyneux's mind right about now?

Master Chief Theater 3000 takes a step back in time with Season 2 drawing from Halo 2's cutscenes.

David Bowman, Design Lead at Certain Affinity, dishes on the Age of Booty blog about their upcoming pirate-themed XBLA game of the same name (previously called Plunder) and some of its influences, including Settlers of Catan.

There is no release date yet, but the game is speculatively expected out in the second half of this year.

According to Major Nelson's blog, Halo 3 and COD4 have done the top ten topsy-turvy trick again. Call of Duty 4 is on top (for the moment) and Halo 3 is playing second fiddle.