Alllllllllllllvvvvviiinnn

Image credit: Halo Studios

Update: Exactly two minutes after publishing, I noticed that Halo - Chipmunk Edition's creator has AI-generated music videos on their YouTube channel. Laugh rescinded pending further evidence. Beware that searching for Halo: Campaign Evolved mods is very much a game of avoid/try to spot the AI use at the moment for those averse to the tech.

Original story follows:

Halo: Campaign Evolved's now it's out in full, so naturally the mods are flowing. In taking a look through the early ones, which include the usual sorts of performance a graphical tweaks which crop up for every new release, I've stumbled across a few works I'd class as pulling off interesting or noteworthy stuff thus far. There's a mod which purports to activate split-screen co-op the devs have left sitting behind the scenes and another which swaps Cortana's lines for ones from the original Combat Evolved. Both of those have been made using AI - Claude in one case, OpenAI Codex in the other.

So, I tried digging a bit deeper into the early combat mods which don't have any AI shoutouts in their descriptions. That's led me to Halo - Chipmunk Edition.

Put together by modder Omniscye, who's also been hard at work swapping every Covenant grunt for Lieutenant Williams, it pitch-shifts the voices of almost every character in the game. "Approximately 15,391 English dialogue files" have been chipmunked, according to the description. Cue the video showcase below:

Watch on YouTube

To my eye, Omniscye's description doesn't mention AI use, and the mod's not tagged as containing AI-generated content, so my hope is that means this is a good old fashioned manual joke mod. It is the sort of thing modders have done for a laugh prior to the current AI craze, albeit maybe not on this scale so soon after release.

Surely the maker of a mod for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 mod which lets the player wield a shield shaped like a woman's backside and another titled Washing Machines of Bohemia wouldn't deceive me, so I'm going to tentatively let out the chuckle I've been holding in. Ha Ha.

If you're in the market for actually useful Halo: Campaign Evolved mods, there's also one which unlocks some hidden skins. Sadly, it doesn't look like any of them allow you to dress as Alvin, Simon, or Theodore.