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:

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.