The Halo-based Grand Theft Auto conversion has been renamed to GTA :: Sin City. This information, and a few other tidbits about the past week, are available in the Weekly Update posted on their forum.

The final winning run in our Going Nowhere Fast contest, Trefitch's Maw sprint, is now available via Direct Download from the GNF Status page. If you're not one of the 900 people who have already grabbed this 82 mb file via BitTorrent - now's your chance to get an HTTP download. It's a gorgeous run... check it out! (Again - announcement of the Grand Prize winner should be sometime in the coming week.)

Back in May, Kris Kristensen, director/producer of an upcoming film called 'Inheritance', stopped by various Halo-related forums (ours included) to ask folks to sign a petition showing interest in the film. (He appealed to the Halo fanbase because one of the stars of the show is Jen Taylor, the voice of Cortana.) Apparently, the push was successful; a couple of days ago, he posted a note on the HaloPlanet forum stating that the movie will be distributed between November 2004 and February 2005. (The responses he got were split between indifference and titillation about the mention of 'graphic sex' in the Director's Cut version - it's a little disappointing to see no real support for the film itself.) Thanks to TankRamp for the heads-up.

Shacknews pointed out Halo 2 wallpapers at TeamXbox and IGN Xbox, all based on the recently released super-hi-res Halo ad. (The same sorts of wallpaper has been created by HBO visitors, currently in the woefully backlogged Wallpaper queue - for example, Ducain whipped up a batch a week ago (and another batch a couple of days later)... we'll do our best to get these up and posted soon.) Thanks, Ash.

Seven new stories in the Fan Fiction section today (updates take more work now, because of the new comments section, so it's easier if I do them when the batch size is smaller). Go read!

Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo has written an article over at the Junkyard looking at the changes in gameplay, from the release version of Halo through the current prereleases of Halo 2. If you read this, and choose to comment on it, remember that 1) the Halo 2 builds we've seen/heard of so far aren't finished, and 2) Halo has been out (and playable) for almost 3 years, while the longest anyone has ever been able to play Halo 2 without signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement is about 3 hours.

Some moron is selling the domain name 'ilovepees.com' on eBay, claiming it is guaranteed to generate 1 million hits in the first week, due to the popularity of the ilovebees.com site. Starting bid is $1,000 and the Buy It Now price is $50,000. Personally, I have to say... if this actually sells, I hold out little hope for the human race as a whole. Thanks to Starman343 for the heads-up.

This week, the Bungie Update is not a normal update - it's a special Bungie.net feature that covers the ins and outs of getting a game going in the European market. Typically fun Frankie read. So go read, already.

vector40 has written a series of articles on Banshee control - he's now added a fourth segment, but this one is narrated video instead of text. It's rather long (ten and a half minutes), but it covers several key strategy points in a way that simply cannot be duplicated with written words. If you're looking for an edge in your online Banshee battles, this is worth watching. It's 55 mb large, in MPEG-4 format; looks like the encoding is unfriendly to WMP9 on a PC, but QuickTime handles it on both Macs and Windows boxes. Turns out my analysis of our bandwidth situation took into account only files.bungie.org and files2.bungie.org - mythica.org still has a goodly chunk for the rest of the month, so that's where it's being hosted. Grab it today!

It's Friday - I guess it must be Movie day again. Merecatfish has made another PSA for Halo CE - you can snag it off his Halocity site. (WMP9 format, 320x240, 3:51, 5.6 mb) 45 Sion has made a pretty foul-mouthed vid called 'SouthPark MC Class' - WMP9 format, 640x480, 57 seconds, 5.6 mb... thanks, c0ld vengeance. Legend has made a teaser for an upcoming 'Halo Revolutions' film; you can find it on Halo Orbit (thanks, Oliver Sopienski). I'm not sure what it has to do with Revolutions at this point... but the sniping's pretty good. (MPEG1 format, 320x240, 1:10, 18.8 mb) Team EP has put together a teaser for a new map they're building (still in Alpha) - Ndugu has snowboards (with all the grinding and tricks that suggests), plus snowball launchers, pickaxes, and more. WMP9 format, 640x480, 2:29, 9.8 mb. A thread about the release can be found on the Gearbox forums. And [CHP] member Vinx has put together a long (9:25) video of gameplay on the Halo CE map New Mombasa. (It's in WMP9 format, 640x480, and weighs in at 56 mb downloadable.) Thanks to HaloPlanet for these last two. And to people who've submitted movies to US for hosting - please be patient. The Going Nowhere Fast contest releases have hit us pretty hard, bandwidth-wise. We'll be in better shape come August 1. Update: oops, one more from our own forum - scabbronumber1 posted Game Over, a 9.6 mb WMP9 that's 4:01 worth of mostly Blood Gulch tricks and gameplay.