Month: February 2003

Bungie.net comes back to life… and the updates are too numerous to mention. Go read about ’em. Short synopsis – Achronos rocks.

For those interested, the Brian Morden Fund page has been updated. Brian’s parents wrote an obituary for him on our forum – we’ve added it to the page.

Apologies for the 18 hours of downtime – HBO is back up and running again. I can’t guarantee it won’t go down again – but I CAN guarantee that the cause for this recent outage will never, ever happen again. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

THR8807 has found an interesting trick on a PC mod site: How to give an Xbox controller a standard USB connector. The process is not for the faint of heart, and requires completely disassembling the controller. But maybe now we can settle all the controller-vs-mouse arguments…

Back to Halo: a few days ago, SketchFactor, Bungie’s newest member of the Online Team, wrote a Halo 2 FAQ over on Bungie.net. It covers a substantial number of subjects, and contains lots of good info we can point to – always nice to have an official source on this sort of thing. Several people…

I, too, will miss Brian Morden – he epitomized, to me, the strength of human spirit and the power of faith. That a teenager could keep up the courage to fight so long, and so hard, against a disease that simply wouldn’t give up reminds me that we’re stronger than we look – and I’ll…

It is with a heavy heart that we here at BORG announce that Brian Morden, aka Ar-Isildur, died at 5:55AM. He was 19 years old. His younger brother, Jamin, posted a note on our forum telling us the sad news. Please reply with good thoughts. I and a few others have actually met Brian in…

As below, the American International Toy Fair started today, and pictures of the Halo figures on display are already hitting the web. There’s a nice collection at Figures.com, including several Halo figures on this and the next few pages (use the “2”, “3”, and “4” links at the bottom). Thanks to Spartan ][ for noticing…

According to Team Xbox, the upcoming Halo action figures will be shown at the 100th annual American International Toy Fair in New York, starting… tomorrow. (Anyone who actually makes it to the fair… TAKE PICTURES!) The fair runs through Wednesday, February 19. Thanks to Strato for the heads-up.

Upon request from the publisher, we’ve removed all Electronic Gaming Monthly articles from our Press Scans section. We apologize to EGM for violating their copyright (we were under the impression that we had at least a tacit okay for this, based on communications with EGM personnel), and we apologize to anyone inconvenienced by the removal…

Bungie’s superstar intern Skip Weasel gets into the holiday spirit with a guide to love on Bungie.net. Neither Bungie Studios nor Bungie.org are responsible for the consequences if you choose to take his advice.

A few days ago, Åstro dropped into our forum to suggest that he was trying to speed-run Halo again. He was shooting for a 90 minute full runthrough, on Legendary. Yesterday, we got mail from Rory Hartley and Bill Copeland, a pair in Calgary, Canada that have done a full run-through on Easy: Pillar of…

In what is clearly one of the most bizarre interviews Bungie.net has yet published, Matt Soell interviews the Disembodied Soul. The beauty of this one is, you can reproduce it yourself! (Ask Matt’s questions, you’ll get the same answers.) For long-time Bungie fans, learning about some of the Soul’s girlfriends might be the highlight of…

In an attempt to show up Lorraine R. McLees, Stosh has put up a Valentines-themed comic of his own. (Give it up, Stosh.) Don’t forget the site itself… I think he’s just bitter cause he got beat by a girl. (Two, if you count Lorraine.) Update: DOH! Wrong comic. (No wonder I had troubles with…

Another Brian Morden update from SilverBrin – the news isn’t great, but the power of positive thinking is astounding. We have nothing but love for you, Isi…

Last fall, a dozen or so website maintainers in the Xbox community were invited to Microsoft’s headquarters for XBL Bootcamp, a two-day infofest on Xbox Live (then a month or so from release). Yesterday, the marketing team that organized that event, AEG, sent out some pretty nice Valentine’s Day boxes… you can see a couple…

Whoknew writes to let us know he’s added a mirror for Valet Parking, a movie we mentioned about a month ago. In these days of tight bandwidth (mythica is still down), it’s good to know there are volunteers out there!

Whoa – he’s right. opie301 noticed that the Halo Story page was updated at the beginning of this week – I missed it entirely. It’s not a big one, but it’s another piece of the puzzle…

A serious collection of artwork for you, finally – 10 images, ranging from pen sketches of battle scenes to a visual apology for a fan fiction joke. The highlight, for me, I think, is the Silent Cartographer render. Check ’em all out in the Miscellaneous Art section.

Finally clearing out some of the backlogged artwork – first up, two desktops in our Wallpaper section.