Year: 2003

We received a press release for this Friday’s ‘The X Factor’ feature on the Discovery Channel. To remind you, it’s debuting at 8 pm ET/PT, and will contain (among other things) an interview with Jason Jones. Read the full press release for more details.

Rob Csigi of the Halo 2 Paradise Forums wrote to let us know of their new URL. They’re on a big push for new members, so swing on by and check ’em out!

So when you win the “America’s Biggest Halo Fan” contest, and you finally receive your prize in the mail… what do you do to commemorate the occasion? I suppose this is one option… (Shamelessly stolen from Red vs Blue’s news page.)

BOLL has been a busy little beaver recently; there are two new Flash toys for you to play with. The first is a game he created over a year ago (but forgot to polish until recently) – Fly the Pelican through the cave system, trying your best to miss the walls. The Flash file itself…

Nice eyes – Iceman1330 noticed three new storyboards over at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. (They’re not currently mentioned on any of b.net’s news pages.) You get a good look at the ODST’s weapons, and the Pelican cannon. Check ’em out! Update: These got posted on Friday, and I managed to miss ’em in the…

GameFAQs has posted a new poll: Which FPS sequel are you looking forward to? I think we all know the answer to that.

Forgot to mention this yesterday… but Target4Hire nailed the audio challenge we mentioned in Saturday’s news. Thanks to Marty and Jay for the followup explanations.

Clan [WSD] has posted a 30 mb movie showing a clan match between themselves and {SDA} last week. It’s all CTF footage (almost 7 minutes worth), filmed from the perspective of one of the {SDA} members. (The final clip shows why, if you’re playing [WSD], you might want to think twice about giving them raw…

The full Demo Trailer Mirrors list has been updated with a number of new mirrors; even the newer QuickTime5 hi-res movie has a mirror (thanks, Halo Orbit!). Check out the list for the full details. (There are now links at the top of the page for each flavor.)

Benjamin Coles points out that the price drop Ding mentioned a few days ago (and then speculated might not actually happen) has actually happened – Target is selling Halo for $27.88 this week, according to XboxAddict. If you need another copy, you can’t beat this price!

Its accuracy depends on Evil Otto having created his artwork to scale… but Shnfara has estimated the thickness of the Halo at almost 120 km by using a side-on picture of the ring and some pixel math. You’ll find the result in our Miscellaneous Art section. Update: My bad – that value (the thickness of…

Six new desktops (8, if you count variations) have built up since we dropped everything for the demo trailer… you can now find them in our Wallpaper section. Update: one of the pieces has been yanked because it used artwork without getting permission from the creator of that artwork. This seems to be happening more…

A new version of the trailer, encoded in MPEG1 format, is now available. It’s 87 mb, and has a screen resolution of 436×320. It’s a bit darker than it should be, maybe (I can’t tell for sure; it looks good on 3 of the four machines I checked it on), but if you can’t watch…

Okay, here’s the deal. If you own a relatively new, fast PC, there’s absolutely no question which trailer you should download: get the WMP9 hi-res version. It’s simply gorgeous, running on decent hardware. And if your sound system supports it, it has Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It’s as close as you’re gonna get to having…

Thursday night, I took the opportunity to fix minor problems with the dialogue transcript for the demo trailer we posted a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to Ross Mills for reminding me to actually POST these fixes.

While some of us were frantic about the demo trailer, the Fan Fiction crowd was pretty busy – check out the latest 14 entries: Its Just One of Those Days: Intro, by Elfster Covenant Invasion! Part One, by Hunter_Killer A Broken Covenant, by TheRambler Sacrifice, by Gruntkiller All Roads Lead To Sol…Unless Stated Otherwise: Chapter…

That Weasel has been busy; there are several new flavors of the trailer (and one official flavor) at That Weasel Television; these are (for the most part) very low-bandwidth items. (These have been added to the full mirrors list.) Apologies for the delay in the HIGH-bandwidth re-encodes from me; first versions had screwed-up gamma. If…

Jay Weinland, otherwise known as Jay the Younger (in deference to the hard-of-hearing Marty O’Donnell), has put forth a challenge to the fans: can you tell what meter(s) the “outro” music for the trailer is written in? (Check the thread for more details, and as of now, one guess.)

Couple of notes about European Halo play; the big one is in France. Swing by Halo-Game’s site for full details, but here’s the quick rundown: competition is the last weekend in August in Clermont Ferrant (central France). Entrance fee is €20, top prize is €4000 in merchandise. Sign up if you’re gonna be in France…

Nukedude has converted the WMP9 version of the demo trailer to a 320×216, 20.3 mb DivX-encoded .avi. If you’re tight on bandwidth, you might want to grab this. It’s not nearly as majestic as the original… but it’s light-years ahead of the shakeycam versions floating around. I have no way to get this to mirror…