Year: 2004

Boxer gets us word of today’s Adventures In Disaster in time to make the normal news; makes you feel bad for the poor grunty.

Hehe… Microsoft Watch, a site devoted to – well, watching Microsoft – recently pointed out a blog entry by a Microsoft employee who commented on the huge percentage of Microsoft employees who participated in the Beta program that ended recently… and speculated about what that might mean for Microsoft’s overall productivity in the days immediately…

Wow. We cleared the Wallpaper queue. I can’t REMEMBER the last time I could say that. Check the Wallpaper Section for 10 new pieces (14, actually, if you count size variants), including a few really nice creations. Wow. I’d hate to say I was catching up… because you folks would just up the rate of…

Wow. WhoKnew, a regular on the #hbo IRC channel and a member of Alpha Base, wanted a Plantronics headset so badly that he wrote a song about it, and submitted it to haloTV. They liked it (it’s the Video of the Week), and he got his headset. (So did 5 other people, but more randomly.)…

Captain Spark gave the Engineer model buried in Silent Cartographer some Elite AI and a plasma rifle (using Halo PC modding tools), and made a short movie. It’s hard to make a longer one, because the game tends to crash when you do this… but this one’s pretty cool. The links in his forum post…

Tankramp, over at HaloPlanet, suggested recently that Stuntmutt might be running out of new jokes for One One Se7en strips. The joke’s on Tankramp – Stuntmutt never HAD new jokes for One One Se7en. Today’s strip, however, does use humor to make a decent point about weapon ergonomics.

We continue to get a significant number of new links being submitted to our Links page (there are 7 added to the database in the past week) – but sometimes submissions make me wonder. Today, I rejected one from a site that stated, on the nearly-blank front page, that access is restricted to members of…

Icetiger writes to point out his newest mod creation, Pipedream. Lots of new vehicles, weapons, bizarre architecture… check this one out! (It’s about a 13 mb download, or a bit smaller in .rar format.)

There’s a 2D Halo game that was mentioned by HaloPlanet during our downtime – but when I checked the link on the HP page, I got error messages. A quick note to Fluffy, though, got me a ForumPlanet thread, which had a better link. There are actually two games, ‘Hail to the Chief’ and an…

TheManRoom wraps up their Halo 2 Preview coverage with a new piece that includes the Halo 2 Fact Sheet, and a collection of all the recent screens and concept art released. Good reading! (Looks like we got an XBL glove tossed at our feet, as well… we’re there, when the time comes.)

Mothergoat has released Unyielding, his newest musical Halo-inspired creation. It starts quietly, majestically… but quickly explodes into heavy guitar-driven rock. 5:32 long, 5 mb big, hosted by Mothergoat himself (though if bandwidth gets tight, we’ll certainly provide an alternative – it’s quite good). Go listen. In Mothergoat’s words, “Turn it up loud, close your eyes…

IGN Playstation 2 has written up a perspective piece on Halo 2 from the standpoint of a gamer whose chosen console is NOT an Xbox. The bulk of the article is spent discussing how it’s going to be the single-player aspect that makes or breaks Halo 2, and how worrying it is that we haven’t…

Dark Strider points out that Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod, has updated again; this time, you can see shots of ‘Plains of Reach’, a new map. Take a look!

Pretty substantial usability updates to BOLL’s HBO PAL, the sidebar that puts all of HBO at your fingertips; he’s cleaned things up, added some search features (you have no idea how useful they are until you actually use them), and added a pair of guides for adding this page to your Windows Active Desktop (the…

Tried to get back to the Art queues – I was actually going through my drive to make sure I hadn’t lost track of any mail during the downtime, and I came across a number of pieces submitted to HBO in the past few months that simply got overlooked. They’ve been mixed up with newer…

You new it had to come one day… Cortana is in the running to be voted ‘Cyber Vixen of the Year’, along with 19 other virtual chicks. Sponsored by Maxim and Spike TV (surprise, surprise). Go vote, then wait until December 14 to see who wins. Thanks, Argent.

Another tourney – this time in Denton, Texas. Entry is $20, event takes place on October 1, first prize looks to be $100 (I might be reading it wrong). Details in this forum post by texasvgames. Update: Man, it must be the day for tournaments… MikeSak wrote to say that there’s one at Gameheads, in…

Bizarre – someone in the UK is selling (on Ebay.co.uk) a ‘Halo 2 Drink’ (energy drink, something like RedBull or Bawls) and a Halo 2 rubberized sticker that they picked up at a Gaming conference recently. First sighting (by me, anyway) of either of these items. Current bid is still under £2, but it doesn’t…

nexus points out an upcoming Halo 2v2 tournament in New Jersey – $35 entry, $800 grand prize, event to take place this weekend. Check out the links!

We don’t really do warthog jump videos any more. They’ve… been done. (I even just got through telling that to a couple of movie submitters in the last few days.) However, Ducain pointed out a new one that’s… well, new. Not done. There’s a bunch of stuff you’ve seen before (though I must say some…