Author: Crux Fidelis

The Halo SETI Marines gain another 6 recruits this week, and remain firmly in 43rd position in the Battle of the Teams. DarthFlounder again outcrunches the competition, and Trux (a new recruit last week) leapfrogs over 48 team members to garner the Frogblast award. The most interesting movement, though, is the second-place cruncher this week……

Interesting. Seems the Xbox is going to have a VChip-like parental controls, according to Alex Kotowitz (Xbox’s Senior Director of Sales), as reported by Game Informer. Parents will be able to restrict what games are played on the Xbox, based on game rating. This gives everybody (parents, regulators, adult gamers) what they want… except the…

Battleground: Halo puts up another episode of “Retaliation”, a fan fiction in parts by Patrick Palmer. Pax.

Thanks to Pr@iler, who sent along a desktop combining the Xbox logo and a modified Halo logo for our Wallpaper page. Pax.

Looks like we jumped too fast. In time for the 7:00 pm GMT announcements planned today, www.xbox.com is up again. Still waiting… (Thanks to Cosmic Muffet for the heads-up.) Pax.

Thanks to papamarx@speakeasy.net, who writes in with news from Daily Radar, who in turn got it from Advertising Age… Microsoft will be announcing a new name and logo for the Xbox tomorrow in San Francisco. Ouch to all those sites who bought xbox domain names! Pax.

Picky sends word that Honest3d.com has an article on the Xbox, and where they (Honest3D) think the Xbox fits in the console world. One interesting quote had to do with the rumor of a RAM upgrade (to 128 MB):The Microsoft rep said flatly that in fact the X-Box was still going to be sold to…

Crovax sends in a new wallpaper for our Wallpaper page, using (almost exclusively) old-style Marines and Covenant. If you pine for the days before the switch, take a look at this one! Pax.

Sokar writes to say that HaloEmpire now has a Halo screensaver (created by GCA) for download. It cycles through Halo screenshots with various fades and cuts between them. (Windows only.) Go take a look! Pax.

A rather spartan email from Pureblood announces HaloPort… which is, apparently, a new Halo site. I say ‘apparently’ because it requires a username/password combo to get past the opening screen… but provides no way to obtain one. More as we know it. Pax.

Peter Askam writes to tell us that Halo Command UK has been revamped with more content on the way. Stop by and take a look! Pax.

Red Hot Ryan sends word that Halo-World is fully up and running. Go check ’em out! Pax.

The word from Haloplayers is that the folks who were talking about bringing Halo to Half-Life have decided that HL is too limiting, and have switched over to Tribes. Anyone interested in this project can join in this HP Forum thread. Pax.

Harry Al-Shakarchi sends in this link to a Daily Radar article about the Xbox XDK (Xbox Development Kit), which includes the current version of what the Xbox looks like. GM J. Allard warns that this won’t be the final version of the product, though. Still, interesting to see where it stands now! Pax.

You heretics will burn! Daniel points us to an I, Cringley report from The Pulpet about X Blocks… that’s Xbox for you faithless lot. Olde Bob knows a thing or two though and rightly confesses that Xbox will only deliver if it has “kick-ass games that appear first on the X-Box”. Here’s the quote: Of…

Kudos to Picky, who noticed that Discreet, a division of Autodesk, announced at SIGGRAPH a couple of weeks ago that they’d be releasing a pared-down version of 3d studio max, called 3d studio gMAX, free to gaming communities everywhere, for modmaking. Halo mods just got easier! The full press release is here. Pax.

Freewill’s Bungie Sightings is temporarily down. The Fanfest forum is still up though. Expect an update… soon(tm). Pax.

Battleground: Halo returns with a redesigned look. White and blue is in and they’ve started a new fanfiction series titled “Retaliation”by Patrick “Defcon” Palmer. Pax.

Mojo announces that Halam is dead, long live Bungie Jumping. Bungie Jumping is a new site, devoted entirely to Bungie-related comics. We say: add this to your roster of daily-checked sites! Pax.

Pallor has written an article for The Corporation about the reaction of Bungie fans when the MS news hit. It’s not particularly flattering to Macintosh gamers. It’s spawned a couple of monster threads at Rampancy.net (here and here), and one smaller one on our own forum… lots of meat to chew on here. Do we…