Author: halo@bungie.org

D. Scott Brown wrote up an interesting article about tuning lightmaps to improve gameplay. Examples from Halo 3, Halo 2, and Gears of War are included. If you’re not interested in the stuff behind the magic of what you see onscreen, this won’t be for y…

We got word that Statsreloaded.com has been completely overhauled – lots of new features, more capacity, with Halo 3 Beta stats coming in the next few days. Give it a look-see!(Louis Wu 13:23:02 UTC)

Grunts’R’Us has posted a full Achievement listing for Halo 2 Vista, complete with pictures and discussions about how to best access these. (We mentioned a couple of these last month – but the first was text only, and the second had smaller pictures, a…

CinemaBlend has an article looking at the three maps in the beta, and discussing what works (and what doesn’t) on each of them.(Louis Wu 13:13:38 UTC)

Mid7night has released his Longsword model for X-Plane – if you have the program, you no longer need to look at his pretty pictures, you can download the model and play with it yourself. Nice!(Louis Wu 13:08:21 UTC)

Karol117 pointed out a Polish website with pictures of a Halo 3 marketing campaign I’ve never seen before… (text is in Polish, obviously, but the pictures speak for themselves.)(Louis Wu 13:06:15 UTC)

Mister Froggy sent word that Halo, Articulated #41 is online – it’s a look at the new Halo 3 Needler. I think a lot of us have felt this way.(Louis Wu 23:24:12 UTC)

Wow, that was fast. Over at High Impact Halo, there’s already a video of some folks exploring Valhalla in a Banshee… OUTSIDE THE MAP. Looks like some texturing still needs to be done…(Louis Wu 22:13:18 UTC)

Check out Tina Leyk’s Halo Fan Art gallery – the top two pics are new. (Well, I’m embarrassed to say that the second image was posted at DeviantART back in December, but I didn’t notice.) Mombassa Sandstorm was created for her brother several months ag…

The Halo 3 Beta Matchmaking Playlist has been updated – Team Training has been swapped out for Big Team Battle Training (6v6, no Snowbound), and Team Skirmish has been tweaked. More details at Bungie.net. Thanks, Mike Scott.(Louis Wu 21:09:45 UTC)

trigger119 has started up ‘Monday Movie Playlists’ at GamingTV.org – random movie playlists, that you can contribute to. Read the details in this forum post, then check out the first list.(Louis Wu 20:55:59 UTC)

Ooh, cool – CertainAffinity.net scored 5 new pieces of Tombstone concept art. Check ’em out! Thanks, Ducain.(Louis Wu 17:05:41 UTC)

Stuntmutt decided to take a look at some of the new features of the Halo 3 Beta this week – he’s starting big. Check today’s One One Se7en.(Louis Wu 16:00:32 UTC)

You might or might not have noticed the Seeker search box on the right side of our home page – as we mentioned last week, Deimos has resurrected this multi-site search tool over at Subnova, and it covers enough Halo content that it’s worth giving you e…

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard new music from Mothergoat – but the Halo 3 Beta has inspired him, and this morning he released ‘Blood Horizon’, a hard-rockin’ paean to the Master Chief’s fight against the Covenant. 4.6 mb, mp3 format, avail…

rapture has taken about 200 screenshots of Halo 2 Vista (originally 1600×1050, but Flickr went and crushed ’em down to 1600×1000) – you can get a pretty good sense for how the graphics look, compared to the Xbox version. Check it out!(Louis Wu 14:46:16…

Davis Beutler was watching an Australian show called ‘Rove Live’ (a hosted variety show, similar to The Tonight Show in the US), and noticed a news tidbit about the Halo 3 beta. I grabbed a clip of the relevant snippet – but if you like it, follow his …

Ross Mills noticed a Halo 3 Beta reference in a recent F@NBOY$ Mini comic. Definitely random…(Louis Wu 14:32:54 UTC)

A bit over a month ago, we mentioned the Affinity Machinima Challenge, a contest put on by the HaloGrid crew. Well, this morning HaloGrid announced the winners in all three categories (seems like the Montage category got dropped) – and impressively, So…

A few new Halo 3 Beta Impressions articles out now – Gamespy, Game Feed, Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows (heh – gettin’ in on the console action, I guess). The beta’s certainly picking up its share of press…(Louis Wu 14:06:39 UTC)