Author: halo@bungie.org

Heh – fans have spoken up in the missed announcement situation, with respect to the game that Bungie didn’t tell us about at E3 this year. Mega64 takes Bungie to task for their failed promises (hilarious, thanks, StormyTheRabbit), and Impervium uses net resources to tell a happier (for Bungie, at least) story. (There are variants…

Tony ‘ubald’ Marcotte sent along another render – this one is a badass version of your favorite augmented soldier. Great work!(Louis Wu 11:30:26 UTC)

A couple of days ago, we mentioned a pretty cool fan-created poem – Jordan117 found a video version of it. Replayability is low, but it’s pretty fun the first time through.(Louis Wu 11:30:04 UTC)

It’s Friday, so it’s time for another round of Friday Caption Fun (the 16th!) from Hawty McBloggy. The cream from last round’s submissions, plus a new pic – go participate!(Louis Wu 11:29:42 UTC)

Just five new pieces in the Fan Fiction section this week – go read ’em!(Louis Wu 11:28:45 UTC)

The Halo-Dragon has submitted sheet music for Dust and Echoes to the Rampancy.net sheet music archive. Go grab yourself a copy!(Louis Wu 11:27:03 UTC)

As predicted, Microsoft’s Xbox division (well, Xbox/PC Games/Zune) posted a $426 million profit for Fiscal Year 2008, on total revenue of $1.7 billion. The press release attributed the success to (among other things) “video game sales led by Halo 3”. Does it make you feel warm inside?(Louis Wu 11:26:36 UTC)

Took ’em a couple of days, but MLGPro.com has put up a wrap-up of MLG Orlando. Pictures, highlights, speculation – go read it!(Louis Wu 11:26:13 UTC)

GameDaily has posted an Impressions article about Halo Wars – short version, they liked it! Go read.(Louis Wu 11:25:51 UTC)

Awesome – TTL Demag0gue noticed that Tobias Buckell, the author of the upcoming Halo novel, “The Cole Protocol”, has posted cover art for the book. Interestingly enough, he got it from Amazon!(Louis Wu 21:05:27 UTC)

The latest Double XP weekend playlist went up 45 minutes ago – this week, it’s Grifball Summer League rules! Go get hammered. (Yes, someday, I’ll come up with a different tagline for grifball playlist newsposts.)(Louis Wu 18:43:35 UTC)

GameVee has put their beta ‘Grab’ feature back online; sign in, give the site a Bungie.net saved film URL, and they’ll record a clip for you, watchable on the web! This was up for a while, and then went down for a long time – nice to see it back!(Louis Wu 18:41:04 UTC)

Halo Wars has been demoed a few times this week – so far, all of the demos seem pretty similar to me. The 1UP Show E3 Day 2 Special has another version, if you’ve missed the streaming versions that have shown up so far. (Thanks, Regicide.) Gamespot showed a live stream an hour ago -…

Heh – John Campbell stopped by with a short video showing a pretty amazingly lucky grenade toss… go watch.(Louis Wu 18:22:03 UTC)

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally got the Halo 1 cutscenes for you in HD format, thanks to HaLo2FrEeEk of Clan Infectionist. These were recorded from the PC version, and are available in both WMP9 format and H.264-encoded QuickTime format. We’re starting with the first Pillar of Autumn scenes – depending on…

The last time we checked in with the Halo Corpse Alphabet, it was just getting started – there was exactly one letter. Now it’s four weeks later… and it’s nearly complete. There are three letters remaining – and some additional characters and symbols have been added. Check it out!(Louis Wu 15:56:58 UTC)

Halo0001 X stopped in last night to announce “403” Episode 1, the first installment of a machinima series about a bunch of guys playing Big Team Battle in matchmaking. Personally, I found it to be too long for its content – but it seems to have been generally well-received on our forum. Go judge for…

An article in the Los Angeles Times has some further quotes from Microsoft’s Don Mattrick about the decision to leave Bungie out of the E3 press conference. He argued that Microsoft wanted to prove they had a lineup that could stand on its own without some of its biggest hitters – he pointed out that…

IGN’s Livewire is currently streaming a Halo Wars demo from E3 – if you’re interested, swing by now! Thanks, Urban Reflex.(Louis Wu 19:06:01 UTC)

Bungie’s posted a summary of what happened (well, what didn’t happen) last night – it includes answers to some of the most common questions thrown around on internet message boards in the past 18 hours. Go read. Thanks, BlueNinja.(Louis Wu 18:56:56 UTC)