Author: Louis Wu

Thanks to Jenkz, who sent word that Haloplayers is back up, and on a faster pipe than before. If you get a ‘Forbidden’ message, the new address hasn’t propagated to your nameserver… give it some more time. Welcome back, guys!

Eldar-Colonel writes to say that Halo HQ has gotten some new forums. Check ’em out!

Matt’s weekly Halo Update went to Battleground Halo this week… and it’s full of progress reports. A dev kit upgrade, controller issues, particle effects, cool new map editor features… and waves! We want to see waves (though we don’t want to be close to Joe Staten when we see them…) Go read the details over…

Ouch. Halo makes the “Worst Moments of 2000” according to the March 2001 issue of PC Gamer. Amongst mentions of 3dfx’s demise and Daikatana, they consider “It’s Xbox first for Halo” to be one of the worst gaming moments of the year. Not a list you really want to be on… thanks to Lophan for…

The Junkyard is having a design competition – come up with the winning artwork, and your creation can grace their t-shirts! Stop by and take a look. (They do Halo news too, you know.)

Thanks to all the people who sent in notes about Haloplayers’ moving woes – we just got a note from Jenkz, as well:we’re in the process of getting the site backup as i speak, but as we dont have 100% control over the new machine its taking time. once we find the root mysql pass…

Huh? Stopping by Haloplayers made me wonder if I needed to change my dosages… It’s been replaced with a page called ‘Joyful Systems – online gardening for healthy systems and happy humans’ based in Santa Monica, CA. Uh oh… broken DNS or something more sinister?

Whew. Forum regular Razz has submitted 5 new desktop images to our Wallpaper page (a couple are based on existing wallpapers, others are variations on submissions he’s made previously), and a 2.1 MB movie, showing a 500-frame animation of a Halo-like landscape. (You’ll need the divx decoder to watch this.) Take a look! (Razz is…

Wow. Microsoft demoed the Xbox at Michigan State University this evening, and we got not one, but two reports on what was said! There are some interesting tidbits in there… you should read both reports. And thanks to ironhorse and Fred Sharp for sending ’em in!

Hmm… info from Jaime Griesemer, Halo designer – you’ll have to make your own sense of it. Q: Which game does Halo most represent when it comes to modifications (ease of use, how much they change the game etc.)? A: Well, since the tag system is similar, Myth II, with some restrictions since we don’t…

The Bungie Store is open! Seems not to work for Mac users (and God help those who call the 888 number listed – I’m on hold as I write this, while the rep tries to find out if they actually SELL Oni – update; he thinks they don’t, I’m going back on hold)… but hey!…

“The fun part in terms of the music playback in the game is that it won’t play the same way twice.”With this, Marty O’Donnell had me hooked. He’s a sucker for a free beer, though, so I eventually got more of the story from him:So it’s a little something I’ve been working on for years…

Thanks go out to Chris Cox, who sends in a chapter of a new work, The Prisoner, for our Fan Fiction section. He leaves ya hangin… go read it! (And remember, if you like it, follow the “more by this author” link to read the rest of his work!)

We were gonna let this pass, but we started getting mail about it – Ding’s comment yesterday, on the possibility of a simultaneous US-Europe Xbox release, was off the mark. As we noted last month, Microsoft has officially stated that there WON’T be a simultaneous release… Ding had just forgotten to take his medicine. It…

Clarification from Matt – at the Bungie Fanfest, he was quoted as sayingThe next time you see Halo, it’ll be playable.This immediately led to a rumor that a demo would be released, which Matt quickly shot down… but it wasn’t until today that someone pinned him down as to what he DID mean. According to…

The Halo SETI Marines continue to crunch along at their reduced pace, hampered by the higher processing demands of the latest SETI client. DarthFlounder, however, seems to be unaffected, continuing the 200+ units/week output that has garnered la Crunch Honneur for so many weeks. Iden, too, is shooting up the charts, leaping past 74 competitors…

Nice spotting by Forensic, who noticed a new job listing on Bungie’s Jobs page:3D Environment Artist (Redmond)Mold majestic mountains, carve cavernous canyons, form fantastic forests… and then coat them in the blood of your enemies! The natural environments you create with the Halo team will serve as the backdrop for sophiticated combat and an epic…

Well, the Giants got creamed, so that was good… but there was no Halo commercial after all during the Superbowl. Ah, well. So it goes.

Halo commercials aren’t COMPLETELY ruled out yet – Massa, from Halonetwork.de, writes:I read over at gamestar.de that Paramount is going to show a trailer for their upcoming Tomb Raider movie. I was quite sure that they weren’t on the list and so I checked back at superbowl.adcritic.com – I was right, they aren’t.So… if the…

Thanks to Allenthar, who noticed that cortana.org is gone… or going… or something. Also, the text for the error page now matches the title of the front page .gif… which makes one wonder a little bit….all things change. We all knew it would come to this…Come to what? Don’t ask us…