Looks like the Sydney Roosters, on track for the National Rugby League finals in Australia, have pulled Halo’s Master Chief on board for some coaching help. Read all the details on the Australian Xbox.com site. Thanks to David the Great for pointing this out – and to the Aussies in this forum thread, who noticed the Nightmare Armor-clad giant on Rove Live recently. Looks like those suits are popping up all over the world!

Looks like Dr. Nick found that Canada.com article as well, but he went one step further, and found THIS article on the Canadian contingent on the same site. It’s a good read, even if they DO call Anim8rJB and bentllama the ‘Canimators’… and it looks like Sep7imus has taken issue with a couple of other… um, interesting phrase choices.

Nice image by opticalneuralinterface over at DeviantArt – someone else who shares Tina Leyk’s twin passions for Halo and the Xenomorphs. A browse through his gallery turns up this Halo 2 image (and lots of other fun stuff). Thanks to Mr. Cynical for pointing it out.

We’ve got another 10 desktops for you today in the Wallpaper Section – and a quick note. Some of the subsections of our site are hosted on a machine that’s having more and more trouble keeping up with the traffic; we’re doing everything we can to migrate away from this. In the meantime, though, if you get an error message when you load a page that reads ‘The database failed to initialize’ – be aware this is (mostly) transient – refreshing a few times should get you past it. I’ve moved the Wallpaper section off that machine for now; I’m not sure its current home will be any better, but given the greatly added traffic in both Wallpaper and Misc Art sections these days, anything that helps has got to be good.

TalkXbox was another site with a reporter at last weekend’s PAX event in Seattle – you can read their writeup, and view lots and lots of pics, on their website. Thanks, Jman.

Canada.com, the web version of Canada’s National Post, has a two-page article on Halo 2, and contains what I think is the first legitimate webview of the new Covenant beam rifle (as well as a not-very-clear pic of the Scorpion tank). It’s a pretty good read…

Normally, I wouldn’t put this on the front page… but it’s the best way of making sure everyone who needs to see this will. The next HBO Junkies lanfest has been scheduled for October 2, 2004; details (and instructions that EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO ATTEND MUST FOLLOW) can be found on the HBO Junkie’s Events page at b.net. I’m already overwhelmed with how many people want to come… so don’t sign up unless this is really something you can make it to. (Even if you DO sign up, please understand that I’m gonna have to turn away at least half the folks who sign up; nothing’s guaranteed. I wish I had a bigger house… but I don’t.)

Equally as surely, we’re working our way through the Miscellaneous Art backlog – another ten pieces have been posted today. We’re still in July, as far as submissions go… but that won’t be for much longer.

Dolbex, synide, and Jason of MLG put together an 8-minute long retrospective of the MLG-Seattle Halo 2 experience; you’ve already seen the in-game footage, this will give you some flavor of the event itself. 26.9 mb, QuickTime format; we’ve put copies up on both files2.bungie.org and mythica.org.

No matter how hard you try, sometimes info gets out before you mean for it to. Take One One Se7en, for example.

Another day, another 10 desktop images for the Wallpaper Section. Slowly but surely…

Nice. Wideload Games, the brainchild of Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian and the first (and only?) company with plans to release a game using the Halo engine, has finalized a publishing deal with Aspyr Media, a Mac publishing house. (This doesn’t mean Wideload’s first offering will be Mac-only… in fact, it’ll be released on Mac, PC, and Xbox.) There’s very little info about the game itself in the article, other than some comments about it not being just like Halo. We’ll be keeping our ears to the ground about this one – the Halo engine is a pretty solid asset, it’ll be fun to see how else it can be used. Thanks, Elite Marine and Gundulf.

Frankie showed up at the PAX event (the Penny Arcade blowout last weekend) with 12 Xboxes loaded with Halo 2 in hand… and seems to have had a good time. Of sorts. Check out the pictures and entertaining commentary over at Bungie.net. (He states, near the end, that this is probably the last chance the public will have to play this build. I think he must mean ‘in the US’, because unless something really stupendous is happening at the ExCeL center in London next weekend, they’ll be playing it again at the Gamestars event there.)

Didn’t think I was going to get to it today… but sometimes you get lucky. The next of about 8 backlogged batches of Miscellaneous Art (ten items per batch) is now up for grabs – so go grab. Cool sketches today.

Boxer points out that Episode 5 of Adventures in Disaster has been posted at akba.net. Careful where you step.

About a million years ago, or maybe it was just back in July, drelnathi sent along a collection of 18 Halo 2 figures, nicely separated from their backgrounds and saved as layered Photoshop documents. They were designed to help people make cool wallpapers – which is why he called it the Halo 2 Wallpaper Kit. Of course, the first upload was corrupt, and the second one got lost in the crush of new files… so it’s taken until now to make this package available. It’s rather large (32 mb, zipped), so if you don’t have Photoshop (or an application that can read layered photoshop documents), don’t bother downloading it. Hopefully, folks can use these to make cleaner desktops for the community! Go grab it at files2.bungie.org.

John Kamphus found an old cigar box in his attic, and added some flavor (14k). Sarge would love him…

Subnova has launched the Halo FAN – a Fansite Advertising Network. If you run a Halo fansite with banner ads, joining this network will give your site exposure across the Halo fansite continuum, as well as providing you with a professionally-managed backend for your advertising particulars. Visit the info page for more details, and information on how you can benefit from this.

MuchMusic.com got a chance to play the Zanzibar build at X04 in Toronto a couple of weeks ago – and they, too, have written up their impressions. Check ’em out. Thanks, Bored_dude.