CYBRFRK points out the blog of Major Nelson, Director of Programming for Xbox Live – yesterday, he took some pics of a new statue that appeared in the lobby of his building. I supposed that means it’s okay for me to put up a pair of pics I took myself of this statue – at E3. (They’re 1600×1200, so you get a slightly bigger view.) Pic 1 is 243K, pic 2 is 297K. This puppy stands 4 or 5 feet tall… and is GORGEOUS. Check it out!

It’s Friday, so there’s a Halo Babies update… the new strip looks at the kindness of strangers (or of Bungie level designers, depending on your viewpoint), and Gruntsbane has posted a fantastic wallpaper based on some artwork he submitted to us a little bit ago. Go grab it!

Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, points out the next installment in Sparky’s Guides – this one is devoted to King of the Hill. Once again, it’s a solid read; there are general tips for the gametype, and then specific pointers for each multiplayer level. Check it out!

Wow – 3 days, 22 Fan Fiction pieces. That’s more than 7 a day… you should go read some.

Couple of tournaments for you, both sides of the Atlantic: first up, there’s a tourney in Tewksbury, MA, on July 10, with a $5 admission and a top prize of a $1350 Dye DM4 paintgun. (Thanks, Pepper4099.) Second, in London, on August 21, there’s the Elite Gaming Championships, with a £25 entrance fee and top prizes of £100 gift vouchers. (Thanks, [PU55]dHoLpLayEr.)

Calvin and Halo steps back from comedy for some philosophy today.

Gamindustry.biz has a story about how this Christmas is going to be rough on gaming companies, because of the huge amount of competition. Halo 2 is one of the few titles listed as likely being immune to the loss of market share. Makes you wonder why some of these companies don’t hold off a couple of months (or release in September)…

Wow – SwampFox has managed to convert Singleplayer to Multiplayer (in this case, the Library) – on XBOX. If you have a modded box, go grab this now. (If you don’t, and want to know HOW to mod your box – go there now, anyway. HBO is not the site you want for Xbox moddding info.) Thanks to Darksage for the heads-up.

Weirdness. Carlo Zottman has discovered a German site that claims to be in negotiations for a Halo movie. Boll Kino-Beteiligungs-GmbH & Co. KG (no relation whatsoever to our resident Flash maniac) has a prospectus on their download page (everything is in German – no English anywhere) that lists, on page 29, movie licenses for existing game properties that are ‘currently in negotiation’ – and Halo is on the list. If you poke around the site, you’ll find links to existing movies they’ve done… and I must say I’m not sure I’d be happy seeing them do a Halo movie… but this is one rumor that simply won’t go away.

It seems that some folks took our ‘Midnight July 1 2004’ deadline on the Going Nowhere Fast contest to mean LAST night at midnight. Sorry for any confusion this caused. As long as the entry reaches us before the END of July 1, we’ll accept it. (Two large videotapes came in yesterday, and haven’t been digitized yet – if you don’t see your times up on the leaderboard, realize we’re getting a FLOOD of last-minute content, and might be a bit behind posting stuff.)

Nice find by munkeypantsman… in one of the new screens released yesterday, there’s a cowering grunt covering his face. What nobody else noticed (or at least nobody else MENTIONED) was that this grunt is NOT wearing his rebreather apparatus… but clearly, the shot was taken in an oxygen atmosphere (there’s a marine on the LAAG with no helmet or external breathing equipment). Can Grunts breathe oxygen (at least for a little while)… or was this guy doomed even WITHOUT the MC shooting at him?

Hehe – TeamXbox is running a feature called ‘Top Ten Xbox Babes‘… and Halo’s Cortana makes number 9. Not bad for a hologram! Thanks, daedalus.

Wow. Halo Boy has posted an entire collection of HUDless screenshots – and they’re very, very good. The entire set is hosted at Photobucket; if the bandwidth runs out because of this news post, drop us a line, we’ll see what we can do about mirroring the files.

Saint mentions that the Library has been updated with a bunch of new entries and screens. If you haven’t looked over this treasure-trove of Halo information, you really should – it’s chock-full of goodies.

w00t! Nesnora, a mod on the Red vs Blue forum and a spectacular artist, is creating 50 first-edition prints of her gorgeous Blood Gulch artwork (which was added to our Wallpaper section a couple of weeks ago). They will be signed and matted, with a pricetag of $30 (if purchased before July 6) or $50 with a brushed steel or stained wood frame. These rock – get one for your wall today! (Thanks to the heads-up from Anim8rJB, who rightly thought it might be of interest to our readers…) Remember – there are only 50 in this first run!

As expected, Bungie has released a great collection of new renders, new screenshots, a gorgeous new print art piece by Eddie Smith, and a great background piece on the technology behind the new shots. Go read, download, and otherwise revel in the new content!

Whoa. RunningRiot managed to capture some pretty amazing footage in his living room…

Kikizo.com has put up a massive collection of screens – it’s all content that’s been seen in recent print articles, but it’s in digital form. Very nice stuff. Thanks to Zero Flaw for noticing. Update: Higher-resolution versions of some of the renders can also be found at Eurogamer.net (thanks, R.net). You know, of course, that the appearance of all this content on various websites means we’ll be seeing higher-res versions from Bungie themselves in the forseeable future…

It’s been a couple of months since the last batch… but XLNC is back with 10 new HUDless screenshots. These were taken using the detachable camera in Halo CE – which, unfortunately, only works when you’re alone. (It’s not networkable.)

Before anyone goes overboard… 1up.com has recently overhauled their website, and one of the things that changed was the listed release date for Halo 2. (They currently have it listed as December 15, 2004.) Normally, silly release dates on random websites are ignored by us… but 1up is a pretty big site (they’re the web presence for several major gaming magazines (Electronic Gaming Monthly, Computer Gaming World, Xbox Nation), and this listed date is newly changed, which might lend credence to the date even among people who normally would scoff. Not to worry – Bungie has confirmed (as of about 5 minutes ago) that the date has NOT changed – November 9th is still the day of reckoning.