Yippee – halosn.bungie.org is back online – many, many thanks to Deimosâ„¢ for making this happen! This machine takes a hefty load off HBO prime and halosm… but the most noticeable change is going to be that the Fan Fiction section is back up. In fact, there were 20 pieces waiting in the queue, submitted before the box died last week – here they are now:

• Earth under siege, by Chief17
• Halo 2 Part 2, Cornered, by BlueChief
• Operation: Stingray Ch. 3: –Survival of the Smartest–, by Nick Kang
• Stand Ye Ground!, by Burny
• The Other Threat, by Conrad Lauf
• Vengeance From The Sky, by Conrad Lauf
• Makin’ It Real (Comedy) Part 2 of 2, by CoLd BlooDed
• Attack on some Human Ship (a comedy), by Nick Kang
• Halo: A Comedy 2, by Tom Murphy
• Project Egon – Chapter 1, by Richard Watson
• The Battle For Gu’re’lah, by Conrad Lauf
• Casualties of War Part IV, by Tom Murphy
• Earth Reawakened Part I, by DeathSquadTrooper
• Halo:The Sacrifice, by gr8ness
• The Battle For Ka’ Miah’Lin, by Conrad Lauf
• Lone Sniper, by someone that you dont know
• The Deadly Mist, by MadJackal
• The Trade Off, by Horror
• The Chronicle of Squad Omega: Chapter III, by Dark-NiTe
• Trapped Part Two : The Two Plans, by Daniel Rennerr

Enjoy!

The Wallpaper queue, as well, was way, way behind. I didn’t do any sorting on this; right now, I’m posting the oldest 20 desktops that made our basic guidelines. (I tossed a couple that were simply too basic to warrant addition – sorry folks.) These 20 are now available in the Wallpaper section. Some are quite good. (The queue contains more than 40 remaining – we’ll be doing updates like this every couple of days until they’re all up.)

I’d like to preface this post with a huge thank-you to the folks who have submitted content to us and have waited patiently for it to appear; the past couple of months have been pretty rough in that respect. Today marks the beginning of a turning point, I hope… I’m hoping to have the Miscellaneous Art and Wallpaper queues cleared by this time next week. (I can’t release all the backlog at once; there’s simply too much of it, we couldn’t handle the load.) I was going through the Misc Art queue this morning, and I noticed that while there were dozens of pieces, a few stood out; they were more than modifications of existing screenshots or hastily drawn sketches, they were pieces that showed the care taken to create them, and the love of the game that inspired them. (This is NOT to say that the remaining pieces are a waste of time, or are shoddily done – it’s just that with this big of a pool, I didn’t want the outstanding pieces to be buried.) I’m therefore breaking with tradition and posting what I consider to be the 10 most impressive Miscellaneous Art pieces in the queue, rather than going in chronological order (as we usually do). From this point forward, we’ll revert to our normal pattern… but right now, I wanted to show off these 10 pieces. Enjoy.

Today’s Calvin and Halo explains why mothers should never be allowed on the point team of an invasion force. You can’t have them sending the soldiers to their rooms…

So… way back in February, the Halo Story page mentioned a clue tossed out by Eric Trautmann about stuff he hid in Halo: First Strike. Periodically, over the past 2 and a half months, folks have offered up guesses about what he might have been talking about… and he has invariably answered ‘Cold’. Until now. Exogenesis ran into him at a public gathering, and finagled a bit more information from him… and it was enough for Anton P. Nym to give the first guess that received a ‘Warm’ response from Eric. Way to go, guys! That should be enough for the more rabid fans out there to nail down what Eric was hinting at…

Took a little while, because I’m learning PHP slowly… but the News By Day feature is back; hitting those arrows next to the date will once again let you view older news one day at a time. Apologies for the delay. Next up… Fan Fiction. (I hope.)

Couple of interesting, totally unrelated newsbits over at Battleground: Halo this weekend; I’m finally catching up. They’ve started a Weekly Update for Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod, and the first one is a doozy (lots of cool pictures). They also link to a couple of threads on the Gearbox Forums (this one and this one) containing writeups and pictures from this weekend’s 5th Anniversary Gearbox party. (No real Halo content there, but interesting to put some faces to names…)

One One Se7en asks a very good question today… I’m thinking, someone might have stumbled on the secret behind the Halo 2 delay!

Evilness is occuring on Halo: Resolution – I’d hope that this sort of thing never REALLY happens…

Okay, I’m not 100% positive it’s bug-free… but it SEEMS to work. I’ve recoded the search function that accesses our news database for php; the biggest unknown is the cookie transfer between the main site (halo.bungie.org) and the machine that now handles the search function (nikon.bungie.org). It SHOULD work, in most cases, but it’s quite possible there are exceptions. Nevertheless, it’s orders of magnitude faster, and far more solid, as well; give it a whirl. (The News By Day function that’s been down since Subnova went offline last week should be back up and running, using this new system, in the next day or two.)

MasterJoe points out a small (53k) Flash animation that’s Halo-related. Artwork is decent, but the animation itself… is a bit confusing. Go soon, because it’s a Geocities site; even at 50k, it won’t take long before it’s unviewable.

We’ve updated our Bungie Weekly Update database to include last Friday’s update over at Bungie.net (including the picture which STILL isn’t visible on the original post). This marks Frankie’s second mention of ‘diaper‘… makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Blackstar has written up a nice thank-you to KP and his family, and put a couple of image galleries online, of yesterday’s Knee For All lanfest. I’m sure there’ll be other writeups and pics coming – but this is a good start!

On March 14, Gamespot listed Halo as one of the top ten first person shooters of all time. They allowed readers to vote, as well, and have now put up the Readers Choice version – and Halo made THIS list, too. Thanks to WhiteRaBbit for the heads-up.

75 degrees outside, and it seems like the perfect day to get some older mail cleared up. I really want to apologize to folks who have submitted content in the past few weeks; I’m really, really, REALLY behind on processing it. In late March, Griever sent in a picture (68K) from Evangelion, a manga and anime; he wonders if the Jet Alone, an Eva (a giant, semi-organic robot used to fight Angels), might not have been to some degree an influence on the design of Halo’s Hunter. I gotta say, it DOES look familiar…

So KP’s got a webcam, but the cord’s not long enough to actually reach the room with the action… if there’s overflow, you’ll be able to see it on this page, but otherwise, we’re out of touch. Gotta love preparation…

Okay, that’s it for updates today (at least from the east coast HBO staff contingent) – Miguel, Count Zero and I are joining a dozen others at KP’s Knee For All lanfest, kicking off in about an hour. Ah, the beauty of Xbox carnage…

Oops, missed it… two weeks ago, we posted a note about the possibility that Halo would be pulled from this summer’s CPL Extreme World Championships for lack of attendance. Four days ago, rapture, of cooked Gamers, put up a message from Angel Munoz, president of the CPL, stating that the minimum 32 teams had been signed up, and that the competition was definitely on. (According to the message, registration closed yesterday.) Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for the heads-up on this.

Rampancy.net has used the recent Origins of Halo article on Bungie net to flesh out their Old Engine galleries, and they’ve dug the original Halo Announcement press release out of the Wayback Machine. Check out the details, and catch up on old history!

3Suns pointed out an article at Gamespy that suggests that Halo might be responsible for opening the door in Japan to First Person Shooters (a genre that has traditionally done poorly there). Give it a read!