Calvin and Halo asks the question… are tigers part of the Covenant?

22 pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today:

• Operation: Halo Part 1, by Chaos Elite
• Unknown, by Allisia
• Behind Enemy Lines, by ScorpionTankRider
• Halo: The Scythe of Death Part Nine, by LordofDestruction
• The Eye of the Storm: Prologue, by LordofDestruction
• You cannot help but wonder, by MasterCD
• Scope (Chapter 3, The Day Hell Froze Over), by The Silver Spartan
• The Blood Gulch Gig (Part 1), by Jillybean
• Halo-strike, by someone that you dont know
• The Breaking Point, by CoLd BlooDed
• The Iron Hands of the Prophets (Part 6): Turning Back, by MadJackal
• Identfying Covenant (Humorous style), by MasterCD
• Insanity, by Frightener
• When Will It End?, by Sentinel
• Prodigal Son: Part 4, by Scott Devary
• Prodigal Son: Part 5, by Scott Devary
• In Chaos and Despair: The UNSC Council, by Maraxus6
• Unintended Consequences – or – A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Ham, by Flu
• Neverland: Home to Sparta, by SOS.Odin
• Gary Young: A Lucky One?, by SOS.Odin
• Halo Heaven: Chapter 2: The Story of the Surviving Spartan IIs, by Justin Harrison, Halo Heaven
• The Other Reclaimer; Part 1; Chapter 1: Mobuto and ‘Aemasee, by Rebel Shuttle

Several good ones, but Jillybean’s comedy was a standout for me.

Battleground: Halo has some new content today – Viper’s posted a new mailbag (someone’s planning to write to Bungie and tell ’em about their dumb halo battleground dumb site), and Rams has posted a rant about how unreasonable it is that 4 of the first 11 Weekly Updates were posted here at HBO. (I guess I should stop sending Frankie chocolate now…)

To all the people pointing out that BOLL’s Warthog Launch game is now on Ebaumsworld, or AlbinoBlackSheep, or any of several dozen other sites – we know, thanks. HBO served over a million copies of the game to viewers in the first two and a half weeks it was online – and we’re still serving more than 100,000 copies a week. It was monstrous before those sites picked it up, and at least when it was here, BOLL was getting credit for its creation. It’s unfortunate that these sites feel that it’s acceptable to simply hijack a Flash game without asking the creator for permission – but I guess that’s the internet today.

Updates on a couple of films; Eclarap writes to point out that Lord of the Ring is now mirrored at Halo-Game, in France, and Verdafolio dropped a note in our forum that Elevation has changed hosting (we’ve updated the movie database for this one). If there’s time today, I’ll add the new movies from last week to the database, as well.

tLove found a profile of Chris Butcher, AI programmer for Bungie, over at The International Game Developers Association. It contains information about how Chris got into the industry, and some advice he has for those coming after him. it’s not clear when this was posted, but The Wayback Machine has a copy that dates back to March 12, 2002, so it’s at least 2 years old. (Halo 2 isn’t even mentioned.) Not a bad read!

We’ve received a bunch of links in the past couple of weeks – bad on us for not announcing them. Apologies to the sites involved.

General Halo Sites

• HaloNova.com
• Planet Zergim
• Halofiles.com

Clan Sites

• Halo OutKastz
• teamQU!K
• Silent Canary Tactical Squad
• Helljumpers
• %XF Clan

Personal sites

• Jatt Productions – Mods, Videos, Comics
• Running Riot Productions (coming soon)
• Akba.info (Art, videos, forum)

(No, none of these are on our Links page yet – neither are any of the many dozen OTHER links we’ve posted in our news in the past several months. For that, too, I apologize. One of these days, we’ll database that section, and add all the ones we’re missing (that are still active, of course).)

One One Se7en, once again, plays the prescient game; in the face of new server problems, it’s particularly poignant.

Halo: Resolution shifts away from the Nightmare Armor substory…

Battleground: Halo points out a Grudgematch on the front page of PlanetAVP; ‘Halo vs The Exosuit’. (I guess they probably mean ‘MJOLNIR armor vs The Exosuit’ – it’s sort of silly to pit an entire game against a single item from a different game.) Whatever they meant, I find it amusing that as of right now, Halo is beating AVP on its own site (53% of 726 votes).

Looks like Aquaduct 2 (the mac Xbox Online client) is coming along; the first phase of beta testing took place this weekend. You could read about it right now on Postpose’s front page… if it were up. Because it’s not, you can see the relevant news item at Rampancy.net, which is where I learned of it.

Wow. A new 2d sidescroller looks to be in the works; Halo: Blood Covenant, from an Italian team. The site is in Italian, but you can get a decent sense for what it’s looking like so far by following the screens link. _ib noticed this over at Battleground: Halo. Coolness!

We’re tight on bandwidth, but that doesn’t mean we’re OUT of bandwidth. Thanks to Mythica.org (which is having minor connection problems at the moment) and HaloNational (nof, you rock!), we have a pair of mirrors for you for The Lord of the Ring, a movie made by Mark Gursoy, and turned in by Ben Roth. It’s just under 3 minutes long, 372×279, 11.2 mb in QuickTime format. It’s a very nice trailer – nice timing, nice choices for characters, and classy composition. Ben says Mark did this to learn Premiere – I’d say I’d love to see his more polished work, because this shows real promise!

DocOctavius has posted a rigging tutorial for gmax over at Yayap.com; if you’re interested in learning how to rig a character, this is worth a read!

Before the emails start pouring in… files.bungie.org has been turned off for the next 4 days. We hit our bandwidth limit, and rather than incur a several-hundred-dollar overage fee, I’ve decided to simply take it down until April 1. Almost all the files available there are also available at mythica.org, and even the ones that aren’t will be back on Thursday… so please be patient. Thanks!

Blackstar put up images yesterday of a new poster he received… I don’t know that I’d have the wallspace for this puppy, but it IS gorgeous.

BOLL points out that HHHT 1.40 has been released; The Helpful Halo Hacking Tool has a few bug fixes, and some nice new features. There are also some (untested) spawn patches for download. See what you can find!

If you try and visit the Nightmare Armor website, and fail… don’t worry, they’re not dead, just over their bandwidth limit. They’ll be back soon, with the name of the winner of the Helmet Raffle. Thanks to Webshift for the clarification.

There’s another collection of HUDless Halo shots posted to our forum that’s worth a look; MarkHawk, of the Ice Fields team, has posted 26 pictures capturing some pretty intense scenes. (Spoiler warning, if you’re keeping track of that stuff.)

As is normally the case, Red vs Blue released a new episode on Friday for Sponsors; Episode 28 focuses on Lopez and his HORRIBLE Spanish. Someone should give that dude the Dummies Guide, or something… For non-paying visitors, the episode should be available tomorrow.