Taken a little time… but the HBO-GameDaemons Halo PC dedicated server is back online, with its original mapcycle. (For the past 2 days, it’s been running a few stock maps while we tried to iron out some difficulties.) There’ll be more complete changes coming tomorrow, most likely (an addition of several new games, and a tweaking of the cycle itself), but right now, it’s online and ready for action! Huge thanks to the GameDaemons staff for getting this going again.

A quick reminder: The Great Halo Scavenger Hunt ends in roughly 3 hours (6 pm UTC, which is 1 pm EST or 10 am PST). The solution (and the names of the winners) will be posted later this afternoon – but after closing time, even if you complete the hunt, you won’t be able to submit your entry. There are still plenty of prizes to win, so if you’re close, don’t give up!

The Apple Store is listing some system requirements for Mac Halo (you’ll have to search for the item; there’s no way I know of to link directly to it), and they’re relatively steep: 700 MHz G4, 256/512 MB RAM, Radeon 8500 or GeForce 2 MX with 32 MB VRAM. These aren’t final requirements, as far as I know – Al Schilling just said yesterday (to IMG) that they hadn’t been pinned down yet – but it’s a starting point. Thanks to Toxicoman, via email, and Howie, on our forum, for noticing.

Mark Hawk dropped in to our forum to announce a trailer for Halo Ice Fields, an upcoming movie in the style of Red vs Blue. You can find the trailer on the Halo Ice Fields website. It weighs in at 40 mb, in MPEG format.

Electronic Gaming Monthly and MTV are teaming up to bring you the Ultimate Video Game Countdown – and they’re soliciting votes from the public now. They’re looking for the best game of the new millenium (past 3 years) – and Halo is in the running. Read this page for details (and a link to the poll). Thanks to SketchFactor for getting the word out.

Today’s Guest One One Se7en is by Rush1312, and it looks at the hazards of hacking.

(GT)Juggler put up another video over at Halo GT – it’s called ‘Meet The Team’, and it introduces you to Halo GT, while showing some pretty fun multiplay stuff. It’s about 31 mb, in QuickTime format. You can find it in their Media section.

Inside Mac Games has interviewed Al Schilling, product manager at Macsoft, and not surprisingly, Halo gets touched upon.

IMG: Do you have any system requirements for Halo yet?

Schilling: Not yet but we’re going to have to print boxes very soon.

The boxes… the boxes! All I can say is, they better not hold up delivery… Thanks to MadScientist for pointing it out.

There’s an article on ‘Hot-Seat Gaming‘ over at Xbox.com – and one of the suggested events is a Maw run. Check it out. Thanks to Rendar for the heads-up.

Hmm. There was a Halo Reclaimer paintball scenario game in Colorado last month – and the writeup before the event includes a long-winded summary of (the beginning of) Halo’s plot. Weirdness. Thanks to Donovan for the heads-up.

Bungie’s very own Marty O’Donnell has posted on his Chapter page that an announcement is coming soon about a large Marty Army get-together in honor of Halo’s 2 year anniversary. More to come on Bungie.net’s front page!

Those of you that live near the Maestro will have quite an opportunity to pump him for info on Halo 2 (the man never breaks though) as well as touch his golden mane! And then raid his fridge! And then flop a grenade on him as he runs from your base! (OK, I’ll stop now)

UPDATE: Oops, I missed the link to the actual event page. November 15, at 4PM is when the craziness starts! Update 2: SketchFactor pointed out that the B.net clock is a little screwy; the festivities actually begin at 1 pm PST.

Hehe – Finn calls it a drop in the bucket… but it looks pretty big to me. Check out the Halo Story page for the latest speculation.

Sometimes, because of the long lead times on strips, One One Se7en is a bit off-topic; its relevance decreased from the moment in which it was written. Today’s doesn’t fit that mold at all. Timing couldn’t be MORE perfect, I don’t think.

The sensitive side of MC? Halo: Resolution isn’t afraid to bare the truth.

Quick status update on the HBO-GameDaemons server, for those confused by recent events… GD is moving us from the initial (pretty haphazard due to its early implementation) server setup we had with them to a more standard install. There were a few glitches in the process (some of which are still to be resolved). All custom gametypes are offline until someone sorts things out in the morning. Hang tight; they’re not gone, just in limbo for a bit. In the meantime, most of those gametypes are available on the HBO-Subnova server. (The GameDaemons server is running, it’s just that it only has the few standard gametypes we’d configured in the rotation.) We’ll post a small update when things are straightened out.

Thanks to Blade, who’s mirrored yesterday’s release of ‘Lethal Rage 2’ at Team Ice.

TT Gamer has put up a very nice Guide to Tweaking Halo; lots of good information. Thanks to Djof for pointing it out.

Forgot to post Fan Fiction yesterday, so today’s update is 22 stories big:

• The Death of Ensign Lovell, by Walker
• Halo Poetry 101: Killing Stuff, by Brian Alexandrowicz
• Plasma Burns and Bullet Shells- chapter 8(finale), by Myth
• Halo 2 Rise of a Hero Chapter 2, by CovieKilla
• Halo Trilogy Side Story: The Grunt Interrogation (comedy), by Alpha Lance
• The fall of new york:the clearing, by hunter_elite
• Threat Assassin #1- The Prolouge, by Lone Jackal
• Aurora Squadron- Part 1, by RogueFox
• Halo 2: Reawakening of Halo (story1), by Christopher Matthew Gonzalez
• Halo: The Beckoning, by Darby Janssen
• My Life as a Grunt, by Alpha Lance
• The Final War: Chapter Three: Getting real… Part One: The landing, by Awacar
• The Last Assault [H&R 17], by Jillybean
• The Interlude [H&R Finale], by Jillybean
• The March of the N00bs – Part 1, by Wado
• Chapter Eight: Rise of the Phoenix, by Blue Jaguar
• Old Style, by Horror
• Attack on ERISTOCK Part 14: Only the Strong, by xitWOUND117
• The Ride to Dagon IV, by duckfoot
• Battle for the Norah: Part Nine, by Sterfrye36
• Orange Peanuts – A Halo Comedy, by Dispraiser
• Derailed Part 11, by Dispraiser

Quick note to the world at large: The Fan Fiction submission form is NOT an acceptable way to contact the administration of this site. If you need to talk to us, use email. If you do not want us to know your email address, we probably don’t need to hear what you have to say. Thanks!

Gah. Chris Macias uploaded a picture of his Halloween costume a couple of days ago… we didn’t get to it. Better late than never! He went as an Xbox (240K), and the costume was good enough that he received a copy of Halo from the Microsoft employee that lived at one of the houses he visited. Not too shabby!

Yesterday’s big news in the Xbox world was that Microsoft has decided to go with IBM’s PowerPC chip for the next iteration of its console. (This isn’t Halo news, so we didn’t bother reporting it.) As Miguel mentioned on our forum, one of the big hurdles to be overcome is the thorny issue of how to keep backward compatibility with Xbox games after this architecture change. PowerPC chips have been used in Macs for almost 10 years now, and Microsoft recently purchased Connectix, a company that produced Virtual PC, a Windows emulator written for PowerPC architecture, so some (like this Macworld UK article) are drawing parallels to other former Mac developers that have helped transform the Xbox into a successful product. (Yeah, we mean Bungie, with Halo. See? It’s Halo-related, now.) Thanks to Lophan for the heads-up.