Back in July, we posted a video by Warbow, showing a jump across the broken bridge underground in AotCR, without explosives. He didn’t quite make it to the other side (well, he did, but not a place he could actually leave from). synide recently submitted a vid showing this jump… but making it all the way across. Yes, he used a plasma grenade, but he did it with s7yle, and for that, we give him props. One day, we’ll even add this to the Tricks section. (It’s true – one day we’ll reopen that section in all its glory. Hopefully, before Halo 2 is released.) Update: please – stop writing in that Warbow wasn’t ‘stuck’ on that pipe. I’m sorry now for my wording. Read this forum post for more details. Thanks.

Hehe – Dark Helmet found a real-life Warthog (made by Peugeot) on the Xbox.com forums. It’s pretty slick-looking! (Okay, it’ll probably cost too much to make Warthog Jousting feasible… but it’s still a nice dream.)

Props to Aginor, for finding a pretty interesting presentation by Adrian Perez, Gameplay and Graphics Programmer for Bungie, who talked for MSImpact, a Microsoft-sponsored student organization at CMU, about some of the deficiencies of Halo: CE, and what Bungie is doing to make Halo 2 better. It’s a fascinating read. Head over to Unlimited Lives to check it out!

poena.dare continues his staff-stalking ways and turns up some interesting information from Brannon Boren’s online journal about Brannon’s Halo-related activities recently. Check out Bungie Sightings for the details!

Another review of Halo: The Flood has surfaced, this time on Subnova.

Nine stories for the Fan Fiction section:

• Just Getting Started Chapter Six, by James Kinsella
• Halo: Captain Keyes Story Part 3, by monitor101
• The Assult on the Control Room: Archangels squad part III, by AlphaBravo343
• OSIRIS XIII 01: SHADOWS OF THE SWORD, by TheRedFaction
• A New Breed Part 1: All Hell Chapters 1 and 2, by GhostMouth Zach
• Into the Fray–Part 3 of Souls of War, by CJ Champion
• Project Shadow Spartan: Prologue, by Shadow Spartan and Arinoth Koby
• The Entar Chronicles Part 2, by Locke
• PART2: THE DEADLY WAR CHAPTERS 3 & 4, by GhostMouth Zach

Off to a water show…

Once again, we’re falling behind in the art submissions; there might be more later today, if time permits, but as a start, here are three desktop images for our Wallpaper section.

Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews points out that the Junkyard has put up a fan-written review of Halo: The Flood; go check it out!

I completely forgot to post this yesterday – but it’s hilarious, and you HAVE to go watch it. Back in September, the guys who ran Drunkgamers.com started a project called ‘Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles’. It generated a lot of interest, at the time… but then the project dropped off the radar screens, and drunkgamers dropped offline. Until this week. They’ve come back at a new location – redvsblue.com – and have some brand-new content for you. There is an intro for the series (ranging in size from a 5.7 mb 360×240 QuickTime version to a 17 mb 720×480 DivX version), plus ‘Episode 1: Why are we here?’ (16 – 40 megs, depending on version). If you’re offended by cursing, this might not be for you… but I found it laugh-out-loud funny. If bandwidth gets tight, we’re happy to mirror these… so let us and the RedvsBlue team know, so that we can coordinate new links. They’re planning on doing 3 a month, if they can keep up – releases will be on Fridays.

Stories in the Fan Fiction section for the day – an even seven:

• A Foul Mood, by Dirty Commie
• Halo: 11th Strategic Interceptor Wing: First Engagement, by LordofDestruction
• Just Getting Started Chapter Five, by James Kinsella
• Flight of the Thunderbird, by Tommarrow and LordofDestruction
• Storming the Fortress—Part II of Souls of War, by CJ Champion
• End Game: Chapter One, by Anthony Coronado
• A Fateful Stand, by Ultra Sonic 007

To read, to read…

A couple of weeks ago, we put up a news article about an origami Master Chief project available from playmore.com. Later that day, Geeoff put up shots of his finished product (including a custom-added AR). We haven’t heard from anyone else… until today, when DocOctavius (in a transparent?but ultimately doomed-to-failure?bid to flood our front page) threw up his own copies. Check ’em out!

poena.dare is working on a strategy game called ‘Ringwor‘, based on Halo. He’s currently soliciting feedback on the rules; check out what’s up already, and see if you can contribute!

Whoa – thanks to Ramius, who pointed out a post on Gearbox Software’s forum in which Dave Mertz of Gearbox confirms that Halo PC currently has screenshot capability. That will certainly make documentation easier!

The MC with a Peace pendant? Now that’s just wrong. Update: DocOctavius points out that it’s not a peace sign, it’s a Mercedes emblem. (And that’s better, somehow? No, no… that’s still wrong.)

CNNmoney has an article on the potential problems Microsoft is facing this November… when hundreds of thousands of Xbox Live subscribers come up for renewal, and the hook MS was hoping would bring them all back for another year (Halo 2) will still be a few months off. It’s an interesting read, with some fun speculation about how this will end up being GOOD for fans… but this particular line stood out (in relation to games that might ‘fill in’ for Halo/Halo 2 and keep people subscribed):

“Counter-Strike’s good,” said Mike Wallace of UBS Warburg, “but it’s not Halo.”

I find that to be an astounding quote, given what Counter-Strike has done to the genre of online gameplaying in the last few years. Thanks to Noah “migraineboy” Brimhall for the heads-up.

Thanks to strato99l, who pointed out an April 1 story that we missed. Xbox Evolved has an ‘interview’ with Alex Seropian, in which he discloses that Halo 2 will be multiplatform, with versions for both the Playstation 2 and Gamecube to follow the Xbox version. The biggest mistake here is using Seropian as the interviewee… true Bungie fans remember that he left Bungie last summer to spend more time with his family. A fun read, anyway!

Thanks to Benny, who grabbed and scanned a text-rich article from last month’s Atomic Magazine, in Australia. You’ll find it in our Press Scans section.

Two clarifications about older issues… back in early March, Mr. Fuzzles discovered that meleeing a multiplayer opponent in a very specific spot (the right shin – the foot won’t do, the hip won’t do, the left side won’t do) results in an instant death. This seemed too specific to me to be accidental; I suggested it might be an easter egg, of sorts. Well, according to Bungie, it’s not…

Everyone agrees the instant-death-foot-melee thing is a bug rather than a feature, but no one knows (or is willing to say) whose fault it is. Given the team’s fondness for identifying and mocking the perpetrators of WAC, I’m inclined to believe they don’t actually know.

So why does it happen? Good question.

One thing Michael and Butcher both said is that the attacker’s angle on the foot must be so sharp that the engine thinks he’s attacking from behind.

Okay, one ‘egg’ down, one to go. A few days ago, Finn suggested that if you trigger the marines to begin shooting at you, they’ll continue to attack for a fixed amount of time before forgiving you… and that fixed time was 77 seconds. Again, this seemed too good to NOT be planned. Unfortunately, again, I was wrong.

The time is different on every skill level; Heroic, for example, is 60 seconds, and Legendary is 120. But it could be even longer depending on how long a sentence they speak when they first turn on you and whether you’re in earshot when your Traitor Timer runs out. 77 seconds is not hard-coded in the game.

So there you have it – two eggs, cracked and hard-boiled on the griddle of my delusions. Luckily, we still have the Megg left.

In much the same way that poena.dare is keeping track of Bungie employees through the Bungie Staff Tracker at Bungie Sightings, Cybrfrk has begun to put faces and real-world environments on the names you read about every so often. Check out his ‘Faces of Bungie WebCam‘ page for some cool candids!

About a month ago, we received a movie from Scott McCallister, called ‘Bodies of Halo’. Timing is pretty good. We completely forgot to post it, though. So here it is, now. It originally came in as a WMV file – 17.2 mb, 3:24 long. We converted it to a QuickTime MOV as well – 15 mb. (The WMV is slightly better quality, though neither one is particularly crisp.) This movie has spoilers in it, for anyone saving themselves for the PC version of Halo. Hosting, as usual, is being handled by Mythica.org – and as usual, we’ve put copies at the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server. (And if you’d like to mirror it for us, simply grab a copy and send us the link.) There should be some other good stuff in the pipeline, as well…