This came in a few days ago – I managed to miss it. 🙁 Sparks writes that a new website, Sector.7, has come online. It’s not fully fleshed out yet, but there’s more content all the time. They plan to move to a purchased domain (and away from the banners/popups) as soon as they get more visitors. Take a look!

I know, it’s been building up for a few days. Sorry about that. There are 10 (count ’em, 10) new desktops in the Wallpaper section today – check ’em out. Fan Fiction coming sometime later, I hope.

For those folks who couldn’t get the DivX-encoded .avi or the QuickTime version of the HaloHackinFun movie to work, Cybrfrk has re-encoded in WMP 9 format. It’s quite a bit smaller, too – 9.5 mb. You can grab it at his site, or snag a copy from Mythica. Anyone else wanting to mirror this, we’re thrilled – drop us a line with a link and we’ll add you to the mirror list!

Almost forgot: Eclarap, of the French site Halo-Game, wrote this last night about the Halo mod app:

By the way, we were able to make it work on our PAL, but only by downloading a NTSC version : so it doesn’t normally work here – might be useful to warn all Europeans from HBO in your news.

Worth knowing, if you’re using a PAL box…

5 new entries in the Miscellaneous Art section for you today – some pretty fun stuff. Take a look!

DovBer (pronunciation – “the bear dove into the river”) Friedman dropped off a 2 sec. loop animation of a spinning 3d model he created of a potential halo2 logo/title. We reduced the size a tad – it’s still a full megabyte, but that’s better than 2… you’ll find it in our Miscellaneous section.

Apologies to all the people who noticed Halo on the tv show ‘The Dead Zone’ Sunday night – it’s been sort of busy here lately. (I’m pretty sure Dzejms was first.) Basically, one of the characters was playing the game – the comment made was ‘He’s trying to save the universe.’ Nice to see Halo getting prime time TV placement!

Matt Soell asks, is that a roll of nickels in my pocket, or am I just glad to see you? Wait… I think that might be a bit off. In any case, Bungie has a new contest running – go read all the details at Bungie.net. You’ve got three and a half weeks to come up with what’s in Matt’s pants…

lol – When I saw the headline from Bungie.net (‘Happy (Belated) Warthog Day!‘), I thought, in my Halo-saturated mind, that Bungie was paying tribute to the one-year anniversary of Randy Glass’ Warthog Jump. Silly me – I forgot there’s a world outside these walls! And every year on February 2, Punxsutawney Phil goes looking for his shadow… this year, in honor of the little ‘hog, Bungie has posted a warthog-related comic, starring some of our favorite Halo characters. Check it out!

Dozi, the guy who created the Hacked film, stopped back into our forum to answer a few questions about modding possibilities. It’s a really interesting read.

Okay, there are more mirrors coming soon, but here’s the starting lineup for the Hacking Halo video – visit the mirror page for all the links we have. As more mirrors come online, we’ll add them to the page. (If you’re interested in mirroring this file, PLEASE, let us know.) See yesterday’s news if this post makes you go ‘huh?’ – I’ve got some kids to take care of.

Desperate call for movie mirrors! Dozi has just uploaded a 20 mb film showing a few of the things you can do with a modded Xbox and the cheat hack mentioned this morning. The problem is… we don’t have the bandwidth to serve it up to all who want it! It’s going to take a bit of time to re-encode it anyway, but I thought I’d get a head-start on the bandwidth issue. If you think you can support a mirror link for this movie, please – send mail immediately. As soon as we have the best version we can get, we’ll get a copy out to you. Once the mirrors have uploaded the files, we’ll make them live. Again – mirror sites only right now. Thanks!

Thanks to Miguel Chavez, for the heads-up on the activities of Team HBO at the Halo Winter Season Regional Championship held this weekend. As he mentions in his post, King Games has put up a page devoted to the event – here’s a shot of Team HBO kicking some butt in round 1. (They’re the team on the left; the head in a white shirt is Miguel, and the four players, left to right, are ninja on fire, neo, konrad9 (I could have those two confused – hard to tell from behind 🙂 ), and KP.) And for a bit of humor, check out the screen names of Krypt, the blue team in the final game.

BIGwooly, of the Seventh Column chapter HALOID, writes to let us know about a bit of internal news that might be interesting to non-HALOID members. For the past year, they’ve been having a monthly lan party dubbed ‘FRAGFEST’. (You can see some of the gameplay in a movie released last spring.) At each fest, they award points to the players ranked first, second and third – and at the 1,000 point milestone, they induct the player as a HALOID Legend. FRAGFEST XII took place last weekend… and not one, but TWO players were inducted. Congrats to Mad Cow and BIGwooly for their Mad Halo Skillz!

It shouldn’t require forum members to remind me… but sometimes it does. The Story page was updated this weekend; check it out for new speculation and ideas!

Whoa. Didn’t think it would happen… but apparently, someone’s reverse-engineered enough of Halo to provide some cheats. Read this thread for details. (Understand that in order to play with this, you’ll need to do all sorts of things that will void your warranty, ensure that you’ll never use this Xbox for XBL, and so on.) Waiting for pics…

Recently, we mentioned an interview at the Australian Xbox.com. poena.dare pointed out that not only was this interview ALSO available on the US Xbox.com… but until recently, ANOTHER interview, with Bernie Freidin (a Bungie programmer), was ALSO available. For some reason, that one is now offline, but luckily, p.d saved a copy. We’ve reformatted it a bit (removing the javascript, the flash, and the worst, but by no means all, the bad html), and made it available in close to its original form, here at HBO. Check it out!

It’s been 3 days since I could process Fan Fiction, and the flood continues. I’m going to institute a new policy, for my own sanity: if you submit a piece, and yell about its not being posted before I manage to get it up, I’m tossing it out, and we won’t accept any more fiction from you. ALL content creators need to remember that you’re not paying ANYTHING to have your work displayed here for the world to see, and sometimes real life gets in the way of updating. I’m tired of being berated for not getting your artwork/fiction/movie posted within 30 minutes of when it hits our inbox. That said, here’s the current Fiction collection.

• Freelance, part 1 and part 2, and Flash Flood, by Bloodcider
• Sarges Platoon, part 4, by Bobby Lucas
• Halo Zero Part 4, by nicholas
• Under the sergeant’s cap, part 5, by Traumatised Marine
• Earth: A Halo Tale, part 3, by Nike
• Battletype MPAV, part 1/2, by el_halo_diablo
• ROUND-THINGIE, part 3, by Matt Anderson
• Halo Battle Cry, parts 1-4, by Daniel Johnson
• Rebirth – Tras’Lok/Weilan; Gallant Claw, by KnightmareWolf/Shadow/Archangel’s Blade/Spartan415
• Dark Halo: Chronicles of Fright, part 2, by Wado
• 5 Way War Part V and 6 Way War sneak preview, by Demosthenes

Go read ’em – I’m sure there’ll be another dozen by tomorrow. (Sometimes I wish fiction writers would actually take the time to PROOFREAD their work; it seems that some of you are so eager to get your fiction posted that you can’t take the few minutes it would take to run it through a spellchecker… it’s rather discouraging to kill an entire Sunday morning formatting pieces as rough as some of these are.)

Rob Farquhar points out his personal review of Halo – while containing a few minor mistakes (he mentions that Warthogs are the only vehicle available in multiplayer, for example), it’s a pretty thorough and well-written piece. I’d disagree (strongly) with his opinion that the repetitiveness of several levels really detracts from the overall quality (despite the fact that there are many circular rooms, AotCR is STILL one of my favorite levels), but again, that’s opinion, not fact, and all reviewers are entitled to their own. Take a look if you’d like to read an exhaustive overview of the game!

Early this morning, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry for a scheduled 9:16 EST landing, within four days of the 17th anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Challenger. With it were lost its crew of seven. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them.