Covenant has put together a Halo 2 map idea in 3D Studio Max; looks like it’d be fun to play! (I don’t see any good reason why this couldn’t be made for the PC version of Halo next summer…)

For folks who have trouble with Windows Media files (you know who you are), Bryan Bayley has kindly submitted a QuickTime version of the Hoedown video. (Any encoding problems can be blamed on me… I made it a bit smaller than its original 40 megs.) You’ll find the 14.3 mb file at mythica.org. Hopefully, it won’t take me weeks to get this into the Movie database… Update: Both versions of this movie are mirrored on Pez’s ftp server. Thanks, Pez!

For all the folks who’ve complained over the last year or so about how difficult it is to find information on the Halo Story site… it now has a basic search function. Works a lot like the search function on the main news page. (Funny, that.) Hopefully, it’ll ease your pain. Please don’t use it to abuse mnemesis and Finn… they’re twitchy enough as it is.

Tuesday’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• Lunar 4 Campaigns, by Dispraiser
• Halo: The Final Fight, part 3, by Daniel Luiken
• Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 6, by Gruntkiller
• Shadows of Archon II, part 30, by Wado
• Wilkins, part 1, by Phat Bob
• This is Suicide, part 3, by Neile Pederson

To warn you – Lunar 4 Campaigns is rather large.

ThetaDot sent in a rendering of the MC’s helmet. He never finished the rest of the body (or, indeed, the helmet), but what’s there is pretty nice! Check it out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned an effort to list the top 50 Seventh Column chapters (one per state) in the US. A couple of days ago, a story went up on Bungie.net that the effort had been finished… and now emildux has posted some more details to our forum. Beyond the top 50 chapters, there are all sorts of stats… see where you fit!

Bryan and Ross have created another gameplay movie – it’s in the vein of ‘Rocket Dance’, and it’s great. (These guys never heard of HBO before they finished the movie…) It’s 3:50 long, 10.6 mb big, and in .wmv format (yeah, yeah). You can find a copy on their own server, or a mirrored copy on mythica.org. If you guys find it as fun as I do, we’ll probably need more mirrors. (I wouldn’t mind a hi-res QuickTime version, either, but that’s just me…) Watch this, and see why you can STILL make a gameplay movie based in Blood Gulch and not have it be the same old thing!

Hefty update for the Halo Story page this evening… and more exciting, it will soon be sporting a search function! For now, check out the latest speculation on all things Halo, and add your own two bits!

As you may or may not have noticed, the news search function (accessible at the top of this page) is now a bit more flexible. Searches now default to exact matches – if you type ‘Fall of Reach’ into the box, you’re looking for that phrase. If you don’t want an exact match, you have the option of altering the search type right from here. As always, problem reports are appreciated.

pete_the_duck is working on an interesting project. Without promising anything, let me say that if all goes according to plan, you might see more of this sort of stuff soon…

It was a pretty quiet weekend, as far as Fan Fiction goes; we received a comedic entry from Gasmask (which should have gone up days ago), and two stories that didn’t meet our length requirements… guess everyone was recovering from the tryptophan in their turkey.

What if Halo 2 used Pelicans in multiplayer? And what if they had cannons? Eric Redmond speculates in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Dinky, from HaloJuggaloProductions, sends word of a small (1 mb) video clip showing a pretty nice midair rocket shot. (400% health probably helps; usually, when you get a grenade stuck to your leg, you’re dead, not just flying. 🙂 ) It’s 24 seconds long; the fun stuff starts about halfway through. WMV format.

Browsing the Battleground: Halo forums, I ran across a mention of a new Halo 2 preview at bluegamers.com. There’s nothing really new in it (most of the info seems to have come from the EGM preview last month), and there’s some interesting stuff that might be a little too strongly worded (EGM says ‘the team is toying with the idea’ of detonator mines, but the article suggests they’re in)… but hey, it’s a preview!

bikeman704 went back to his old Halo stuff (built for Half-Life) and whipped up another pair of images; check ’em out here. Pretty slick!

Game Girl Advance has posted an article called ‘Halo: Original Game, or Sequel?‘ While we strongly disagree with the conclusions drawn in the article (we – the staff of HBO, not just me), I’m quite pleased they were able to find the info they needed so easily. (The screenshot of Keyes was taken from a pre-release movie put out by Gamespot in October, 2001.) Check it out!

Whoa – someone got tired of waiting for Halo action figures! Check this little guy out. (Thanks to Physalis for the heads-up.)

According to Hedgemony, Halo is pushing Xbox sales in Australia STILL, more than a year after release. (Okay, it’s only been out for 8 months Down Under… but you know what I mean.) For more details and speculation, check his forum post!

The 2003 Game Developers Conference is coming up soon (March 4-8, just 4 months away), and there are already at least three Bungie talks scheduled:

• Marty O’Donnell will be part of a 6-person panel deciding Does Melody Matter?
• Jaime Griesemer, Tim Longo, and Randy Smith (of Ion Storm) will look at level design On All Levels
• Marty, Jaime, and Mat Noguchi will discuss Halo: Development Evolved

(There’s another session listed, but it seems to be a duplicate of the last one.) Sounds like there might be some good stuff to hear!

Recently, someone going by the name of ArakniZ has been dropping movies off in our Uploads directory. They’re in WMP9 format, so we can’t watch them. (There is no player for WMP9 for Macs, and none of the front-page HBO staffers has a PC.) Normally, we’d email this information… but ArakniZ hasn’t given us an email address. We cannot post what we cannot watch; anyone who wants a movie posted by us needs to put it in a format we can see. (And we’d really, really, REALLY like email addresses we can contact you at, so that we don’t have to waste valuable front-page real estate sending personal messages… you don’t want it posted, that’s fine, but we’d like to be able to contact you about your work.) I’ve added this information to the Movies page, as well. All that said, we DO have a new vid for you to watch; Calvin has dropped off a short piece analyzing what makes a movie worth watching. (Please don’t take it too seriously.) It’s in QuickTime format, is just under 2 minutes long, and weighs in at 6.4 mb. We’ve put a copy up at Mythica.org (which had another terabyte month for the Halo cause – thanks, Brian!).