Halo in your local pub? Narcogen, of Rampancy.net, found an interesting article describing a new marketing deal between Microsoft and Anheuser-Busch which will get Xboxes into bars. Promotional schwag, including Xboxes, will be given away during the initial phase. Nice!

In the midst of the forum madness of the last couple of days, Lorraine Reyes-McLees dropped by with an update on Eagan (misspelled the last time we mentioned him) – sounds like everyone’s doing well! (We want sketches, Lorraine!)

Strykerwolf created a pretty cool image for Halo-ween… we’ve shamelessly stolen it for use here on this page. (You can see the original on our forum.) Strykerwolf – if this thievery is not acceptable, we’ll yank it… but it was just too cool not to use.

Lots of Fan Fiction today…

• Unexpected Surprises, part 3, by JediKnight114
• Fafnir, part 7, by KnightmareWolf
• Shadows of Archon II, part 25, by Wado
• The Shadows, part 10, by Glenny
• Cooking Covies with Neco Divad, by Neco Divad
• The Time Vortex: Intro, by Arthur Wellesly
• Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 3, by Gruntkiller

See what you can read (and comment on) before the next wave.

Whoa. Can’t remember the last time we did this, but hey, exigent circumstances, and all… Travis Cossel, quickly making a name for himself in the Halo Video scene, has put together a promo film for the iGames Halo Winter Season – you can grab a copy (6.3 mb, 1:22 long, QT 5 format) over at our Mythica mirror space, or from the Psyjnir.com hotline server, or from HBO’s mac.com overflow space. (This, too, we’d be happy to offer mirrors for… if you’ve got the space, let us know.)

On October 25th, jackass the movie opened in theaters. Within three days, we’d received two submissions parodying this film. Our limited bandwidth resources required that we choose one… Kevin Kranzky has created a 6:45, 32.5 mb film that looks at stupid Halo stunts. Some of it’s hilarious, some of it is kind of silly… but then, I’d guess that can be said about the MTv film, as well, right? It’s currently being hosted by Mythica.org and the Psynjir.com hotline server, but it’s a big’un, so if you’ve got space, and would like to help out, let us know! Update: CYBRFRK has put a copy up at Cybrfrk’n. Thanks! Update 2: GJ has supplied another mirror, courtesy of Fantazm. Woohoo! (This one’s in Europe.) Full mirror list coming at some point.

iGames has posted the tournament rules for the Halo Winter Season; if you’re interested in competing in this national event (the first qualifiers are this weekend), check out this page! Thanks to Team Overkill for the heads-up.

Tuesday’s Fan Fiction:

• Liberation, part 8, by Hoju
• Indoctrination, by Havok

Have at ’em…

SilverBrin****, of The Psyjnir Complex, has created another piece of Halo fan music. In SB’s words:

Think Halo meets Oni… If the Master Chief and Konoko were out clubbing, you might hear this….then again mb not not :(.

It’s interesting. I have trouble hearing the Halo influences in places… but you should check it out for yourself! Just under 3 megs, in MP3 format. And yes, this means I’m gonna get off my butt and set up a Fan Music section to this site… Soonâ„¢.

Game Nation has interviewed Xbox Canada’s marketing manager, Ryan Mugford. There are some interesting numbers in there; Canada has the highest percentage of Xbox gamers in the world (30.1% of their home console market), the highest percentage of Halo purchasers, and a ridiculously high percentage of people with access to broadband (80% of Xbox owners have it). Now, except for the silliness about Halo coming to the Gameboy Advance (I must say, a large chunk of Mugford’s credibility went out the window when I read that portion of the interview), there’s some good info in there; don’t mind the uncertainty in the Halo 2 release dates, pay attention to the Xbox Live info (and the Canadian stats in general). Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi for the heads-up.

Hojjen drops off a big, bright desktop for our Wallpaper section. Take a look…

Bizarre pair of Miscellaneous Art submissions tonight. (For what it’s worth, the creator of the first one has nothing to do with me, and I probably wouldn’t have posted the second one if I hadn’t been so amused by goings-on on the forum this evening.)

Better late than never… today’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• He’s Baaaaaack! Chapter 1, by Killer_Fairy
• Outlaw, Chapter 4, by Chris Cassani
• The Hephaestus Equation I, by Dirty Commie

Apparently, the comments abuse is getting worse. A forum thread has been started to get votes from people interested (one way or the other) in the continued existence of the Comments section – be sure to chime in soon.

Weekend Fan Fiction:

• Halo 2: Return of Death,, part 4, by Lord Dagon
• ‘GET OUT!’, by Neile Pederson
• Justification, part 2, by Rixor

A word of advice to fan fic writers: If you decide to use a font that 95% of your readers do not have access to (like, say, Tengwar Sindarin), be sure to submit any text in that font in GRAPHIC format (take a screenshot, save as a gif). This is the first and last time I’m going to be downloading fonts to do this for writers; in the future, any text that comes in in a totally random font will be displayed in the default font (which will, I promise, make it look really stupid).

We received another movie from Jiberish Halo Productions. This one’s called ‘Fear and Wonder, and it’s a 3:21 long, 13.8 mb gameplay film. There are some great moments in this film (the dismount/mount at 0:40 is fantastic), but I’d like to make something clear… this movie (and more than a dozen like it that have been submitted by various people in the past couple of weeks) is the kind of movie that we wrote the Posting Guidelines for in the first place. It’s pretty cool to watch, it’s well made, for the most part… but it really doesn’t add anything original to the corpus of Halo movies. 🙁 I’m letting this one through, for a variety of reasons, but I want to make it clear that from this point on, movies like this will NOT be hosted by us (or more accurately, by those that supply our bandwidth) any more. Please don’t ask, because I hate saying no. Likely, I’ll just point you to this news post. [Movie sidenote: Someone uploaded a movie called ‘Red Star’s Halo Secrets’. There was a readme attached… but there was NO CONTACT INFORMATION in the readme. The movie is not watchable (either the upload failed midway, or it uses some strange codec I don’t have access to), but I have no way of contacting the creator to ask for another copy, or more information. If you’re reading this and you know who created this movie, please let us know.]

Pair of desktops for you today. (One was submitted probably as a logo enhancement… but it’s wallpaper-sized, so I’m putting it here.) Check our Wallpaper section.

We’ve added the three map views from Bungie’s recent Team Tournament Strategy Guide to our Screenshots database.

Griffon writes to point out that Halo Command Central (a site that has existed in many guises over the years) is live again, in its prettiest format yet, over at Forerunners.org. There’s not much content yet (Just a Weapons page and a Vehicles page, it seems)… but it’s open, and content will fill out quickly, he promises. Go check it out!

Light Fan Fiction offering today – one story; Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 2, by Gruntkiller. Go take a look!

Unreal Halo, and some mods on an early bit of concept art… all in our Miscellaneous Art collection.