Gah. Sometimes life just kicks you in the – oh, never mind. HBO was down for a couple of hours this evening, but not because it changed IP addresses. It died because of user error (with me as the user). We got it up and running again – but the IP change has to wait for morning. So there will still be an outage tomorrow, on top of this recent outage. Hopefully, it won’t be a long one. (The Time To Live on the dns records for this site were set to something ridiculously short this morning; in theory, that means that the downtime will be minimized. Some of you, of course, will be on networks that pay no attention to niceties like dns records, and HBO will be down for however long your service provider takes to update its files. Can’t be helped.) Once again, I’d remind all that the HBO forum is on another network entirely, and will NOT be going offline.

Thanks to Ghôlsbane, who pointed out an article at MacGamer, summarizing the day’s events at Apple expo 2002 in Paris. They spoke to Peter Tamte, head of Bold Games and Destineer Studios (the publishers behind the Mac version of Halo).

Peter told us that Halo is meeting every internal schedule and should be released simultaneously for the Mac and the PC in Summer 2003.

This is what he said a month ago, to Inside Mac Games… and 2 months ago, to our own Miguel Chavez. It’s nice when things go as planned!

Strykerwolf, once and for all, proves the veracity of the infamous ‘locked weapons’ story floating around the internet. See his proof here. (Originally posted to our forum.)

We’re a little ambiguous about posting info from the Edge scans leaked this weekend… but this picture was so cool, we decided we couldn’t hold it back. Warbow has taken the new Halo 2 ATV and stuck it out in the American west… wow. You can find it in our Miscellaneous Art section. Update: seems Warbow forgot the shadow on the first version. Grab it again if you downloaded it already – it’s better now. 🙂

Thanks to Oso, who pointed out a trailer from G4 for the upcoming broadcast of the Halo National Championship on G4TV – you can download it in MPEG format (3.8 mb, 36 seconds), or stream it to Windows Media Player. It’ll show you a few of the contestants, and a bit of the set it was all filmed on. The show airs Friday night, September 20, at 11 pm eastern time (8 pm pacific). There’s no word yet on whether the actual show will be available on the web at some point.

I’m getting sort of tired of this… but HBO’s colo host is changing our location, which means our IP address changes. Again. Which means that as of 4 pm EST today, this site will be inaccessible until your local DNS information catches up. Apologies. (The forum will continue to be accessible; it’s not moving.) Update: Obviously, we’re not offline yet. In fact, we don’t know when the move is going to happen. (This is unsettling, to say the least.) I suppose the best we can do is to say that when you can’t reach us, we’ve changed addresses. 🙂

Another desktop image from Chaoz in our Wallpaper section.

Yesterday, Zeinin posted a note on our forum about a movie he was planning to make – about the fall of Reach. He put up a couple of stills, and I figured I’d hold off on a news post until there was a website, or something. However, over the course of the day, he revealed many more shots; read through the entire thread, you’ll find some amazing bits of work. Can’t wait to see the final product!

iBonk has posted a video showing a new, rather intriguing form of Warthog Launching – how high can you make that puppy go? There’s a forum thread here.

Mad Cow dropped off a tweaked b.net screenshot for our Miscellaneous Art collection. (It’s a pretty minor change, but it’s rather well done.)

Dolbex, of Been Mawed (possibly soon to change to a different name), has sent in a pretty scary desktop for our Wallpaper section. (If you like it, drop him some email – there are others.)

The Halo Fan Fiction Project, an attempt to write the Halo story in novel form, has closed down. You can read an explanation by its leader, until it’s taken down… and you can chime in on their forum if you care to. Hopefully, the people involved will find other outlets for their creativity in the Halo community. Thanks to Wonga for the heads-up.

Monday’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• UNSC Long Range Rifle Group, part 4, by Blindside
• Relations, part 1, by Icebraker20
• Taken From A Four Year Old, by Blindside
• Revolution, part 8, by Gruntkiller
• The New Reach Campaigns, part 5, by Gasmask

That’s all for today…

Another desktop from Chaoz in our Wallpaper section…

One of the more enjoyable ‘mini-games’ in Halo multiplayer is Jousting; Warthogs square off, usually on Blood Gulch, and ram each other, head-on. The intention is to knock the opponent out of his hog (and then run him down, of course). Several films have incorporated footage from games like this… but they’ve always left me feeling like something was missing. I thought that perhaps this style of gameplay was better suited to actually PLAYING than watching. Now, however, there’s a film on the scene that shows me that all it takes is timing, a great score, and an eye for theatrical flips – this style can work VERY well on film. Check out Fun With Vehicles (not to be confused with Vehicle Fun, released some time ago), an almost-3-minute, 15 mb QuickTime movie with perfect musical choices and some great camera shots. (If you can mirror this film, please let us know.) Update: Eric Jourdan has added another mirror for this file. (See the mirrors list for a link.) Thanks, Eric!

Just a heads-up – an upstream router is undergoing maintenance this evening; most of bungie.org (excluding HBO, but not its forum) will be offline from roughly midnight to 6 am. There’s nothing wrong, it’s just a hardware upgrade. We apologize for the downtime.

BOLL has created a nice Flash animation showing the cool bumpmapping of the Halo 2 Master Chief. We’ll add it to the Miscellaneous section soon.

Got a great note from Paul Teets today:

I was watching CBS’s football coverage today and they were doing a special on Brian Griese for Denver. To my amazement I heard some interesting background music. “Under Cover of Night” from the Halo Soundtrack!!! Guess Halo is now mainstream. Soon everybody will know how special this game is.

I gotta say… this just tickles me. Marty and crew – you rock!

To the vast numbers of people sending us a direct link to a download directory containing the Edge scans: thanks, but we posted it yesterday. (Check this post.) The directory everyone’s sending us links to is listed at least twice in the thread mentioned in that post – and as we said there, we’re not sure how we feel about Edge’s intellectual property being disseminated so widely when the issue isn’t even on the shelves yet. If you want to see the scans, finding the URL should be pretty easy – but please don’t ask us to help take income out of Edge’s pocket even more blatantly by displaying that URL on our front page. Thanks. (I’m betting that a significant chunk of change has been lost to Edge because of this – there are thousands of issues that WOULD have been bought if the information hadn’t been spread like this. Most of these ‘lost’ copies would ONLY have been bought for the Halo 2 info – so putting that info up now directly impacts Edge’s bottom line.)

Chaoz sent in a new desktop for our Wallpaper section. Take a look…