Ouch! Xbox.com has put up a ‘Halo 2 Trailer Countdown’ – and it’s set at 21 days. Ugh. (Unfortunately, even though the link it goes to is broken, Bungie has confirmed that the date is correct.) Think of the interim as a reflective period… (Matt Gray gets the nod for the first heads-up.)

Vinny Mac has submitted ‘Marines’, a pretty cool Flash file – it’s just over a meg, and it’s really nicely done. You can call it a music video, I guess… low-tech, but some laugh-out-loud moments. Check it out!

It’s happening again. 🙁 Recently we had two movies submitted to us (different submitters) containing interesting gameplay clips put to music. They’re very different – one focuses on a Master Chief who can’t drive, is in .wmv format, is almost 9 minutes long, and weighs in at 14 megs, the other focuses on what happens when plasma grenades and warthogs get together, is in .mpeg format, is almost 5 minutes long, and weighs in at almost 50 megs – but they have the same problem – they need a home, and neither one meets our Movie Posting Guidelines. The Halo 2 trailer is on the horizon, some other very promising pieces are coming soon, and some of our biggest bandwidth donors are facing troubles of their own… bandwidth is really, really tight. 🙁 If anyone wants to help out with either of the files mentioned above, let us know – we’ll send ’em off to you, and post a link (and our grateful thanks). If anyone has a large, unused bandwidth pipe that they are just aching to fill-drop us a line, we’ll set up a movie mirror, and thousands of Halo fans will love you.

Team Overkill has written up a description (with pictures) of their experience at the first round of the Halo National Tournament. There’s some interesting stuff in this thread on our forum, as well.

For those of you who just can’t wait to actually SEE the Halo 2 trailer, Gamers.com has put up a transcript of it. Thanks to andrew katz for the heads-up.

It’s not a flood, just a trickle… but hey, they’re getting out. 3 more entries in the Gameplay Tricks section – a glitch, a new Blood Gulch technique, and a demonstration of class. Check ’em out!

Lion has created yet ANOTHER Halo mini-game – this time it’s a Space Invaders type. You’re the MC, shooting Banshees. It’s a little funky – all the Banshees got trapped up in the top left corner for me, so just holding down the fire button racked up the points until I got bored… but hey, whaddaya want for free? PC-only, just under 2 megs, zipped. We’ll set up a section somewhere soon.

Yeroen, over at Bungie.net, points out that even though the Rules page for the Halo National Championship seems to have disappeared from the EBGames website, you can find them online here, courtesy of iGames.

Three new Desktop images for you today:

• Chiefs, by DannoHung (I’m using this one right now)
• Bild1, by Ken Schreiber
• H2BackVI, by Paul Teets

Go visit our Wallpapers section for these.

Griffon has created a couple of morphing animations to show the difference between the Halo MC and the Halo 2 MC. You can find MPEG versions on his page here (the version with a background is 288K, the version matted on white is 256K), or you can grab local .mov versions (morphinchief.mov is 261K, mmwhite.mov is 296K). Go Go Gadget Assault Rifle!

Not everyone can tell yet… but HBO is back online, after a short outage yesterday, at a new home. Hopefully, DNS will propagate fast enough that by the time the Halo 2 trailer is released, folks can find us. Moral of the story – buy your bandwidth from nice people.

[BFoH]Sepultura writes to point out a clan page for the german clan ‘Battle Federation of Halo‘. We’ve added them to our Links page.

Once upon a time, a big star in the Halo fan firmament was The Core, which morphed into Rampancy.net. Time went by, and R.net slipped off the radar screen – dns woes, loss of maintainers to the Bungie developer stable, and maintainer change of focus all contributed. Narcogen has resurrected the site, however, and it now sports a Halo 2 forum, an emerging Halo 2 FAQ, and more. Stop by and say hello!

Apparently, Xbox Gamers has managed to secure an interview with the Halo 2 development team – they’re currently asking for questions. If there’s anything you must know, head on over! (Thanks to Aginor for the heads-up.) Update: you might want to check Matt’s own words on the subject before you send your questions in…

Clearing out the rest of the weekend Fan Fiction queue:

• Shadows of Archon, part 3 and part 4, by Wado
• Rise To Honor, part 15, by Shadow
• Cry for a Hero, part 2, by el_halo_diablo
• The Discovery, part 7, by strategyfreak

Read ’em now, before we’re offline…

I said I’d do it – so I’m doing it. Too much mail about this – too many forum posts. Last Thursday, Halo 2 was announced – and at 6:15 am PDT, Bungie released a set of desktop images. One of them (‘The Mark VI’) contained some very-hard-to-read text spread around the image. About an hour later, lexicus began to decipher it – the final tidbits were posted an hour after that. The full transcription can be found in THIS post – put up after one-too-many threads on the subject. They’re still coming (as is the email), though.. hence this news post. Bottom line: The text is known, please don’t send us any more modified images showing it to us. Thanks!

Halo 2 secrets revealed… and why you shouldn’t worry. All in our Miscellaneous Art section.

And the Fan Music collection grows… SilverBrin has submitted a new piece for your listening pleasure. He writes:

      I just uploaded a file called “Mahdrigalo.mp3”. It’s a piece I wrote the day I heard Halo 2 was announced. It is also in honor of Marty O’Donnell’s timeless music. It is exciting to think he is now working on new stuff for the new game!

      Anyway, I twist around the Halo and The Siege of Madrigal themes into my own interpretation and then combine them at the end. It is entirely Midi and does not use any audio from Marty’s music. Everything was rendered using cheap midi software (hence the poor quality). I still think the dramatic interpretation may entertain…but you guys can be the judges. </blockquote>

Just as Halo wallpaper starts with Bungie-created artwork and presents the submitter’s vision, this piece starts with Marty’s Halo theme and ‘Siege of Madrigal’ piece, and presents SilverBrin’s vision. We’ve upped it to Mythica.org – it’s 5.3 mb. Enjoy!

The Psyjnir Complex claims to have a source on the inside – the inside of WHAT, we don’t know – with some information about the future of the Halo franchise. Or maybe it’s the local McDonald’s franchise. I can never tell. Check ’em out anyway.

Sometimes, you just can’t catch a break. Last month, HBO moved to new digs – bigger pipe, better server, yadda, yadda, yadda. This morning, I received a phone call – the owner of the colocation company that HOSTED that new server had skipped town, and the datacenter was threatening to cut power for non-payment of bills. The sad part is, I’d done my homework – these guys came relatively highly recommended. 🙁 Someone has stepped in to clean up the mess – so HBO won’t be going down permanently… but there WILL be a day’s outage this weekend (timing unknown at this point) to move servers to another facility nearby. Our forum runs on a different machine (and a different pipe), and isn’t going anywhere, so if, by some weird fluke, something happens to keep the site down for longer than we thought, information will be provided there. Apologies for the inconvenience.