Bungie.net came back up from its downtime this morning… and you’re gonna like the reason. They were installing their new Forum system – eventually, every chapter will be able to ahve its own forum, but for now, there are just a pair of them, The Underground, and the Septagon. It’s completely custom-built – check it out! (Thanks to Warbow for pointing them out.)

Pack up the lamps, Granny – HBO is moving. We’re setting up new digs on a nice fat pipe, so that folks who’ve had trouble connecting should find that things have improved. (It’s not, unfortunately, fat enough to handle all of the movies we mention… sorry.) We’ll keep both the old and the new sites updated for the next week or so, to make sure nobody gets left behind – with one exception, you shouldn’t even NOTICE the transfer itself. The one exception is Fan Fiction comments. There’s no easy way to keep the two sets nicely synchronized – so some of the old comments might get lost. Just a warning to anyone LEAVING comments. Now is probably a good time to mention that Halo coverage in the near future will be pretty spotty – I’m headed out of town again, and CZ is on a pretty lousy connection. I’m looking into the possibility of pulling Crux out from his self-imposed isolation… but no guarantees. Things will be back to normal next week.

The things people will do in their spare time…

Bungie.net has put up a notice that all Bungie web services will be down for several hours tomorrow, starting at 10:30 AM PDT. (Obviously, you won’t be able to read it THERE after that point, so we’re mentioning it here.) This means a couple of hours of webcam downtime…

Couple of new Fan Fiction stories for you:

• Halo: The True Warrior Part Two, by Mike ‘Halo Lord’ Galazka
• Halo 2: Jupiter, by Chi Zhang

Still playin’ catch-up… Update: Within 7 minutes of posting those two, Shadow turned in his latest chapter of the Rise to honor series. Gotta love it!

Ever wanted to see what the Keyes Loop actually looked like? NthDegree256 modeled it for you. (Also available as a 139K .mov file, if the .avi is hard to see…) Pretty cool!

Want a free Xbox, and a copy of Halo? MyLocalBands.com is giving one away, autographed by Home Town Hero (a ‘postiviely valiant rock ‘n’ roll band‘). You need to visit the contest page, and send the link to all your friends – each friend who visits the page from your link earns you a chance to win. Contest ends on July 31. Thanks to TomeOne for the heads-up.

We’ve updated the Links section a bit – stripped out URLs that no longer lead anywhere (though we didn’t remove seemingly inactive links that actually still pointed to a Halo site), added a site or two… reorganized a bit. There is now a Fan Fiction section, a Movie Mirrors section, and all the known online hacks are listed in the Miscellaneous section. Hope this helps!

Mythica.org still seems to be down – an ominous sign. Stepping to the plate are The Repertory and Project Mjolnir – two sites devoted to Halo movies – and That Weasel Television, another long-time bandwidth donator. Most movies released recently now have multiple mirrors at one or more of these sites. The Movies database has been upgraded to allow searches by movie name, so finding that one film you want to see should be easier now.

Just in time for mythica.org, our biggest movie bandwidth donor, to go down, the Movies Database has been updated – 21 movies created in the past month or so have been added to the database. Unfortunately, many of them are hosted only by the mythica server, so they’re not all available at the moment… but it’s usually a temporary problem that brings the server down. (We hope.) A search by name function will be added in the next day or so. To kick off the new additions, we’ve included a previously unmentioned film – HaloCable – submitted recently by XERO Productions. It’s 5:40 long, in .wmv format, and contains footage from Ian Haddock’s Rocket Dance, as well as original footage – all set to new music. Take a look!

Mr Bill Jr V, a fan-fiction submitter in the past, has created a Halo movie entirely in Bryce. It’s 3:02 long, 13 megs big, and in QuickTime 5 format. Vector40, who is hosting the movie over at The Repertory, calls it ‘meditative.’ Seems to me it would have worked very nicely with a Tangerine Dream soundtrack…

Sunday’s Fan Fiction (really, the last several days):

• The Lost Away Man, by redblooded
• Taker of Life, Giver of Death, part 3, by Ian Barnes
• The Brethren of Saturn, part 5, by Lynnada
• Rise To Honor, part 8, by Shadow
• The Aftermath, part 4, by Gasmask

Catchin’ up slowly…

Cowboy Leo recently dropped off a new Logo enhancement for us – we’ve added it to our Logos page.

A couple of Halo reviews have surfaced recently… JJBok spotted one over at Gamer Chickz, and Blue’s News noted one at Game Basement. We’ve added both to our Reviews Database.

Brian Josselyn, aka Blackstar, has put together a couple of movies for your viewing pleasure. The first is a trick with relatively far-reaching implications – what are the limits on projectile flight? (This has been added to the Tricks queue, as well.) You can find some interesting discussion about this movie on our forum. The second movie is a highlights reel of a lanfest held right here at HBO HQ last weekend – we called it ‘Freedom to Kill’, and there was quite a lot of that. Brian’s movie combines halo footage with some live voice action from the game, and some inspiring music choices – it weighs in at 30 megs (QT5 format), so be careful with it! (If demand is high, we’ll rustle up some mirrors for this puppy.)

A few days ago, Sno mentioned his Ultimate Tiporium on our forum. It’s not only Halo material, but there is a Halo page there. Some of the tips use techniques that Vidmasters might scorn… but sometimes, it’s whatever keeps you alive! Take a look.

Overshadowed just a little bit by the official MS PR announcement about PC Halo was an update to the Screenshot Captions section of Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. There are 4 new photos… and some of ’em just make you want to break in to Bungie Headquarters and steal that dev kit. First heads-up props to MasterOmok, who sent us email about it.

Whoa… back. Sort of. First off, I’d like to thank Count Zero for the backup this week – he kept the site running while I was incommunicado (unexpectedly so – who’da thunk that I wouldn’t be able to find something faster than a 19200 connection in Bakersfield… or even any time to log in with it?). Figures that I’d miss the biggest news of the last few months, too, doesn’t it? Secondly, in response to a suggestion by B-Sharp, news headlines will now appear in the news article they are associated with – to make recognition easier in following days. Finally, I’ll be slowly (over the course of the day) adding news items for things that turned up this week but might not have made the main news page – but there are still quite a number of family activities planned for the day, and I have no idea how much time I’m going to have here. Might run through tomorrow, even. It’s good to be home!

OK folks, this is the big one: Real details on the computer version of Halo. Zaruthustran first broke the story on the forum, and then the press release hit Blue’s News.

The important parts:

• PC version: Gearbox Software (Half-Life: Opposing Forces).
• Macintosh version: Westlake Interactive (Mac ports of Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, and more).
• Publisher: Destineer
• Release date: “Summer 2003” for the PC, just “2003” for the Mac.

There’s one more critical line in there: “Additional information regarding game content, features and enhancements will be announced at a later date”.

Well, there you have it. Not much more I can say here (except maybe, to some people, “We told you so”).

Thanks once again to Team Overkill, who provided copies of the Halo-related videos on the July OXM DVD – the top 3 Top Plays were Halo stunts, and they made a movie called ‘Dreams of Master Chief‘ (a spoof on Warthog Jumping, with stunt footage by Randy Glass himself). The films are 2.2 mb and 21 mb, respectively, and in QuickTime 5 format. We needed to wait until the issue was off the shelves before we could post these.