Whoa – nice design! Haloplayers, one of the old guard Halo sites, lost its domain name a little while back… but they’ve taken a new one – RealHaloplayers.com – and are back and better than ever! (If you can’t see ’em yet, the DNS changes haven’t propagated – be patient.) Classy new design, a serious focus on the multiplayer community… these guys are ready to rock. Check ’em out!

It’s nowhere near as finished as I’d like… but it’s functional, and it’s MUCH more finished than the old version. For those people looking for Halo Movies, we’d like to announce our newly-overhauled Halo Movies Section. More features will be coming soon (sorting, searching, and so on) – but for now, hopefully you’ll find an up-to-date, organized list of Halo movies to be useful. There are lots of new things – many movies have been converted to different formats, to make them more accessible (usually that means smaller) – and several movies that have been missing for ages have now been found. Browse away!

A rather well-documented entry has been added to the Gameplay Tricks section – there is now quite a bit of documentation on getting through the locked door on Silent Cartographer. In addition, there are a pair of bonus movies – both are from xbill; one shows how to get through that door in a jeep without explosives or beating, and the other shows some entertaining cutscene manipulation. Check it all out!

Fan Fiction offering – lighter than usual:

• Halo (in a nutshell), by Jenova
• ODST Saga, Chapter 3 , by Robo42786
• The Renegade Marines, part 13, by Shadow

Don’t forget that script!

A new magazine has hit the streets – ThePerfectCore lets us know about it in our forum. (You’ll find the cover in our Miscellaneous Art section.)

This showed up in our inbox yesterday. We think it fell off the produce truck in Hollywood. Or something.

As noted by MSN on our forum, and Firfin via email, Microsoft has decided to drop the price of the Xbox outside the US – new prices (as of April 26) will be €299/£199/A$399 in Europe/UK/Australia, respectively. Makes you wish you’d waited, huh? Update: Veebs points out that Microsoft is giving everyone who bought an Xbox BEFORE April 26 two free games and a free controller – so it’s all good. (except, of course, for those of us in the US, who STILL have to pay $299 US per xbox…)

Microsoft’s Japanese Xbox site has a new Halo trailer (Windows Media Player format, High Bandwidth only). Nothing new for seasoned Halo movie watchers but some nice gameplay nevertheless. Warning: it may contain a spoiler for those who haven’t played Halo. Pax.

Apologies for the slow news service – major connectivity problems yesterday has led to quite a bit of cleanup today – not much time for Halo. However, this is big news: According to this MacWorld.uk article, a UK company has announced a DirectX solution for the Macintosh – which should make the porting of games (potentially even Halo, though maybe the timing is off) to the Mac a whole lot easier. Thanks to Miguel Chavez for the heads-up on our forum. Woohoo!

Three new Halo reviews, thanks to Blues News – StonedGamers.com (who didn’t summarize, so we’ve left them out of the Reviews Database, though they loved it), Ausbox.net (they loved it), and Gamers Xtreme (they loved it). Running tally: 115 reviews (plus 2 unranked), average 94.9%.

Quick update on the eBayed Halo shirt mentioned yesterday: It’s up to $41 right now, and we’re still 2 and a half days from the end of the auction! PCDestroyer says, “Bungie must not want to make money hand over fist…” Heh. (These shirts will likely be half that price, or less, when the Bungie Store finally reopens.)

Today’s Fan Fiction installment consists of new chapters to existing series:

• Aftermath, part 5, by Alex Cross
• The Hell Of War, part 6, by Jaywhit10
• The Renegade Marines, part 12, by Shadow

That empties the ff queue… for probably about 15 minutes.

Rather an odd size for a desktop image… but that’s what he’s calling it. 🙂 Germain Couët has created another mural image – this time of a battlescene during the day, in the snow. You’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.

Team Overkill has created a pair of images based on the designs on the multiplayer flags in Halo – you can see the originals in this screenshot, and find TO’s representations in our Miscellaneous Art section.

This came in yesterday – but yesterday was insane. (Heck, the whole WEEK’s been insane…) Mark Mendenhall, the guy behind Hurricane Halo, put together a little warning video, called ‘If Halo Were Sponsored by Ford…’ It’s been crunched down to a puny 3.5 mb, so I’ve tossed it up into mythica.org’s nearly unlimited fountain of bandwidth – if anyone wants to mirror it, we’d be happy to announce it. Sure to bring a smile to your face… unless you own Ford stock. Update: Alan Wu sends word that he’s mirrored the film, along with a re-encoded version in .wmv format (1.7 mb), at Project MJOLNIR.

The current Fan Fiction crop:

• Ode of Ends, by Jehkoh
• Halo: Mercy, Chapter 1, by ssj9000chilango
• Operation False Prophets, Chapter Eight, by Ian Barnes
• Roughneck Two-Zero, Chapter Five, by Anthony Coronado

Go get ’em!

Ack! We received a pretty cool art submission this weekend, but time was so crazy, we forgot to add it! You can find ImmortalPain‘s elite in our Miscellaneous Art section.

The Marathon eBay page maintainer has noticed a Halo t-shirt for sale – someone got one at a lanfest, and never wore it. 3 days left in the auction – current price is $6.50. If you just can’t wait until the Store opens… get to bidding!

Thanks to Veebs, who has put up pdf versions of both the Marty O’Donnell talk (4.4 mb) and the Griesemer/Butcher talk (473 kb) for download. (Some of the notes for the Halo AI talk have been cut off… but mostly the entire thing is quite readable.) Appleicious has done the same – the O’Donnell talk is 11.3 mb, the Griesemer/Butcher talk is 5 mb. (I haven’t been able to download these two yet.)

The information included in the GDC proceedings was so intriguing that we’re making it available in a more accessible format – the PowerPoint presentations have been converted to straight HTML. The Jaime Griesemer/Chris Butcher talk on Halo’s AI is available now – Marty O’Donnell’s talk will be available tomorrow. The notes make for FASCINATING reading.