The Game Developers Conference proceedings are now posted – you can find them on this page. There are two talks of interest to Halo fans – Jaime Griesemer and Chris Butcher talked about Halo’s AI (PowerPoint format, 14.2 mb), and Marty O’Donnell talked about Halo’s music (in PowerPoint format, 3 mb, or MS Word format, 44K). A wealth of information in both talks! Worth some serious discussion on our forum… (Thanks to Jaime Griesemer for the heads-up.)

Ouch. Three german Halo sites are now offline:

• Halo Forum
• HaloXperience
• AreaHalo

We’ve adjusted our Links page accordingly. Thanks to Martin Spitzenberg for the heads-up.

Interesting find by Vector40 – Apparently, a site called ‘fanfiction.net’ has a growing collection (28, as of right now) of Halo Fan Fiction pieces… with very little overlap (one article, at first glance) with our collection. I wonder if that means the submission rate will slow down here? Not anytime soon, I’d guess – here’s the latest batch:

• Effusion Chapter 4, by Tursas
• The Renegade Marines Part XI, by Shadow
• Aftermath Part 4, by Alex Cross
• Legacy of Cillian and Journals of Diego, by Jehkoh

Read ’em through… don’t worry, there’ll be more! Nasty Notice: DOH! Careless me, I didn’t even pay attention to the fact that one of the stories I uploaded this morning was, in fact, a complete plagiarization (is that a word? It was a total ripoff) of another story found right here – Tyler Sivertsen’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Marine’ was a word-for-word transcription of Jaywhit10’s ‘The Hell of War Through the Eyes of a Marine‘. I’ve pulled the offending story, and I apologize to Jaywhit10 for not catching this sooner. Plagiarism sucks.

Pfhoenix has created a Halo sound scheme for Windows – you can read about it here. (The individual files are all in .wav format, so Mac users can easily hear what’s available.) Take a look!

First Storm Singer, now Trey Ikon… you gotta love this stuff. These will be added to the Miscellaneous Art section as soon as the artists believe they’re ready.

Things to do when you’re bored….

Quick note, on this most hectic of all weekends: Narcogen, of Rampancy.net, points out that Blackstar Productions is now hosting its own movies (‘Halo: The Movie’ and the Halo Movie Teaser). Check ’em out for more details! (We’ve added these to the ‘Halo: The Movie’ mirrors list – we still need to compile a mirrors list for the teaser – and have removed the R.net mirrors. The updated Movies page, containing all movies released in the past several months, should be online sometime this weekend… hopefully.)

A couple of days ago, This Side Up mentioned on our forum that he’d begun work on some Halo multiplayer map designs. He’s turned them over to us, and we’ve put them up for you to look at – there’s no guarantee anyone can ever make them… but it’s an intriguing start.

Goodness, almost forgot… the Halo Story page got a couple of updates recently! (mnemesis did a bang-up job covering the recent rash of Halo theories which flooded our forum…) Check it out, and add your own!

Miscellaneous, yes. Art? Dunno.

A surprising number of gameplay tricks remain in the queue (some simply because they’re complicated enough that documentation is taking longer than expected)… but there are 4 new ones (5, if you count xbill’s Elite Speech trick posted earlier today) in the Tricks section. Take a look!

Threebrain.com has a Halo-related cartoon today – if you’re reading this after the 12th, jump back to April 12, 2002. I’ve felt like that… Thanks to Lawrence Peterson for the heads-up.

Heh – just got word from Joe Broni that the beans on elite ‘speech’ were spilled by Chris Butcher during the talk he gave at the Game Developers Conference last month – a week before Jester noticed the backwards speech. Hard to know WHO to give credit to! 🙂

Two new Halo reviews have popped up – Battle-Fields Network, in the UK, liked it except for lack of bots and the repetitive nature of some of the architecture, and DVD Plaza, in Australia, who had pretty much the same complaints. We’ve added the Battle-Fields review to our Reviews Database… but due to the lack of an overall numeric score for the DVD Plaza review, we can’t do the same there. (Blame me for building an inflexible database.)

Your daily Fan Fiction collection:

• The Hell of War, Part 5, by Jaywhit10
• Well Enough Alone, Part 4, by Ryan
• Shadow and Iroquois, by Jehkoh
• The Saga Continues, Chapter 3, by Edward Parker

What are you waiting for?

TeamXbox has put up an article covering the shindig thrown this week by Microsoft to celebrate the passing of the million-copies-sold milestone for Halo. (Wow, that was too long.) Nice pics, and it sounds like it was a good time! Fan-submitted movies, like Randy Glass’ Warthog Jump, were shown to the appreciative crowd… congrats, guys, for blowing away the devs!

StormSinger is working on a new model for… well, for something. Halo-related, it seems. Maybe. Anyway, it’s pretty interesting, and the thread it spawned is a great read.

Whoa. Major update at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. New Screenshots (12 of ’em, not a mediocre one in the bunch – but beware spoilers in at least one), and new Concept Art (early Hunters and guns). Thanks to Tarrsk for the speedy heads-up!

Yesterday, xbill dropped a bombshell on our forum – he pointed out (with proof) where the Elite voices in Halo came from. Recently, his host pulled the page – apparently, free hosts don’t like it when you’re too popular… so we’ve done what we don’t usually do, and jumped a trick to the front of the queue. His EliteSpeak trick has been posted in the Gameplay Tricks section – don’t worry, all the waiting tricks are still there, we didn’t lose ’em. Gettin’ there…

Jay Weinland stepped into the discussion about Elite speech on our forum with a pretty interesting description of how the whole process came about. Give it a read!