Heh – TitaniumPez caught the Master Chief… um… well, watch the show (144k).

Stosh created a Halo comic which pays tribute to Matt Soell’s… um, unhealthy interests. Check it out!

pete_the_duck has gone a to a couple of places not yet documented – one on Halo, the other on Truth and Reconciliation. You can check his website for pictures from the locations… but as of right now, he’s not willing to share his techniques for reaching them, so don’t ask us. 🙂 Update: he’s explained… and reproducing this one ain’t gonna be easy…

A quick reply by Matt Soell to a request for clarification of the PAL/NTSC situation (‘Can they play nicely together?’) turned into a veritable firestorm on several forums, here and in Europe. (Most of the unhappiness can be explained by my lack of understanding of the answer I was acting as messenger for…) Matt stepped back in tonight with a more complete answer – NTSC and PAL boxes cannot play nicely together, not because Bungie doesn’t like Europeans, but because of basic speed differences between the two versions, and because of the way Halo was written. Hopefully, in the future, games (both from Bungie and from other developers) will take into account the different refresh rates of the two television standards, and allow competitors with either system to play the other… but for now, with Halo, that’s just not an option. Read Matt’s whole post for a more complete explanation.

Last week, we mentioned a small article in Entertainment Weekly about Halo lan parties. That issue is now off the shelves… so we’ve posted it in our Press Scans section. Take a look! (We’ve also added a more useful date-sorting option to the Scans database – you can now sort the scans from newest to oldest, instead of just oldest to newest.)

The Incoming queue for the Gameplay Tricks page has finally been cleared – another 4 entries are up for your viewing pleasure. Pretty eclectic collection, this time around… check ’em out, if you don’t mind the spoilers!

Back in late February, customsex sent word that Eleet Ops Faction had a new video for the masses – it showed how to get down from the beginning of the Maw (a subject which was pretty hot at that moment), and a bug in Two Betrayals in which the death of one co-op player meant the death of the other. It was rather large, however – 31 megs – so I told him that we couldn’t host it, and that since it showed one subject he’d already covered in another vid (albeit without the music) and another subject that could be done in many, many fewer bytes, that finding a host might be a problem. Well, thanks to Vector40, that host has been found – The Repertory has put the movie up, and you can grab it from there. The Two Betrayals bug is pretty hilarious… and there’s plenty of playing with dead bodies. Again, it’s a 31 mb MPG, almost 2 minutes long. Check it out!

Cybrfrk has written an article entitled ‘Halo: Extreme Tactics‘, looking at the phenomenon of game engine exploitation. It’s an interesting read – visit Team Xbox and read it!

New wallpaper from Kyle Hovenkotter. ‘The Daily Grind’… sounds about right. Check it out in our Wallpaper section.

Fanfic Fest – A new poem from Ryan, a new Renegade Marines chapter, and a new Operation False Prophets chapter. The Fan Fiction page bulges…

Link action – halo24.de is now listed correctly on our Links page, and Silent Halo has been added. German Halo action and… some rather strange pictures, respectively. Additionally, we got word from Cal that he’s started a new Xbox portal site, to help people find Xbox-related sites. We decided a long time ago that we weren’t going to include Xbox sites in our Links section (there are too many of them, and this isn’t an Xbox site, it’s a Halo site) – but if you want to check it out, look at Xboxx.org.

Continued Fan Fiction submissions – Jehkoh sends in another poem (‘Death of a Soldier‘), and Tursas ramps up again with a new series – ‘Effusion‘. (This one’s a bit… odd. Has me wondering where it’s going. 🙂 Spoilers, though, for anyone who hasn’t finished Halo.) Check ’em out!

f·p·p · h·a·l·o, a Polish Halo page which had existed at some time in the past but had made it onto our Dead Links page for being, well, dead, has been resurrected, and once again has current Halo news. We’ve moved it to our regular Links page. (Vector40 noted this about a week ago, but I was ignoring him.)

The poetry continues – Jehkoh sends in ‘Legion‘, to be found in our Fan Fiction section.

Danish Madness: Yesterday, we posted a note about a Danish Halo review. Otizz offered to translate it… I told him it wasn’t really necessary. Sippan decided to send in a translation anyway – so we thought, we might as well post it. (It comes with commentary.) Then, Paladin sent word of ANOTHER Danish review – this time at Game Reactor. They gave it a 92%. Seems okay. Again, it’s in the Reviews Database, if you can read Danish.

This week’s Weekly HBO Review is longer than usual – thanks in large part to a lot of Bungie employee contributions. If you missed any posts this week, or just want the short version, check it out!

Short on ammo? Got a big gun, but don’t know what to use your limited shots on? brad has discovered a pretty cool exploit – in a coop game, if one player is reloading at the time that the other player passes a checkpoint, the gun that is being reloaded will have infinite ammo. Don’t manually reload, or switch guns, or the glitch is lost… but as long as you keep that one gun up, and don’t hit ‘x’ (which means no vehicles, either), you’ve got as much ammo as you can fire! Very nice.

At 12 noon UTC today (six and a half hours ago), Contest 1 of the Maw 700 closed – and our crack team of Halo experts huddled together over the final entries. After some rigorous debate (and not a few fisticuffs) a winner emerged. Our congratulations go out to ALL contestants… but especially to Frogblast, whose winning time of 2:43.90 was sufficient to carry the day. Full details (including Honorable Mentions) can be found at the Contest 1 page. Time to gear up for Contest 2!

Drunkgamers.com has started a new feature – It’s a section with multiplayer pointers, accompanied by movies. The first one shows a nice flag recovery in a game of CTF Pro – and some damn good pistol shooting. guS, of drunkgamers, says to expect regular updates with more movies and pointers in the coming days. Worth a look!

Otizz sends word of a Danish Halo review at the Danish MSN site. It’s in Danish, so I have ZERO idea of what it says – but they rated it 6/6 butterflies. We’ve added it to our Reviews database, even though we don’t know how to translate the quote we used. (Hopefully, it’s clean.)