More fan fiction for the masses – another couple of stories from Gasmask, and another installment of Uriel’s ‘Beyond the Paradise‘ series. Check the lot out in our Fan Fiction section!

A few days ago, GameSpy put up its Game of the Year Awards… and Halo was voted Xbox Best Action/Adventure Game. (We reported this last week.) It lost out to Madden NFL 2002 for Xbox Game of the Year, though… and was overlooked for a number of special achievement categories (Best In-Game Cutscenes, Best Sound, Best Artificial Intelligence… though it did receive a runner-up award for Best Force Feedback). Today, the people speak… in GameSpy’s Gamer’s Choice section, an astounding 59.2% of fans voted Halo the Xbox Game of the Year. Who’s right, the GameSpy critics or the fans? You decide. (Thanks to RedFoxTX for the heads-up.)

Though it will keep coming up, Marty O’Donnell, Halo’s Audio Lead, makes a very clear statement about the existence of a certain curse word in Halo:

the “f” word is never used by anyone or anything in Halo. It is however used by players stuck in the grav lift room of the T&R on legendary…

I can vouch for that second part, for sure.

Inside Mac Games has put up their 2002 predictions, as part of a 2001 Year in Review article… and Bungie gets a pair of mentions. The first one is serious (and seems quite possible):

Destineer will ship Halo for the Mac. Period. (OMG, the BEST GAME EVER WILL SHIP! Wooohoo!)

The second… well, not so serious:

Bungie’s Jason Jones will be knighted by the Queen. He’ll now answer only to Sir Jason.

Thanks to Red Hot Ryan for pointing the article out.

Heh – Mr Bill Jr V asks on our forum, ‘Is there too much Fan Fiction?’ Half an hour earlier, though, he submitted ‘The Awakening‘, a sequel (of sorts) to his earlier ‘The Spirit‘. You can find these (and many many more – too many?) in our Fan Fiction section.

Gasmask has turned in not one, not two, but THREE more installments of his ‘Journals of the Doomed’ series. You’ll probably find it easiest to simply read them in one shot – but you’ll find the individual stories in our Fan Fiction section. Comments work again (I managed to break them for part 2). Warning: There are major Halo story spoilers in the last entry.

Two of the new reviews mentioned recently contained new screenshots – we’ve added them to the Screenshots database (now up to 538 shots!). The Xbox Hotgames pics are right at the beginning, where new shots usually are… but the GamerSquare shots are farther in (since we missed the review when it first came out). Enjoy!

Thomas Barbee dropped off a very nice Bryce image, Halo-fied… we’ve added it to our Miscellaneous Art section, but it’s a decent size for a desktop image, as well.

Wow. Dan Rudolph pointed out this page at Game Rankings, containing a list of 40 Halo reviews, a whopping 11 of which weren’t on our Reviews page. We’ve added them now… and placed a running aggregate score at the top of the page. (Halo currently holds a 95.2% rating over those 55 reviews.) Later tonight we’ll add some extra screenshots, and a pair of movies, found on the new pages.

Reuters reports that Sony is dominating the video game market at the moment – after the rush of buying spurred by the release of the Xbox and the GameCube, people have gone back to buying for their existing products, it seems. 12 of the top 20 best-selling games for the first half of December were for Sony’s Playstation and Playstation 2, 7 were for Nintendo products (4 Game Boy Advance, 2 GameCube, and 1 Game Boy Color), and one – Halo – represented the Xbox. Three of the four November Xbox best-selling titles, and both of the November GameCube best-sellers, disappeared off the charts. (The two GC titles for December were not on the list in November.) Halo, then, becomes the only game for the new consoles to hold on to its best-seller status through the middle of December – not bad! Thanks to Jeremy Roush for the heads-up.

Gamespot has put up their Best and Worst of 2001 awards… and Halo did pretty well. Best Shooter, Best Xbox Game, Number 3 in the Top 10 Video Games of 2001 (beaten by Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Grand Theft Auto III), and nominated for Best Sound. (Strangely, it wasn’t even in the running for Best Story or Best Graphics.) You can vote for yourself in their Reader’s Choice Ballot. Thanks to Razorback for the heads-up.

Doesn’t usually happen quite this quickly… but Gasmask has submitted Part 2 of his Journals of the Doomed series (Part 1 was posted 12 hours ago). You’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section…

Thanks to David Allan, who pointed out that the UK magazine ‘Computer and Video Games’ reviewed Halo in their January 2002 issue. They gave it a 9/10, and had nice things to say about gameplay:

Awesome in both single and multiplayer, this pushes console shooters to an all-new high and even gives the finest the PC can offer a run for it’s money.

But even more interesting than that was a small interview with Halo Product Manager Steve Fowler.

CVG: But what of online play?

SF: We have all sorts of aspirations of getting Halo, of some sort, online – whether that means this current Halo, a Halo 2, or some sort of additional disk we send out.

This review (and its accompanying interview) is not yet on CVG’s web site. Still, the info is tantalizing…

Deimosâ„¢ points out what happens when you take a Banshee where it shouldn’t go… and flip it. Yes, that guy’s on the wrong side of the glass.

In what might be the last fan fiction of the year, Gasmask sends in the Journals of the Doomed, an account of the landing on the Halo. Check it out in our Fan Fiction section… and be sure to leave feedback!

Ouch – Penny Arcade has put up their Surly Aftermath to their Awards Ceremony for 2001… and Halo wins… well, go look. Thanks to Uriel for the heads-up.

VoodooExtreme picked their ‘official’ Game of the Year (as opposed to Apache’s top 10 of 2001), and while Halo got the nod for Best Console Game, the overall GotY went to PC title ‘Dark Age of Camelot’, mostly due to Halo’s weak Internet multiplayer showing. Thanks to Brizzle for the heads-up.

Heh – The Seattle Post-Intelligencer put up a shot of Ed Fries, as he

its in front of a photo of Munch, a character from Halo, one of the games made for the recently released Xbox.

Um… no. Thanks to Devin O’Reilly for the entertaining heads-up.

A couple of days ago, we added a desktop image ot our Wallpaper page from Alain Couët – but it seems it was really created by Germain Couët – we’ve fixed the error, and added his latest image, another mural. Check ’em BOTH out in our Wallpaper section!

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S !



(Okay, okay, so we stole it from Bungie – but hey, they’ve recycled it themselves!)

From the HBO crew and our families, to you and yours, we wish you the merriest of holiday seasons. Pax.

We’ll be back updating on Wednesday, the 26th.