It was about time. Our Links page was getting rather long in the tooth… so today, I went through and pulled all pages that either 1) don’t exist any more, or 2) haven’t been touched in a while. (‘A while’ was defined, rather arbitrarily, by me, to be one month.) Makes for a much shorter page… All the pruned links were simply shunted to a different page, so nobody can yell that they’ve been deleted. Side benefit – the official (Bungie and Microsoft) pages finally get representation.

Oh, man… Catachan, of Battleground: Halo, got his copy of PC Zone magazine today… and it contained some eyebrow-raising news:

Our guess is that Halo for the PC will be out next autumn, probably to coincide with the announcement of Halo 2, which is already being worked on and a cert to arrive on Xbox first yet again.

This is the part where I remind you that until this is confirmed by someone at BUNGIE, it’s just a rumor… and an unlikely one, at that. (I’m not gonna flat-out ridicule it, because other, stranger, things have come to pass… but recent comments from the Bungie team would suggest that the ‘already being worked on’ bit was created from whole cloth.) More as we learn it… thanks to Halifax for the heads-up.

GiXeLz sends in a nice muted-tone desktop image, in three sizes, for our Wallpaper collection. Think of this as a nostalgic look at what Halo might have been (though there’s an awful lot of what Halo is, in there, too…).

Knight Premier writes to suggest that there’s a clear relationship between the 7th Column logo and 343 Guilty Spark, a character from Halo. (As well, of course, as the obvious relationship between Sparky and the Marathon logo…) You make up your own mind. (He’s modified the 7th Column logo a bit, to help you out.)

Halo crushed the competition in the last VoodooExtreme poll, ‘Your pick for 2001 console game of the year?’ (47% of 4140 votes, more than the next 10 games combined) – but it’s currently in third place in a new poll, ‘Which game released in 2001 had the best graphics?’ (Max Payne and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are both ahead of it). If you haven’t voted, get over to VoodooExtreme and do so! (Thanks to Aginor for the heads-up.)

Thanks to Razorback, who noticed that Halo snagged the #9 spot in IGN’s Hot 25 contest. Take a look, and enter to win the console of your choice!

Fall of Reach details… Eric Trautmann drops an interesting tidbit into the Marathon’s Story page forum – there’s been some discussion, on and off, about the outrage felt towards Dr. Halsey, and her involvement in the ‘recruitment’ of children for the SPARTAN project. The moral offense of replacing a child with a flash-clone (so that the parents wouldn’t know he or she was gone) seemed (to me, at least) to be less relevant in the 26th century… but Eric’s explanation of the left-out backstory clarifies things a lot:

Though not explicitly stated — and as such, this is completely “non-canon” — my intention was to have the clones be defective in some way; mental retardation, previously “undiagnosed” illness (Parkinson’s, most likely), or other such defect. That’s why they use the original kids, not the second generation dubs. ;D

As I say, though, we didn’t come right out and say that either in the game or the novel, so that notion may be revised to something a trifle less, uh, dark.

Had that been included, the moral outrage would have been COMPLETELY justified… one more example of how cutting-room floor material can make hard-to-understand plot points clearer. Thanks, Eric!

Matt Soell dropped into our forum with a status update about the fan-conducted Jason Jones interview:

He’s trying to give in-depth answers – many of the questions are not the sort of thing he could answer quickly without being glib, which he doesn’t want to do. So he’s taking the time he needs to answer with the depth they deserve. It looks like we’ll have to run the interview next week, but I think it will probably be one of the most illuminating interviews he’s done.

That definitely sounds worth waiting for…

Aargh! Just when you thought it was safe to go to bed! ActiveXbox posted their Halo review today… but I missed it earlier. Graphics and Sounds took high honors, Manual and Price (??) were the low votes… overall rating was 95%. The Reviews page continues to grow. (Thanks, Blue’s News, for the heads-up.)

Oops, we missed one – PC Magazine reviewed Halo on November 15. Short but sweet (appropriate, since it’s on a platform the magazine doesn’t cover)… they gave it a 5/5. Yes, it’s on the Reviews page.

We got to pokin’ again, and found 4 unnoticed Halo reviews. None of these are dated (they’re not even listed in the news sections of the sites in question)… but hey, we know they’re from the last few weeks, right? Xbox Gaming rated Halo 98%, Xbox Gamers said 9.9/10, Xbox City thought it was a 4.8/5, and Xbox Xtreme gave it 9.5/10. We’ve added these to our Reviews page.

What th… Matt Soell finally gives it up and explains his two-year-old comment about wall-hugging hippos… and you’re left with a NEW question! (They were proximity mines, that never made it into the game… or did they?)

Cesar Berardini, of TeamXbox, dropped us a note telling us that Amazon.com had informed him that Halo was not available:

We’ve recently learned from our supplier that the item you requested to be notified about, HALO, will not be available in the foreseeable future.

Whoa – a huge reseller like Amazon can’t get more… does this mean they didn’t print enough?

Pallor writes to say that a local radio station in Nashville, 102.5 WQZQ, is running a contest – they’re giving away an Xbox a day until December 25. (They’re calling it ‘Putting the Xbox in Xmas’.) Since WQZQ is part of the Dickie Brother Broadcasting Network, there might be a radio station in YOUR town that is hosting a similar giveaway… (I couldn’t find a linke to Dickie Brother Broadcasting anywhere on WQZQ’s site, so you’ll just have to do your own hunting.)

Two new Halo reviews out there: The Armchair Empire gave Halo a 9/10 (citing framerate drops and a ‘B-movie science fiction’ plot), while GameOver gave it a 97%, even though they had a problem with a protagonist who could flip a tank over with his bare hands, but not kill instantly with a melee attack. We’ve added both of these to our Reviews page. Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for the heads-up.

Thanks to Acrappa, who noted on Rampancy.net that IGN Xbox has put up a PDF Halo Guide for its Insiders. This is just the previously posted Halo Walkthrough, packaged up as a PDF document – in fact, the HTML version (available to all, not just insiders) has screenshots the PDF version doesn’t have. Still, the search function is pretty nice… As a side note, IGN has reported that Thursday evening, for about 24 hours, they’ll unlock the Insider site and let folks look around – they’re hoping that the taste of what’s available will get you to want to subscribe. Whether this tactic works or not, realize that you’ll have 24 hours to grab whatever content you’ve heard about in the past that you haven’t been able to see…

We received a wet-looking Halo logo from Rob Cox – we’ve added it to our Logos collection.

Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews, curator of the JunkYard, points out that VoodooExtreme is hosting a new poll: ‘Your pick for 2001 console game of the year?’ Currently, Halo has 690 of 1591 votes (or 43%, handily outdistancing the second-place Grand Theft Auto 3, with 15%). If you haven’t voted, make sure you do!

The sharp eyes of mnemesis are STILL working – he caught a new job listing on Bungie’s corporate site.

3D Animator

Bungie is seeking a skilled character animator to join our quest for world domination.

Responsibilities:

• Create realistic animations for a variety of characters that meet Bungie?s quality, originality and creative standards, all within tight technical requirements.
• Maintain a consistency of animation with regards to appearance, style, timing and other related aspects from one character to another.
• Assist with other aspects of art production, such as modeling and texturing.

Requirements and application procedure are listed, as well. Hmm… is the Phoenix team looking for new blood, or is this for a NEW project?

The Unicycle? Matt Soell alludes to an intriguing tidbit in this forum post…