Praetor has sent in a new desktop – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section. A lot going on there…

Omniscient, a frequent submitter to our Fan Fiction archive, has dropped off a piece of fan art – he says that “though the setting and the weapon in his hand are really not related to Halo at all, this art was never the less inspired by the game.” You’ll find it in our Miscellaneous Art section.

TeamXbox ran across another couple of reviews we missed today (too much Halo playing while trying to digest yesterday’s turkey… makes us lazy) – The Electric Playground loved the controls, whined about lack of bots and repetitive architecture, and gave it an 89, while XboxWeb loved it to death, and gave it a 9.8. Both of these have been added to our Reviews page (which, incidentally, has been added to the navbar – thanks, Nij).

Djoey.154 writes to point out that a French magazine called ‘Joypad’ has put Halo on the cover this month. They call Halo ‘the most beautiful FPS in the world’… Gotta love that blue marine.

The work on getting Halo to play online has been fast and furious over the past few days. We’ve watched it carefully, but have held off reporting much until solid progress was made… that time is now. A new program called Xbox Gateway has been written to route Xbox packets over the internet… people have successfully played 1-on-1 multiplayer games from two different places! The program is free, and will soon be open-source. It currently has limitations (more than two players introduces unacceptable lag (although one of our forum visitors reports an acceptable 4-player game), and each player must have a linux box available for use on the local network for routing packets)… but past that, the work’s been done for you. Visit XBoxGW.com and download the software, and instructions on how to use it… and you should be on your way! (Thanks to Freewill for keeping a beady eye on the entire process for us.)

Lothster sends in a new rendition of the Halo logo – psychadelic! You’ll find it in our Logos section.

Two new reviews have popped up recently – Cloudchaser Microsoft thought Halo was simply Perfect Dark, repackaged, and gave it a 9.0… Core Magazine loved it, but felt that the lack of bots were a hindrance, and gave it an A. We’ve added both of these to our Reviews page. (Thanks to VeeoftheMiB@aol.com and R.net for the heads-ups.)

Charles D. Clifford told us that The Adrenaline Vault has put up their Halo Review (and 9 new screens) – they loved it. They obviously didn’t read The Fall of Reach (it’s becoming clear how much of the backstory was buried in that book), but it didn’t stop them from seriously enjoying the game.

In the later sections, the single player experience actually feels less entertaining than pairing up with a buddy to fight back the hordes of enemies, and I have a seven hour, five AM finishing, side-by-side stretch of gaming to back me up in that assertion.

(That’s, what… MTB = 300?) Go read it. (We’ve added it to our Reviews page, and the screens to our Screenshots database.)

Forensic proposes a new rating scale to replace the (in Halo’s case inapplicable) StC (‘Start to Crate’) system for rating shooters: MPB (‘Minutes Past Bedtime’):

You measure how long you stayed up past midnight playing, despite having to go to class or work the next day, and you’ve got your rating. In this case, Halo earns a respectable score of 120.

A few days ago here, Halo earned a 220…

op_ivy noticed a Yahoo story on Xbox sales that contains this line:

Word-of-mouth recommendations and stellar reviews are driving gamers to the great games available on Xbox, including “Halo,” which earned the highest accolades from Electronic Gaming Monthly, securing a rating of 10 from all reviewers.

As soon as we can, we’ll put the article up…

Thanks to bullseye, for pointing out that two of the screens in this week’s ConsoleDomain Halo Review hadn’t yet been posted. They’ve now been added to the screenshots archive.

Lorraine Reyes steps in to a discussion on the disappointments of Halo with some information about the physics model (Halo gravity is the same as Earth’s) and a tidbit about the sniper rifle (there’s no aim-assist, as the other weapons have), as well as some basic common sense about playing games. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to decide if it’s worth getting involved…

Another walkthrough page goes up… IGN has posted their walkthrough of The Library in their Halo Strategy Guide. Thanks to Aida-kun for pointing it out seconds before I could write this… 🙂

Deco drops a note on our forum about the poetry in 343 Guilty Spark – and upon reflection, I’d have to agree with him that the hectic feel of the level was pervasive; I never felt like I got a break. (In fact, I got fatigued near the end; I really WANTED a breather. 🙂 ) The Flood, though easy to kill, were used to their best advantage on this level – they showed up in tight corridors, they showed up in dark corners. Though there were more of them on the Library level, I felt as though the fear factor was higher on 343 Guilty Spark… and it seems Deco feels that way too. If you have a special level where you were most frightened, or in some other way impressed, add it to his thread!

Anthony Tilford dropped off a new desktop using some of the cool new concept art and screenshots at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. You’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.

NaliGun noticed a review at Blueyonder of the Xbox Xperience tour currently in the UK. While they hated the event itself, they loved Halo:

Even the poor LCD screens in Nutopia had difficulty disguising the sensational visuals.

Worth a read – gives props to Marty and the Sound team, as well!

A couple of days ago, TeamXbox mentioned a rather absurd eBay auction – someone was auctioning off a PICTURE of an Xbox. The auction closed Monday, and the listing was gone yesterday – obviously some eBay rules were violated by selling a printout of a game console for roughly what the console itself should sell for… however, thanks to bungie.org’s own Doughnut, we’ve been able to reproduce the listing here, for your own edification. All links have been removed – it’s just a static page. It’s here to show you why you should be careful and read EVERYTHING before you buy.

Skeletor had to crow this morning – he tells a fun gameplay story on our forum. No spoilers… but he did come up with something interesting. In many reviews, people have disparaged the Covenant Needler as a useless weapon… but Skeletor discovered an extremely valuable aspect to it; if you can keep the targeting reticule focused on a single victim, the needler can take down a fully-shielded Elite on Legendary in a single clip. Thanks, Skeletor!

The Xbox names just keep pouring in… Some people have noticed that the Seven Dwarves names show up as default player names, so it’s not clear whether they’re ALSO machine names, or if folks are just reading the wrong line. Also, in several cases, the box had already been renamed, so some of the names aren’t original any more. For this reason, we’ll probably stop taking submissions of names now, unless 1) you KNOW you’re reading the correct line (it’s ABOVE the picture of the Xbox, not below it), and 2) you haven’t renamed your box. The existing list will not be shortened, but new, non-official names will not be added.

Heh – people see funny things. 🙂 A month ago, we wondered whether Captain Keyes (as rendered in the game) might bear some resemblance to Joe Staten… now septimus prime, over on the Marathon’s Story page forum, is wondering if the storyboard version of the Captain (visible on Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site) might not be modeled after the Story page founder, Hamish Sinclair, himself.

You be the judge.