The Halo SETI Marines hold steady at slot 52 in the Battle of the Teams, thanks in large part to the awesome crunching of charleya and Int_21… but the influx of nearly 1000 units (thanks to new members Istan, Radar, Matthew and Vladoz) doesn’t hurt, either. See all the crunching data on the 7 day stats page.

Cesar Berardini, of TeamXbox, lets us know that TXB has a report about launch title commercials up – the short version; they’ll go live on November 11. Go read the long version to find out where Microsoft is spending its half a billion advertising dollars…

A couple of new desktop images for you tonight – one from Daniel Byrne, and one from [SE]X-Com. You can find both in our Wallpaper section.

The Hawk Chronicles continue – Chapter 3a arrived tonight for our Fan Fiction section. A taut read – check it out. (And don’t forget to leave Vector40 feedback in the Comments section!)

The HaloServer team points out that the haloserver.com domain (which, as we mentioned a few days ago, is for sale), is now at eBay. Auction ends in a bit less than a week – current bid is $5, and the reserve is not met. Go grab a good fansite name now!

FAQ overhaul: two major changes are visible to you, the reader; There’s a new page, called ‘Most-Asked Questions‘ – you should point people to this page if you see them asking about the PC version, or bots. (Likewise, you should let us know if there’s a question you think belongs on this page.) Additionally, the Weapons page has been brought up-to-date; new pictures, cleaned-up pictures, far more detailed info on most weapons (thanks, JB), and an overlooked weapon has been included. Comments are always welcome.

Woohoo! Folks have asked how long Halo will take to finish, and how the different difficulty levels change this… Chris Butcher, who developed much of the AI, has posted a detailed commentary on just this subject on our forum.

for an epic battle (or if we’re playing co-op) I pick Legendary. it took me about 60 hours of continuous play to finish the game on this difficulty, and that’s after months of developing and playtesting the game.

There are details about how Legendary compares to Myth’s Legendary difficulty, or Marathon’s Total Carnage – bottom line, in Chris’s words; Don’t Stop to Breathe. Go read this!

A couple of forum posts worth noticing; DevilFrog found a MadCatz trackball for the Xbox (interestingly enough, the idea of using a trackball came up a couple of days ago, and was met with serious enthusiasm)… and Darkman noticed that Microsoft’s official Halo site has been updated again – the timeline has been removed, and replaced with the prologue to Eric Nylund’s novel, ‘Halo: The Fall of Reach’. (This is the same text that showed up at Random House’s site on Wednesday and at IGN Xbox yesterday.) Even when we’re out, the forum is full of good info!

Oops – we managed to miss Cloudchaser’s Xbox Unleashed: Halo Impressions Part 3. (We commented on parts 1 and 2 yesterday, and part 4 earlier today.) They were impressed, especially with the AI and the audio. Careless of us… sorry.

In a HORRENDOUSLY long thread over on the IGNCube.com forums, Matt Casamassina, Editor-in-Chief of IGNCube.com, put up a few screenshots to point out what textures SHOULD look like – he’d started the thread by complaining about what was being done on the GameCube. His example? Halo. We’ve added 4 of these shots to the Unofficial Screenshots page – they’re nothing special, in terms of what’s going on… but as a peek into what Halo is capable of, texturewise… they’re awesome. (That grass one just blows me away!

A month ago, we showed you the first Halo 2-page print ad. The second one’s been floating around for a bit now… It’s been seen in Rolling Stone and GamePro, for example. As before, we’ve scanned it at a small size (800×527, 84K), a larger size (1500×989, 242K), and the ad copy itself (800×168, 25K). Enjoy!

Cloudchaser Microsoft has put up part 4 of their Halo impressions – this time, it’s a fan-written commentary on the level known as ‘Flawless Cowboy’. It’s interesting, given that it’s written by someone who has either never seen Halo before, or is pretending that they’ve never seen Halo before:

Well, this lady told me over a radio or something that a enemy dropship was approaching and that I should cross some tubes or pipes to the other side of the river to escape being detected. I promptly ignored the command and starting scanning the horizon for the enemy. I wanted some action. I got it pretty quick. The drop ship arrived along with two of those personal fighter like thingies. I was instantly under heavy fire. The drop ship dropped about 6 bad-guys (Covenent right?) and then took off in a flurry of gunfire.

A fun read, in either case. Check it out!

Ooh… nearly missed this. Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, noticed a story at Wired News with the following subhead:

Rumors of the Xbox’s shaky stability have been greatly exaggerated.

The story notes that Xboxes in use at the Xbox Unleashed event have been running for 12 hours straight, with no crashes. (There are more than 50 consoles at the event.) There haven’t been any more net stories about kiosks crashing, either – seems the software upgrades distributed last week really did solve the problem.

Konard’s in trouble, in Ashley Power’s ‘Running, Part 1‘, available on our Fan Fiction page. Be sure to let her know what you think of it in the comments section!

Forum wrapup: op_ivy passes along commentary on the Xbox Unleashed event in Los Angeles – event flavor, Halo impressions, and a spoiler or two (clearly marked). Funky J makes the new GameSpot movie available on his Hotline server – details about access can be found in his post. And Darkman, annoyed by the commentator in that movie, hacked it up a little to remove as much of him as possible. (Be careful with this link – the movie isn’t all the way up as we speak, and it locked up two different machines during the attempted download. Give it a bit longer.) All this and more on our forum today!

Gamespy has posted a Halo preview a couple of days ago. They were unimpressed with the AI – and they wished for mouse control – but otherwise, they liked it. Can’t please everyone…

Cloudchaser Microsoft has put up a couple of articles about Halo as part of their Xbox Unleashed coverage – the first one is extremely positive about the framerates (looks like just a quick note) and focused on multiplayer, while the second one is a bit more in-depth, and looks at solo player. Their biggest gripe was control of the jeep. (As an aside, the ‘X button to flip’ mode is still in the final release, it seems…) Thanks to Allenthar for the heads-up.

Lots of HBO visitors are worried about spoilers popping up where they don’t want to see them. For those actually LOOKING for spoilers, the Marathon’s Story page has some pretty massive ones in its most recent update… if you decide to look, don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Electric Playground interviewed Seamus Blackley, head of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group – he’s as enthusiastic as usual. He raved about a lot of things – including control:

EP: Halo surprised Blackley. He had concerns about the control of the game, and in fact didn’t want it to be a launch title.

SB: Jason Jones and I are pretty good friends, and he said “I’m going to convince you. You’re wrong.” And I was wrong. The editors of three of the biggest game magazines in the United States have all said that they wish they had the controls in Unreal now that they have in Halo.

The article as a whole is a pretty good read. Thanks to TomeOne for the heads-up.

<sigh> Right about the time we get caught up with screenshots and movies, places like GameSpot have to go and release tons more. There’s an updated preview, a 75 meg movie (!!), and 20-someodd new screens. (They say it’s 30, but there are at least a few repeats – but they can be forgiven, it’s hard work releasing THIS much new info in such a short time.) I can’t tell you what’s in the movie – I’ve only got 5 megs of it so far. My guess is, though, we’re talking MAJOR spoiler action. Media overload…