Draikin sends in an attractive desktop image for our Wallpaper section.

TeamXbox has put up a Poster Gallery of Xbox launch titles. The Halo poster is simply a re-alignment of the elements of the box art… but it’s still pretty cool. Check it out!

Bob loses a recruit, and the Nautilus loses… more. Tursas submits Chapter 11 of his Hermes Trismegistus saga to our Fan Fiction section. What’s with that illness? Check it out, and don’t forget to leave a quick comment when you’re through!

The Bungie folks weren’t too impressed with it… but hey, it’s the first two-page Halo ad, so we’ve captured it for posterity, in a readable format. You can take a look at it in small (800×492, 84K) or large (1500×923, 244K) formats… and for those who don’t like to squint, there are closeups of the ESRB rating/fine print (800×194, 30K), and the main ad text (800×181, 33K). This appeared in the November 2001 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine.

Tyson Green, aka Ferrex, jumps into the ‘Why no Bots?’ discussion to give a pretty realistic rationale for leaving them out this time around. Would definitely be nicer to have them than not… but it looks like there just wasn’t time. Matt Soell goes further, and suggests that their inclusion has been in doubt since the pre-buyout Chicago days… which doesn’t bode well for their existence in the upcoming PC/Mac versions. As Matt says,

It’s not that bots aren’t cool, but Halo does not really suffer for lack of them. They were never a key part of the design.

Might make sense to check out the final product before passing judgement on this decision…

Martin Kildén Smith sends in a new desktop for our Wallpaper section. Watch your files, easy to lose on this…

Hmm… another quarter heard from. Over on the Marathon’s Story page forum, there’s been quite a bit of discussion about the leaked Halo backstory information (more, disappointingly, than in our own forum, actually), and a new name has surfaced – Eric Trautmann. Eric seems to be responsible for – at the very least – cleaning up and tying together the details behind the Halo storyline. He also passes on some info about the Halo novel we mentioned last month. It’s a little surprising that the name has never surfaced before… but more importantly, Eric makes it clear that the XML file discovered last week had some date discrepancies which were scheduled to be fixed – so the reconciliation between the Halo and Marathon timelines shouldn’t be considered to be a closed subject. Hmm… Go read his post for the details.

A terse reply from Matt Soell confirms that there won’t be any multiplayer bots in Halo. (Ar-Isildur of *WP* followed up with a second confirmation from Jason Jones, in case anyone decided to doubt Matt.) Hopefully, the single-player replay value will compensate for this… if not, you’ll need to make better friends with your neighbors.

Bummer! Most previous Bungie games had fun acronyms on the packaging materials – fans spent lots of time trying to work them out. This time, unfortunately, there won’t be any – seems they forgot. Inside, however…

Folks asked… so here you go. The Fan Fiction section now has a Comments option. If you read a story, be sure to hit the comments link for it, and leave a note; short or long, doesn’t matter – just so long as you let folks know what you think. Feedback is only useful if you give it… so be sure to give it! (Warning – I’ve done almost zero testing on the comments system, so there might be a bug or two. If you run into trouble, please… let us know asap.) Comments can be left anonymously, if you choose – simply leave the ‘From’ field blank. Enjoy!

The Halo SETI Marines hold steady at number 53… the loss of signum hurts a little, but the arrival of Int_21 almost makes up for it. Total crunchers are up, but total units are down… too many people actually WORKING at their computers! Check your results on the 7 day stats page.

Cyberjackie sends in a new desktop for our Wallpaper collection… a bit hard to read in places, but interesting.

This is NOT to get your hopes up, or down, or whatever – this is information. Jon Kimmich, Product Planner for Halo, has just begun to look into the format that the PC version will be released in. (The choices are multi-CD or DVD.) Read his post for caveats, and realize the decision will be whatever makes most sense at the time… but also remember that HE’S THINKING ABOUT THE PC VERSION RELEASE. It would be silly for the Halo Product Planner to be thinking about the PC version release if there WASN’T going to be a PC version to be released… so all you doubters out there, heed.

What the…? Flawless Cowboy, otherwise known as Jaime Griesemer, Halo Designer, jumped into a forum discussion today with some… odd info. People were wondering about enemies that can blow themselves up at death, and speculation ran to the idea that the baddies were doing this to deny you weapons, or something similar. The response from Mr. Griesemer?

Those guys don’t choose at the moment of death, they are pre-wired to do so as a safety precaution. And it isn’t to deny their opponents their weapons, exactly, at least not how you think… and it’s definitely not to deny the _player_ anything.

And then a bit more… Ooh. I want this game.

Whoa – Halo weapons in Counterstrike. Strykerwolf wondered, on the R.net forum, whether anyone would be interested in a weapons mod for CS that looked like this. All I can say is, nice modeling job!

A week ago, we put up a page that contained the text from Microsoft’s official Halo site. With the discovery of the controlling XML file, we’ve updated that page to contain the entire timeline (up to the crash of the escape pod on the surface of Halo), as well as some descriptive text that appears when you mouse over the images. The Halo Story Page is ready to be born. Hamish?

Justin Brimm points out that MacGamez.com has a feature called ‘The 2001 Sizzling Preview‘, and Halo is one of the 8 games they looked at. Not a lot there… but the reviewer is considerably more excited than he was before he wrote it, which is good.

Major screwup in the Microsoft Marketing division: If you visit the official Halo site, you’ll find a section labeled ‘Timeline’. At the end of the text, it says

For more in-depth information on the historical events leading up to this current predicament, simply click on any of the highlighted years below. Please be sure to check back often for the latest back story installment.

Down below, there’s a single entry – ‘Early Conflicts’. This section (indeed, the whole site) pulls its information an XML data file – this is convenient, in terms of development, because you can build the Flash framework, and add content later. Someone, it seems, decided it would be easier to simply put all of the content in at the start… and simply comment out the parts they didn’t want showing at first. (Most people aren’t that familiar with XML files yet, and you can’t exactly read the ‘source’ of the Flash animation… so it seemed safe.) Unfortunately for MS, a diligent Bungie fan was poking around in his browser cache this evening, and FOUND the XML file. (You can grab it for yourself here – but my guess is, it’ll be changed PDQ, so you might not find anything useful. Update: as of 11 pm EST, the new info is gone – only the ‘Early Conflicts’ entry remains.) Chlazza posted the contents of this file to the Marathon’s Story page forum this evening… and for better or for worse, the Halo backstory is now far better known than it was yesterday. First reading says that tying this into the Marathon storyline is going to be nearly impossible – in Halo’s universe, FTL travel was developed (by humans) in 2291… and none of the Marathon datapoints show up at all. Discussion should commence immediately on our forum.

This week’s Halo Update just came in from Matt Soell… the tone is pretty upbeat; seems clear that development is going well. Things are nearly finished – bug squashing and multiplayer ‘testing’ are the orders of the day. And it warms our hearts to hear of the camaraderie between team members like Marty and Joseph… read the whole shebang for yourself.

Ouch – looks like Microsoft is delaying the US release of the Xbox by a week, according to this Associated Press story. That’s gonna cost something, PR-wise… Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi for the heads-up.