Fourteen new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section today – and an apology. There was a story in German I needed to reject – we made a rule almost two years ago that we’d only accept fan fiction in English, just from an administrative perspective… but I never added that to the rules page. I’ve rectified the error; apologies to the submitter.

Recently, we posted a bunch of pictures of a Master Chief suit created by Alan James – today, we’ve got a helmet from Germain Couët. It’s possible he’ll continue with the rest of the suit – but for now, he’s got some nice headgear!

Some of you may have noticed that the Halo Story page had some strange rearranging of news posts. We had a database glitch, and needed to input a few lost records – the upshot is that the newest entries, from mnemesis, are now well down the page below Jillybean’s recent work. They’re the last two entries for February 19… but if you haven’t read for a bit, check out the top few posts, as well.

TheTaintedOne has created a pretty massive gameplay vid; it’s 12:22 long, in widescreen format. Timing is quite good; composition does a nice job of moving you from kill type to kill type. Movie ends with another melee-only oddball clip (just like the very first release I ever saw from TheTaintedOne) – all in all, if you like watching Halo 2 gameplay footage, this is one worth seeing. It’s available via BitTorrent right now in both QuickTime (64.5 mb) and WMP9 (61.2 mb) formats. It’s a little scary being the first movie posted after a ‘stop sending us bad stuff’ newspost… but someone’s gotta do it. Update: TheTaintedOne started a forum thread about this, if you want to comment. Update 2: HALOChat has provided a web mirror for those who’d rather use a browser than BitTorrent.

I HATE making posts like this one – but I think it’s become necessary. Recently, we’ve received a mountain of video announcements and submissions; some bits are quite good, and we’re happy to host them, or point them out if others are hosting them. Others are not great, but okay… and as long as they come with their own bandwidth (that is, nobody’s asking us to help with the hosting), I don’t mind putting up a news post. Unfortunately, many of them (more every day) are, simply put, crap – and lots of these come with their own hosting. If I want to pass on an announcement, I have no choice but to tell the maker that we’re not posting because the movie is crap – and that’s just mean. Please – save me the trouble, by LOOKING SERIOUSLY AT THE PIECES YOU SUBMIT. If nobody outside your immediate family would leave the thing running for more than the first 30 seconds… scrap it and try another tack. I don’t want to discourage budding movie makers; there are certainly MANY examples over the years here at HBO where someone who was given just a little bit of encouragement when they were raw and inexperienced blossomed into a spectacular moviemaker. I do want to make you think about why you’re doing this, though; if it’s just for the exposure, take the time and make a GOOD film instead of shooting us everything you’ve ever recorded. I know I’ve said it before – but clearly, it was far enough in the past that many folks never saw it: if a movie doesn’t show at least SOME level of entertainment value or originality, even if it comes with its own bandwidth, I’m going to pass on mentioning it. You’re welcome to circumvent me and post it in our forum, if this happens to you; if the announcement is met with enthusiasm and excitement, I’ll realize I made a mistake and take another look.

Outpost: Coagulation was announced last night – there’s a trailer and Episode 1. (The trailer was sent in a few days ago – I apologize, it got lost in the shuffle.) Heavily inspired by Red vs Blue, it’s the story of a team of Spartans on Coagulation, living and working under the threat of Covenant encroachment. Audio can be a little hard to hear at times. HALOChat has provided a mirror for episode 1, in case bandwidth runs out. Both vids are WMP9 format – the trailer is 14 mb, ep 1 is 22.5.

Yesterday, we posted BitTorrent links to synide’s MLG DC Aftermath vid – and almost a thousand people grabbed a copy. Those torrents are still open, and seeded nicely; if you want the vid, and have access to BitTorrent, this is really the fastest way to get it. If, however, you can’t use (or don’t want to use) BT, we’ve put up http links for both the WMP9 version (bungie.org | mythica.org) and the QuickTime version (bungie.org | mythica.org). Grab what you need! Again, these vids are about 34 mb, and will give you a taste of what an MLG tourney is like. Most of us will never actually be there in person… but synide’s shakeycam can make you FEEL like you’re there (well, after a bad burrito…).

The HBO Helljumpers are holding a tourney – rules and details can be found here. If you’re European, and you’re interested… swing by their forum – there’s plenty of room!

MasT3r would like very much if you’d take a look at his gameplay vid, currently hosted at That Weasel Television. Gameplay is decent… but it’s pretty long (9:35, with more than the first half devoted to slayer-type play on Lockout). 39.5 mb, WMP9 format. There are a couple of threads on our forum for comments – this one was first.

There’s a new Public Service Announcement posted over at Red vs Blue – it’s called ‘Cold and Flu Season’, and it uses the RvB team to pin down what causes the illnesses we come down with around this time of year, and some of the best ways of combating them. Well, okay, not the BEST ways… Hi-res for sponsors, standard res for the rest of the world. Thanks to altodarknight for the heads-up. Update: Bah. Sorry – it’s NOT yet available for the rest of the world yet. Soon. (Next time, I log out before posting. My bad.)

The Halo CE Chronicles continues over at Halo Maps, with Episode 5 – ‘Thy Pain be Mine’. Definitely a different view of human-Covenant interactions… this ain’t your standard Spartan. Flash format, 6:16, 7 mb.

Wow. Webshift (the original webmaster for the Nightmare Armor website, but someone who left the team a ways back) is selling his personal Master Chief full body armor on eBay. Starting bid is $2000 (less than half the price a set would have cost you direct from Nightmare Armor, even if they HADN’T stopped selling it), and there’s almost 7 days left in the auction. It’s silver, and comes with undersuit and boots, and a storage bin. Check it out.

The Weekly What’s Update has been posted at Bungie.net. Summary: Downloadable content is coming, cheating fixes are coming, you can be banned for being stupid on the b.net forums, and they can’t answer the questions they want to answer. If you are one of those people who don’t want to read an update that basically says “we’re still doing what we said we were doing last week” – don’t read this. More importantly, don’t whine about this on our forum. Thanks.

MLGPro.com has released its Aftermath video from MLG DC. (synide says it’s lame, but I think he’s biased.) It’s about 4 and a half minutes long, and will give you a taste of what MLG’s tournaments are like. WMP9 is 34 mb, QuickTime is 33 mb. If you’re a Video on Demand subscriber at MLG, you can grab a copy via that service now. If you’re not, but you have access to BitTorrent, you can snag torrents from us (WMP9 and QuickTime) – we’re supplying a healthy chunk of seed bandwidth, and the more people who grab this the better that situation will get. If you’re not a VoD subscriber, and you have no access to BitTorrent, don’t fret – we’ll release web versions tomorrow, after the initial rush has been dealt with. Go get it!

lAbsolutel pointed out that his speed run of the level The Arbiter has been posted at High Speed Halo; quality’s not great, but you can certainly see the action. While you’re there, check out Flechette’s amazing Uprising run; 2:25 from opening to closing cutscene. Wow!

We recently got a rather odd submission – Zytz grabbed a copy of Cortana’s Core, a recently added desktop image created by Demonic Spartan, and altered the hue – a dozen times. All 13 images are in his Cortana’s Core Mod Package (3.5 mb, zipped); the idea is that you use them as rotating desktops. If you’re using MacOSX, this functionality is built into the OS; simply select the folder in the Desktop and Screen Saver pane, set the Change Picture menu to 5 seconds, and sit back to watch the trippy show. If you’re a Windows user, you’ll need to find a 3rd party program to use this; this one was suggested by the denizens of #hbo, except that the minimum cycle period is 15 minutes; sort of defeats the purpose. If you like melting, flowing wallpaper, and you think you can find a program that will implement it on your system, grab this package; it’s definitely cheaper than LSD. Update: I didn’t mention this product for Windows, because their website says that the free version is limited to 20 uses – but DSmooth wrote to tell us that that’s old info, and that the free version is fine for this use.

Hehe – today’s One One Se7en was originally scheduled to be a Wednesday strip, so that it could properly whinge about the Legendary Walkthrough chapter that had been released the day before. We did some shuffling recently, and I guess I screwed up. Pretend it’s Wednesday. In fact, pretend it’s Wednesday a few weeks ago, since the MC’s still in Cairo Station. Gah.

Fan Fiction gets another 15 pieces today. Go read.

NJHalo.com is hosting a $1000 Halo 2 tourney ($30 entry per person for 4v4 gaming) tomorrow (Saturday, Feb 19) in Dover, NJ. Check their post on our forum or their website for more details.

Sniper 058 put together a six minute tribute to the Arbiter – mostly Legendary gameplay (the final scene was done in Heroic, because he didn’t want the movie to last all night), interspersed with (nicely) overdubbed cutscene footage. Available in WMP9 (16.9 mb) and QuickTime (19.9 mb) formats. I probably shouldn’t need to say this – but there are game spoilers here.