Fifteen new pieces for you up in the Fan Fiction section today… go see what you can find! It’s a bit early here to curl up in front of a fire… but it sure is cold enough.

Just wanted to give folks a heads-up… there are a number of sites that have been submitted to our Links page that I’ve left in the queue – they’re all on Freewebs, which seems to be down at the moment. I haven’t deleted the submissions; they’re just on hold until we can actually see the pages.

Red Leader let us know that After War, a Halo comic hosted at Black Art Studios, is back on track after a short hiatus (Kevin apparently got sucked in by Half-Life 2). Episode 11 has been posted. Chief and the Arbiter… mano a mano.

Joe Hopkinson sent us a link to a Flash vid he’s put up at Newgrounds. There’s not much to the story… but the artwork’s pretty fun. It’s less than a meg… go watch!

Each time David Galindo releases a Halo vid, forum threads pop up, asking what music he used. Dan Downs pointed out that David’s put up a page on his website that contains a comprehensive list. Go visit if you were curious where you heard that tune before…

Cubedog reminded us that even though they were discussed at length on our forum, we neglected to post the list of winners of the Flash Stats contest held by Mike Chambers of Macromedia a couple of months ago. Oops. Now we have.

Interesting article at Computer Graphics World – if you’re intrigued by the technical aspects behind Halo 2’s beauty. There are some factual errors in the article about story-related content… but that’s not really what these guys were looking at. If you’ve ever wondered about polygon counts, or Level of Detail specifics, or how individual NPCs were personalized, check this puppy out! Thanks, Germain Couët.

Clive Thomson, of Slate, wrote a piece on the hassles of cutscenes… and condemns their use in Halo and Halo 2.

Both games had forgettable storylines—pure alien-invasion boilerplate—that were redeemed by the game’s superrealistic physics.

Ouch! You might disagree, but the general argument (that cutscenes tend to pull you out of the immersivity the games engender) is a reasonable one. Thanks, Anton P. Nym.

A few days ago, Starman343 posted a note on our forum, pointing to a far more detailed post on the High Impact Halo forum – he’d managed to hear a dialogue snippet that Marty O’Donnell alluded to a few weeks back. This was clearly added as an easter egg; it requires that you have possession of the IWHBYD skull (see the HIH Skulls Database for all known details of this mysterious skull), something extremely difficult to obtain. Even when you have it, hearing this egg isn’t a guarantee; once Starman343 had posted, our resident dialogue guru, Captain Spark gave it a shot, but was unsuccessful on his first attempt, and Starman himself explained that he cycled through a lot of dialogue before repeating that tidbit. Last night, Cody Miller proved his Legendary prowess yet again… and posted three hilarious snippets on our forum – so Marty’s egg has been found, and added to our Dialogue Databank for posterity. Go listen! They’re hilarious. (And nice work, everybody.)

Yesterday evening, Bungie posted its Weekly What’s Update – a recap of what’s considered cheating, some vague info about downloadable content, an explanation of why the Zombie gametype can’t be added to the Matchmaking playlists, a bunch of basic stuff… and proof that better graphic tools will NOT make you a better artist. Go read. First heads-up goes to DiscipleN2k on our forum.

There’s a new update over at Halogen, the Command & Conquer Halo mod; they’ve put up a nice textured version of the Scorpion tank. We heard from team leader Dispraiser about it… but first heads-up goes to Logical2u.

Dennis Powers writes to say the Halo CE Chronicles Episode 2, ‘The Key to Home’, has been posted at Halo Maps. 4:20, Flash movie format. You can get some really nice camera angles out of Halo CE!

Eep – that last news post reminded me I forgot to post today’s One One Se7en. Hmm… maybe that was a GOOD thing.

Today’s Ctrl+Alt+Del news post is a tribute to Bungie… and to Halo in particular. A nice read. Check it out. Thanks, Bonekin.

We got an answer, of sorts, from Joe Staten regarding the titles used on the ‘Hall of Murals‘ images we posted a couple of days ago. Not definitive by any means… but you take what you can get sometimes. (See the page for details.)

Remember how Bungie was gonna challenge EGM to a rematch, to try and regain their honor after the Humpday Challenge shellacking they took? Well, according to EGM Shoe’s blog, it happened… on Tuesday. Three games. EGM came out on top for the first two, lost the third. Stats, commentary, and a tiny bit of trashtalking can be found at that last link. Thanks, psyho case.

Cody Miller has posted a number of his speedruns over at archive.org (home of the Wayback Machine, and a pretty darned respectable video game film collection) – you can find links to them in this forum post. (The Outskirts and Cairo Station runs were already posted in our news a couple of months ago – only the last two are new.) You’ve got to watch the Maw run; it beats the GNF winner by over a minute, and contains some pretty amazing moves. (Come to think of it, the Metropolis run’s pretty slick, as well… I loved the bit where Cortana said ‘those pilots are no pushovers either’… just before Cody smacks one of ’em in the back of the head. Oh, Cortana… sometimes you’re just clueless.) Go watch.

Yahoo’s Buzz Log noted that folks are doing quite a lot of searching for game cheats… and Halo 2 is 4th on the list of games currently being scanned. Don’t folks know there ARE no cheats? Thanks, Nathan Riggle.

John Rivas also points out a Christian-perspective review over at Plugged In Online. (It’s linked off the right side of the front page at the moment, the title is “‘Halo 2’: Save the World; Lose Your Soul?” – but it opens in a popup window; the full URL to the article, missing site navigation, is here.) This one suggests the game can damage you:

The heart-pumping action that makes Halo 2 so engaging comes at the cost of (potentially) reducing the value of real people in the real world.

Eh. I pretty heartily disagree with that assessment… but it’s certainly an opinion.

Tons of articles today are looking at Microsoft’s bottom line, and how it was bolstered by Halo 2. The LA Times has a piece showing that Halo 2’s $300 million in revenue helped the entertainment division post a gain instead of a loss. (Total sales were $10.8 billion for the year; $1.4 billion of that was in the entertainment division… so a bit more than 10% of Microsoft’s income comes from Entertainment, and one fifth of THAT came from a game that was released with less than two months in the year remaining. Not too shabby! Halo 2 accounts for almost 3% of Microsoft’s overall revenues!) Other articles: BBC (thanks, Shinesevens), Gamespot. Update: Oops, forgot one; TeamXbox put up a story, too (thanks, John Rivas).