12 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today… go read!

TricKy passed on a couple of links for us last night… the Swedish gaming site NordicGamers.se posted their ‘Best of 2004’ article, and Halo picked up Best Soundtrack, but lost Best Action Game to Half-Life 2, and came in third for Game of the Year (behind Rome: Total War and Half-Life 2). Master Chief also picked up Hero of the Year. Then, over at TalkXbox, a new Halo 2 Strategy article has gone up; Week 11 looks at Ascension Team Ball. (This one seems pretty basic, to me. “Stay together, get the big weapons, hide.”)

replay put together a pretty long theory about where Delta Halo might be – an interesting read. For what it’s worth…the ‘Halo Activation Radius’ graphic he doesn’t know who to attribute to was created by PD, and has been in our Miscellaneous section for almost 3 years now.

Devin Olsen wondered if it was just that time of the month for Skill videos… it’s a bit late to be adding his entry to that post, but then, he calls his ‘Not a Skill Video‘ anyway. 2:37, 7.4 mb. I liked the Zanzibar sword-carrier beatdown, myself. Update: Bonekin decided to get in on the ‘no skillz’ action… he put together Noobs Gone Wild, with plenty of clips showing what NOT to do in a Live game. 16.8 mb, WMP9 format, hosted by That Weasel.

Yesterday, Bungie posted a new Cheating FAQ, a collection of information about what constitutes cheating, what doesn’t, and what happens to cheaters. If you’re at all curious about whether that trick you’re exploiting will get you into trouble in the long run, or whether the team that just beat you by stealing the flag from under your nose 3 times in 2 minutes will ever be punished… you should read this. Amusingly, just a day before, some moron chose to cheat in a Team Skirmish game that contained… bentllama. (How dumb do you have to be to cheat against a well-known Bungie employee?) Go read llama’s description of the event… and maybe start a pool with some buddies on how fast this guy’s gonna end up banned. (Certainly faster than if he cheated against, say, you…)

As a cap to a truly spectacular day, content-wise, we’d like to offer you a few gorgeous images. Swing by our Craig Mullins Halo gallery for a full version of the Arbiter and Master Chief image used in today’s Sneaking wallpaper from Bungie. (There’s a more recent version of this image – one that has an energy sword and some beautiful lighting changes – but we can’t release it yet.) You’ll also find ‘Brute Kick’, ad stunning pic of the MC taking out a Brute – and a sketch of that image, in progress. Thanks to Bungie for the permission to post these, and to Craig for the images themselves! Enjoy.

Three brand-new wallpapers have been released on Bungie.net – and man… there’s some classy stuff there. Mister Chief, in a classic WinXP setting… Delta Halo, in all its glory… and a recently-leaked Craig Mullins piece, reworked by Shishka for your screen. (There’s some good background in Sketch’s writeup about this piece.) Go look, go download, go change your desktop.

Mike Miller has come to be known as a pretty amazing campaign player; if you don’t know the name, you haven’t been reading our news. The man has graciously agreed to share his knowledge and skills with the Halo community; we will gradually be releasing a Legendary Walkthrough of Halo 2, created by Mike. It contains general tips, specific strategies, and, because images sometimes teach better than words, video supplements for showing off techniques. Right now, we’ve got an Introduction (with plenty of general hints for Legendary-specific gameplay), and a walkthrough of Cairo Station, complete with 11 individual videos (in both QuickTime and WMP9 formats). Please – grab only what you need; our bandwidth has been hammered pretty hard this month. Thanks! And thanks to Mike, for the start of what looks to be a spectacular resource!

Hehe – over on the Marty Army forum at Bungie.net, Marty posted the following suggestion (you have to be a member of the Marty Army to be able to see this):

The Marty Army members should all demand to see the video of Frankie attempting to “sing” Billie Jean. Talk about price.

FugitiveSoldier has put up a poll on the Bungie.net forums asking whether people agree – at the moment, it’s 7-0 in favor. (Heck, Marty – if you can shoot me a copy of the vid, I’ll happily host it here, in case you’re being blocked by the Online Team…) Thanks to FugitiveSoldier for pointing out the b.net post on our own forum.

OMG Finn’s not dead OMG! Big ol’ update over at the Halo Story page today. Some of this is old stuff to forum regulars, some is not. There’s definitely some grist for the speculation mill! Go read. (Don’t forget to check out Jillybean’s addition from last week; it was just a single tidbit, so I forgot to post news about it… but it’s definitely thought-provoking!)

The Red vs Blue crew is at the Sundance Film Festival this week… and the Salt Lake Tribune has found them interesting enough to warrant a feature. A nice general overview… go read! (They see a million downloads a week? That’s… um, like 25 or 30 terabytes or so. Gah.) Thanks, ICDedPpl.

That Weasel writes to let us know that Grunts Are People Too!!! has a new episode up… Project GN? What’s going on? In WMP9, QuickTime, and DivX formats, 7-13 mb, depending.

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, felt disgusted enough by the reaction of the school board decision in Puyallup to block a Halo 2 tournament that would benefit tsunami victims that he’s written a retort. It’s interesting to see WHY he’s annoyed… it’s not the action, it’s the reasons BEHIND the action, and what those reasons might lead to. Go read. Update: Looks like there’s some funkiness in Rampancy’s code at the moment; if you try to read it without being logged in, you’ll get a php error. The solution is simple: visit Rampancy’s front page, and log in first.

David Galindo has made a few movies for the Halo community – they’ve all been received pretty well. He’s made a new one… this one’s called ‘Explosions in the Sky’. This one takes a look at the power of heavy weapons, with some amazing camera work. You can grab it from either bungie.org (QuickTime, 24.5 mb | WMP9, 30 mb) or mythica.org (QuickTime | WMP9). There are a couple of screenshots on the Videos page of David’s The Sights of Halo 2 website.

Thanks to Cody Brigan, who notified us that the Mister Chief contest being run by misterchief.com is now over – with the winners announced! Some pretty cool stuff came out of this one. (Mr. Brigan, not totally coincidentally, was the grand-prize winner, with a funny Flash tidbit.) Go watch. (Warning: Stuntmutt’s entry might be considered unsafe for work. Or at least scary.)

Yesterday (well, 2 days ago by this system clock, but trust me, it was yesterday), (GT)Juggler posted a note on our forum about a new movie he’d made. GT 14 – You Slay Me is 4 minutes long, and 26-31 mb large, depending on the version you get. It’s a departure from his last few vids – no modding, just gameplay and nice effects. The initial rush should be over; it was announced on High Impact Halo yesterday… but for folks who haven’t grabbed it yet, there are a few options: Halo GT has a bunch of links to the original MPEG-4-encoded version; that one weighs in at 31.3 mb, and is best viewed with a current version of QuickTime. We’ve re-encoded it as a more-compatible QuickTime, as well as in WMP9 format (both about 26 mb) – if the MPEG-4 doesn’t work for you, go ahead and grab one of these. While you’re checking out gameplay vids, our forum was hit with a few other links today: WaLKa posted his Halo 2 Montage, and quertykd posted TheSkills. Must have been the weekend for polishing the movies! Update: trigger119 just pointed out ‘Bullets’, a new vid from his clan, Vypers. 22 mb, WMP9 format.

The 2004 Winter Pentathlon is over… and the writeup has been posted at Bungie.net. A masterpiece of spin, written by Newbies and Middle-schoolers attempting to downplay the TOTAL CARNAGE that was Old-School this year… it’s a fun read. Check it out. (I gotta say, though, the Karaoke vid starring Cher O’Donnell is… disturbing.)

Bungie has continued their long-dormant series of ‘what’s it like to work here’ articles, this time with an interview with Steve Cotton, one of the lead multiplayer map designers. Interesting read, though Steve sounds a bit… brainwashed. Or maybe it’s just hogtied. Thanks, Frankie.

Captain Spark has updated his collection of dialogue snippets – you can grab a new batch of 48 zipped files over at his website, or search for them piece by piece in our Dialogue Databank. (The reason ours says 45 results and his says 48 is because there were a few that were improvements on existing clips.)

Yesterday, High Impact Halo posted a note about a new jumping vid from Kahai_maluu and the Jump Tactics team; is this a new sport? (Some of the atmosphere reminds me a lot of skateboarders, actually.) The movie is a monster – over 50 mb for 15 minutes of jumping hijinx on Lockout – and it’s some pretty amazing stuff. Amazing, as in you had no idea how far the Bungie physics could be pushed before now. Duke’s note put a serious strain on Mythica’s servers (they spiked somewhere near 120 Mbit/sec last night), so HALOChat has tossed the file up at Filefront, as well as made it available via BitTorrent – grab the links from his forum post. WMP9 format; folks who can’t view that can save themselves the huge download. I dunno… this is just gonna make me MORE frustrated when I fall off a ledge on Lockout… these guys would have just jumped across to another walkway, or something. Go watch.