Ten new pieces in the Fan Fiction queue were approved today – many new series started! Go see what you can find.

Trigun mentions that there’s a new episode of Halo: On Vacation as well as a new Flash episode of That Halo Parody over at the 7th Revolution. (Well, it’s really at Newgrounds, but it’s LISTED at the 7th Revolution. Or something.)

foxygrandpa117 completed another one of those ‘wow-this-is-gonna-take-a-while’ tricks by bringing a Hunter to the bottom of the security shaft in Silent Cartographer. Read his forum post, watch the procedure (6.3 mb, WMP9 format, hosted by Mythica) and TELL me you wouldn’t go insane doing that.

mrsmiley points out that Halo Babies has a new Guest Strip from Polarbear. The things you never wondered about as a kid…

In response to many, many, MANY questions about submissions to our various sections, I’ve finally written up a set of guidelines – they SHOULD help you get your content to us. (They’ll also tell you what we’re not willing to put up.) Questions or suggestions, as always, can be sent to us via email. You’ll find a new ‘Submissions’ link in the navbar, for easy access.

Several folks have pointed out the ‘plasma grenade’ reference in today’s Foxtrot comic; it’s pretty oblique, as Halo references go, but hey… Foxtrot is funny.

Gamestyle Offline (a downloadable PDF-formatted magazine available from the Gamestyle website) has a 2-page Halo 2 preview in its latest issue, 8. Thanks to HaloPlanet for the heads-up on this.

Apologies for the outage yesterday on our Subnova-hosted server; it killed several of the updates on yesterday’s news page. It’s back up, however, and we’ve got ANOTHER 10 wallpapers from the queue for you in our Wallpaper section; this gets us near the end of July. Soon… soon.

Poop Scoop has transcribed another trio of Halo music pieces – ‘The Maw’, ‘On a Pale Horse’, and Edgen’s ‘Halo: Master and Chief’ – and put up the sheet music (in pdf format), a midi version, and a Finale file for each piece. You can find all of this over at Rampancy.net. Nice! Update: I forgot; you won’t see a ‘download’ link on the individual pages unless you’re logged in. (Registration is free.)

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a theater in Logan, Utah, using their screens for Halo-playing late at night. bentllama ran across another story of the same theater – with a LOT more detail. An interesting read. (Don’t mind the forum thread in which everyone tells him to search first; he’s bentllama, after all.)

Halo continues to make inroads in the fashion world, as Pallor points out that the September issue of InStyle puts an Xbox with Halo in their “What’s Hot Now” section, along with a list of celebrity fans including Justin Timberlake and Julia Roberts. As with last time, it’s good to see new audiences start paying attention to video games in general.

Yep, Subnova’s down again, taking with it some sections of this site. We’re working on it.

Just a quick heads-up; if you play Halo PC or Halo CE on WinXP, and you’re considering updating to SP2… be careful. At the very least, read this thread on the Gearbox forums. I have a pretty untweaked machine; it gets used for very, very little besides Halo. I’d kept up on all the updates prior to SP2, and never had a problem. My Radeon 9600 uses the newest 4.8 drivers. I made sure to open all the appropriate ports in my XP firewall. I updated to DirectX 9.0c. (All of this was prior to SP2, and both Halo PC and Halo CE ran smoothly.) However, after the update, when I fired up Halo CE, I got a ‘Direct3D failed to initialize’ error, with a suggestion that I check dxdiag. No errors were found, all appropriate functions were enabled. Nothing I could do would get CE to start, however. I uninstalled SP2, and all is well again. Just one guy’s story.

(GT)Juggler posted a Single player to multiplayer conversion map of the Hangar in the Maw. It’s Xbox-only, so you’ll need to have a modded Xbox to use it. You can find pictures and a download link on HaloMods. Looks pretty nice!

The Miscellaneous Art queue, as well, is going to be cleared out, 10 pieces at a time. The first 10 (dating back to late June) are up now. Once again, apologies to all the artists whose work has been neglected.

A couple of months ago, I cleared out the Wallpaper and Misc Art queues, and vowed not to let them get so backed up. Then I went and made a silly promise to someone – that I’d finish the backlogged Movies database before I added any more new content to either of these sections. This, of course, guaranteed another backup. Today, I begin the cleanout. I’ll be adding 10 wallpapers a day to the Wallpaper section until we’re clear. The first batch is up now – follow that link.

Only 4 new stories in the Fan Fiction section today – I was just clearing it out because I’ll be away from the keyboard all day, and I’m doing my best to clear the inbox first. Enjoy.

The weekly update has been posted at Bungie’s own Bungie.net, and it’s a doozy. Not only is it much longer than updates tend to be, but it contains a great deal of specific information about parts of the game we’ve never heard about before, from evolving exploding buses to scary things that make you want to go wee. Some of the more interesting tidbits, to me, are the emphasis on asymmetrical maps (I’m looking forward to this, but I know there will be a huge amount of complaining by hardcore CTFers) and the revelation that Halo 2 will not have load points- new areas will be loaded “in the background” without interrupting play. Check it out! Update: Frankie wanted to clarify that there are load points – plenty of them, of varying length, between levels. They’ve just kept them minimal during levels. (update by lwu)

343GS.com has started Season 2 of its EchoFourNineteen comic series… this one is in Flash. Voice acting is funky… but animation is great. No comments about the plot. Check it out!

IGN recently put up a sizeable movie, labeled ‘Halo 2 Stuff’, on its Halo 2 media page. It’s available as a 320×240 WMP9 stream, for everyone, or a downloadable QuickTime (up to 315 mb in 640×480) for Insiders. What it IS is a (decent) shakeycam video of the Halo 2 presentation at the recent Leipzig Games Conference; Pete Parsons and Cam Payne played out the E3 2004 demo for the crowd. As far as footage goes, all of this is already on the web, in better quality… but the start of this video contains some pretty funny stuff. There are a couple of Nightmare-Armor-clad guys (that’s not the funny part)… and then the two show announcers try to get the crowd riled up for the demo, and finally (all in German, remember) start yelling ‘and here’s Pete Parsons!’, while pointing at Cam. (Pete wasn’t on stage yet.) Cam is quietly trying to let them know he’s not Pete – but they’re pretty much ignoring him. Eventually, they get the message, and there are a couple of minutes of fumbling while someone goes off and FINDS Pete. Dunno… I found the whole thing hilarious – and I don’t even speak German. (Pete, when he started the presentation, was cool as a cucumber.) Thanks to Art Vandelay for the heads-up.