MarkHawk points out a new Subzero Rivalries comic – takes a shot at Halo’s AI, I think.

Stuntmutt proves that even Cortana is not immune to the corrupting influence of One One Se7en.

Halo Babies has posted their 50th strip today – and it’s a cliffhanger. There’s also some information on meeting these guys at the Halo50k Seattle event, coming up at the end of August. Go visit!

A couple of months ago, we mentioned the UXB web-based Halo server database. This has now moved to a new home at UXB’s recently launched Halo Maps website, a home for map downloads and HaloPC/Halo CE information. The site has no ads – just good, solid Halo info. Check it out!

Strato has found a Master Chief skin for UT2004; you can see pictures and grab a copy (4.8 mb) from FileFront. Nice colors!

Thanks to Wado, who was the driving force behind the new Comments solution to the Fan Fiction section. Stories will continue to be posted in the usual manner – but comments are now handled on the Fan Fiction Forum. (Each story gets its own thread, and you can either follow the ‘Read/Post Comments’ link from the story itself, or backtrack from the comments page for a given story – the first post will always have a link to the story it’s attached to.) If you want to post comments, you’ll need to register on the forum; it’s a standard phpBB install, so comments section moderators will now have far more control over abuse than the old system had. You cannot post new topics, and you cannot reply to existing ones unless you’re registered. The system went live yesterday, with no fanfare, with just the dozen or so stories posted since the Comments section was taken offline – but it now contains today’s Fan Fiction update (another 18 stories). Please read the FAQ and the Guidelines that Wado’s been so kind as to write up – and enjoy the new functionality!

Bill Daiber and his crew were another winning team in the Mountain Dew/Halo 2 contest – he’s sent us his writeup of the experience, and the pictures that won them their seats, for the fans to read. You’ll find the info in our Miscellaneous section.

A couple of days ago, we posted a note suggesting that Eric Trautmann might not have left the Halo universe entirely. An email from Eric points out that we misinterpreted the blog entry – no matter WHAT happens to his job, he won’t be working on Halo. He IS looking forward to the wedding, though. Priorities – it’s all about priorities. And he’s got good ones.

Bah. Looks like Warbow got one last Calvin and Halo into the queue before he left for the summer – and I missed it on Tuesday. It’s posted now. When you play a game, you should always think the rules through before you start.

MasterGrief points out an ‘Advertisement Campaign for Halo CE‘ over on the Halomods forum. In actuality, it’s a video made by Aztec showing gameplay on Fissure Falls – but who am I to argue? Available in high and low resolutions (bizarrely, the screensize of the ‘low-res’ version is larger than that of the ‘hi-res’ version, though it DOES have a lower bitrate). DivX-encoded .avi, 11.2 or 14.7 mb, depending on the version you grab.

Direct downloads of the Keyes winning run of our Going Nowhere Fast contest are now available; visit the GNF Status page for your choices. Quick Update on BitTorrent stats for the contest vids in general – 12,000 total downloads have been handled by the network, accounting for 1.2 terabytes over the past couple of weeks. (Our normal bandwidth needs haven’t decreased because of this contest – this number is in ADDITION to what we normally handle.) Direct downloads account for another very large chunk of bandwidth – I don’t have exact numbers, because I don’t have access to all the server logs, but I’m guessing it’s on the same order as the BT downloads. For this particular series of downloads, BitTorrent made a HUGE bandwidth requirement tolerable for our network of self-supported servers.

Last week, the Mountain Dew/Halo 2 contest ended, and a few teams got email that they’d won. Two of these teams showed up at Bungie headquarters last Saturday, and now one of the participants has written up his experience. 3 solid hours of Halo 2 netplay on Zanzibar is definitely enough to get a feel for what the game is like – and they liked. Lots and lots of details – some of these came out from folks who played at E3, but face it, it’s much harder to nail down details when you’ve only got 10-15 minutes to play. Lots of stuff, like sniper recoil or shorter melee range, point out tweaks that Bungie has added to make gameplay more balanced; folks who’ve gotten fat exploiting the old status quo will probably be unhappy, but for the average player, the game just got better. Check it out! Thanks to JNewt for the heads-up.

Halo Zone has posted a collection of ultra-hi-res screenshots; while most have been available from other sources (the 1920×1080 screen grabs from the Halo ad are new), they haven’t all been in one place before. If you want multi-thousand-pixel Halo 2 goodness, and you couldn’t be bothered to scour the web for these… visit Halo Zone, and grab them all in one place! Update: Eep – apparently this site attempts to install a suite of spyware when viewing, including Bargain Buddy and Internet Optimizer. If you’re viewing it on a Windows box, beware. Sorry about this. Thanks to P78 for the heads-up. Update 2: Problem fixed – ads removed. There should be no more trouble, according to Funkmon. (Thanks, Funkmon!)

NiTrOuSoXiDe has released a no-leading patch for Halo CE; it’s currently in beta-testing. To be used, both the server and the client need to have this installed for it to work (a download link is in that thread). If you’re finding that the changes in client-side prediction made in Halo CE made playing more difficult compared to HaloPC… give this a try! Thanks to MasterGrief for pointing out the thread.

In classic Stuntmutt fashion, today’s One One Se7en looks at an unintended consequence of a new Halo 2 feature. (No, it’s not bee-related.) If it makes no sense to you… use that mouse button.

The latest version of the Mac Halo Timer, now up to 1.5, has been announced. Lots of new features – if you’re running MacOSX 10.3 or higher, and you want to keep track of spawn times for various items, this puppy’s for you!

The final winning run for our Going Nowhere Fast contest, Trevor Fitch’s Maw run, is now available for download via BitTorrent. Once again – it hasn’t been mentioned for a bit, so here is a BitTorrent client download link. This run is really efficient – no deaths at all, and some really classy moments. 82 mb, QuickTime format. Go grab it! Now that all 10 winning runs have been released, we’re ready to begin consideration of the Grand Prize winner – these 10 runs, plus 20 more, will be analyzed for style and speed, and the run that comes out on top of the heap will garner for its owner a brand-new Limited-Edition Halo Xbox. Expect an announcement sometime next week.

While I was out last night, a huge thread erupted on our forum, arguing about my choice yesterday to ban the use of the word ‘bee’ from forum posts. I’ve been accused of stifling speculation, of favoritism, and of limiting new fans from entering the Halo community (among other sins). In my defense, I’d like to say that I really do believe the ilovebees campaign is Halo 2-related, and that it comes from official sources… but I DON’T believe those sources are inside Bungie. And my biggest problem with the entire phenomenon (at least here at HBO) is that there is ZERO ORGANIZATION. The day this story broke, there were over 800 forum posts on the subject. If someone had filtered them for new and unique information, however, I bet there were fewer than 25… all the rest were simply restating finds that had already been found. (On Bungie.net, the signal-to-noise ratio was even worse; there were 5000 posts that first day or so, and only a tiny fraction contained new information.) Without organization, this puzzle is nothing more than an annoyance. There is some wonderful organization out there – at the NetninjaBeeWiki site, at the unfiction forums, and elsewhere – but NOT HERE. And THAT’S why I asked that discussion be taken elsewhere. It’s likely that this puzzle will provide a ton of fodder for the Halo Story page, and that an after-the-fact analysis will show that it was hugely productive in building hype for Halo 2 – but for now, other, non-bee-related material is becoming harder and harder to process because of the roar, and I’m simply not capable of doing it all. (There’s a great article on the subject, summing up my personal views pretty well, up over at Gamespot right now. Worth a read.)

Update on this morning’s outage at Subnova; looks like a storm took out power for a good chunk of the evening. Things are getting back to normal, so everything that used to be running on halosn (including Fan Fiction) is back up again.