Dispraiser has posted Weekly Update 3 for Halogen, the C&C Generals total conversion, over on the Junkyard forums. New renders, discussion of vehicles, and a units list… give it a read!

MLGPro.com has interviewed Zyos, one of the top pro Halo gamers on the scene right now, about what it’s like to be a pro gamer. In addition, if you live in the Atlanta area, you can stop by the Lennox Mall Gamestop between 5 and 7 pm this Friday, and maybe get the chance to play him. (If you beat him, you get free admission to MLG Atlanta – 50k3, kicking off this weekend.) Go check it out!

Walshicus has updated his Halo Stellar Cartography submission to include data about every star on the map. Simply click on the map thumbnail to get started exploring. This, I think, is beginning to qualify as an obsession.

That Weasel Television, in conjunction with Mother’s Tooth and HaloRules.com, is launching its first all original, all exclusive, Halo series called “Grunts Are People Too!!!” Original music, grunty action, dead grunts. What more could you want? (Some episodes don’t seem to be uploaded yet, but give it time.)

Hmm. Looks like I forgot to update the Weekly Bungie Updates archive last week – but it’s now up-to-date. An awful lot of content in these past two updates… things are really coming along. See, for example, the progress on the lightmap farm – back in february, it was just getting built – now it’s a critical piece of the puzzle, so much so that a crash causes a loss of a day. Ouch!

Ducain has announced a new contest – The Three Towers. Put stuff on the Blue Beam towers, win cool schwag. How great is that?

If today’s One One Se7en makes no sense, you’re not reading Bungie’s Top Stories closely enough.

The cast Halo: Resolution are getting out… maybe.

Stefander points out the latest Zanzibar weekly update, over at Halomods – the energy sword is really coming along, and some other guns are being modeled. Take a look!

Cyber Gaming Network has posted a Halo 2 preview; it’s a solid read, combining info from the E3 demo and recent press without going TOO far out on the speculation limb. (It’s an update of a much shorter preview they wrote after E3 2003; the URL hasn’t changed.) Give it a read…

aiMutation is a Windows program for modifying the appearance of the AOL Instant Messenger. Recently, a new skin was released with a Halo theme. Thanks to Baldev Patel for the heads-up.

Many of you probably saw threads on various Halo or Xbox forums this weekend about leaked beta screenshots. Bungie has yet to make a public announcement about this (it’s unlikely that they ever will, actually), but there are many clues that suggest that these aren’t fakes; that they did, in fact, come from a beta version of Halo 2. I wanted to take a moment to state our official policy on leaks like this, and to explain why I think they’re a problem. We will NOT allow links to these pictures to be posted to our forum – as we find them, we’ll remove them, and if people persist, they’ll be banned. As one of our admins posted last night, if you can’t find them for yourself, that’s YOUR problem. Many folks are asking what the big deal is – they’re just screenshots, and not even very exciting ones… who cares? Putting aside the legal issues (which aren’t actually minor), there’s a really good reason to keep pics like this away from the public… many casual gamers don’t realize that a beta version is NOT a final version. Often, there are elements that have been added specifically for beta testers – debugging information, or extra on-screen displays, so that testers can provide useful feedback to the creation team. (Beta testing isn’t a game; that should have been made clear from the recent Bungie.net article. It’s pretty serious business.) When beta shots hit the public, though, many people are oblivious to the fact that they’re looking at a test image. We’ve already had folks griping on our forum about how cluttered the HUD looks, and how disappointed they are in Bungie for putting so much crap onscreen. Others read these comments, maybe without even looking at the pictures themselves, and the ideas spread… and before too long, there’s buzz about how crappy the interface of Halo 2 is. Only… it’s NOT the interface of Halo 2 – it’s the interface for BETA TESTERS. Boiled down: the final product can NOT be judged by the appearance of an early beta – but because many people can’t make distinctions like that, pictures of early betas do NOT belong in the public eye.

Massive content update over at Halo Babies – new fan art, a new fan STRIP section, and some credit stuff. w00t!

Brand-new layout at XboxOttawa… and with it comes a new Flash game called Melee Combat. It’s a bit hard on your keyboard… Go play. Thanks, Mantis819.

Dark Helmet posted a small video showing his own Marine Launching techniques yesterday, on the High Impact Halo forums – he shows that Marines take no fall damage, no matter HOW FAR they fall (or what hits them)… but more importantly, he’s invented a new sport – Halo Trap, using marines as the pidgeons. Hmm… there might be ethical problems with that. To save on DH’s bandwidth, we’ve made both his original WMP9 film (5.2 mb) and a QuickTime conversion (5.6 mb) available from here. Thanks, Ducain, for pointing this out. Update; Dark Helmet clarifies a few points about fall damage and marines. They CAN get killed from it, my mistake. They can take a heck of a lot more punishment than you can, however…

A full-blown website devoted to Mac Halo development has been opened – it existed, in a much simpler and less interactive form, on HaloMods, but it now has a site of its own, and a much more extensive layout. If you’re a Mac user interested in modding Halo, check it out! (Thanks, Nick.)

c0ld vengeance, with a little help from his friends, has put together a series of Mosaic pictures – 5 can be found in this forum post, and one more in this followup. The software used to make these is linked from here. Intriguing views…

It’s Monday, so there’s lots of action on the Going Nowhere Fast front. The sixth level run – 343 Guilty Spark – is now available for download via BitTorrent, to begin with. It’s a 58 mb file; 7:41 to dash from the Pelican dropoff to the final pickup spot, and the first use of the purple boxes as traditional videogame crates – making the Time to Crate value rather high for Halo overall. Watch this run; you’ll find some amazing ways to shave a few seconds off here, a few seconds there… Also, since it’s been three days since Sean Oehrle’s Assault on the Control Room run was made available via BT (an even 1000 downloads, as of right now), we’ve provided direct download links for this 52 mb film. You’ll find them on the Status page. (Thanks, once again, to all the mirror sites for these files; BitTorrent alone has served over 900 GB worth of movies in the past 10 days, but the direct download links have accounded for hundreds of gigabytes more; we couldn’t do it without you guys.

c0ld vengeance has apparently made his opinion about the 2-day European delay for Halo 2 known… and today’s One One Se7en addresses his concerns. Sort of.

Ten new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section… and a special-case instruction. Wado SG asked me how folks could submit their entries to the now-defunct Enkidu Fan Fiction contest and have them all be grouped together; I suggested using the Series Title field. Wado reminded me that this is normally tied to the author’s name… so it’s not settable on the submission form, as it currently exists. Rather than recode the form to allow for this special case, it would be easier for me if people submitting their Enkidu stories would simply drop me an email with the name of their story – I’ll link them all from this end. Again – this is ONLY for this one special case. If you would like to submit your Enkidu entry to the HBO Fan Fiction section, and have it readable with all OTHER submitted entries – send me the name of the story after you submit it. Thanks!