A couple of months ago, Bungie ran a contest called the ‘Launch Week Prizetacular’ – they gave away cool stuff to randomly-selected B.net members. The second prize was a Limited Edition Xbox Console – and last night, rapture showed up in the #hbo irc channel with pictures. Seems Joyeuse finally received his prize, and posted up shots on the Gearbox forum. A Limited Edition Xbox… signed by all Bungie employees. How cool is that?

We got word from Dolbex about a fun contest sponsored by MLG: Impress ‘Your Mom’, win free entrance to 50k3. The details: come up with the coolest multiplayer move ever, and ‘Your Mom’ (one of the Been Mawed crew, and a staff member of the 50k3 event) will give you a free ticket, an MLG t-shirt, and dogtags. Full rules can be found on the MLG site. Deadline is 3 weeks from now… so get cracking!

Looks like Cortana.org has gone offline. A visit to the site gives a Denied message… and a visit to Forerunners.org, its parent site, shows a news post stating that it’s officially offline, with an explanation coming sometime in the future. Our links page has been updated.

MireL pointed out a glitch he found at Halo Online some time ago – it’s possible to climb out of the Pillar of Autumn, into space, through an airlock door. (The top pane of glass is passable by bodies, though not by bullets.) Goatrope quickly filmed the glitch (DivX format, 1.7 mb – I’ve also put up a QuickTime version of roughly the same size), and others in the thread confirmed that it works on both Xbox and PC. There’s not much to see outside… but it’s still fun to find areas like this!

Battleground: Halo has become HaloPlanet – an official Gamespy Planet site. A new look, tons of new content (check out the interview with NiTrOuSoXiDe), and lots more to come – there’s a welcome message from the site directors explaining where they’re hoping to go. Explore!

Recently, Saint’s been running some fun mini-contests on our forum, called ‘Where’s The Master Chief?’ An invisible MC is placed somewhere in a screenshot of a Halo level, and it becomes your job to find them. (We haven’t been front-paging these because the files are pretty huge (a front-page link might swamp psyjnir.org, the host), and because they’re being solved fast enough just with forum regulars participating.) Yesterday, he upped the stakes a bit; instead of just the warm glow of knowing you found him fastest, Saint offered to make custom screenshots for the winners of a 6-image contest. The contest is here (with an extra screen here, to fix a mixup) – the 6 winning images are here. A nice change of pace!

SFGate.com has put together a list of games coming out in the next 6 months that could keep you in your house – forever. (Like that’s a GOOD thing.) Halo 2 is on it.

A forum member reminded me that I’d been meaning to mention HaloTV again. This is a site which provides streaming versions of many popular Halo vids, including some content not available elsewhere. Recently, they opened a beta Red vs Blue channel… a great way to grab a random dose of the funniest Halo serial on the net. If you haven’t looked recently, check ’em out!

Calvin makes Hobbes happy (but not the converse) in today’s Calvin and Halo

A week ago, we mentioned an upcoming mod from Icetiger with low-gravity play and bots – it’s now available for beta download from Halomods. (If bandwidth runs out, there’s a mirror at Halo World and another at Fileplanet, as well.) If you’ve got Halo CE – give this map a shot, and send your feedback to Icetiger! Thanks to Battleground: Halo for the heads-up on this one.

This is just a reminder – midnight, EST, on July 1 is just under 64 hours from now. That’s the final deadline for all entries to the Going Nowhere Fast contest – if you plan on mailing a tape, now would be a VERY good time to do so. (And you should send it Second Day Air at the very slowest – anything slower, and you’re not guaranteed a delivery by the due date.) The more glitchable levels (Silent Cartographer, AotCR) and the foolable levels (PoA, 343GS) are honed down to a razor’s edge… but there is plenty of room for improvement on some of the less-attempted levels. For example, in the past 12 hours, we’ve received not one, but TWO entries for Keyes – both of which beat the existing fast time by many, many minutes. (Times will be posted once we’ve gotten the films into the hands of the judges.) Show us what you got! Remember, there’s lots of little schwag (books, action figures) and some pretty good BIG schwag (a special-edition Xbox) on the line…

ps2.ign.com has posted an article entitled ‘PS2 vs the World: Flagship Crushers’, in which they analyze other consoles’ top games, and how PS2 equivalents stack up. Page 6 is a look at Halo 2 – and all three reviewers acknowledge that there really is nothing on the PS2 that will compete with it. (All three check out the best contender – Killzone – and come to the conclusion that yeah, it’ll be good… but it won’t touch Halo 2.) Remember – these are hardcore PS2 fans. Thanks, Mr. Mongoose.

Want some cool wheels? You might just have to wait a few years. Check out the December 2551 issue of Car & Pilot, nicely posted by Frankie over at B.net. I want one of those.

What happens when you take spectacular game art, and let a spectacular wallpaper creator mess with it? You get something SketchFactor calls ‘Desktop Coolification‘. Check out the Bungie.net Wallpapers section for a fantastic new piece by Zoe, using Lorraine McLees artwork. Thanks to akba for the heads-up.

Konrad reminded me I forgot to post links to pictures taken at last weekend’s lanfest. (They weren’t very exciting… but hey, there were a bunch of HBO regulars there, so…) You can find a set from GT(Juggler) here, and another set from Konrad here. Funny comments from MIguel (who didn’t make it) on the GT shots.

The July issue of Xbox Gamer has hit the newsstands in the UK, so we’ve put the June Halo 2 article (scanned nicely by broony) into our Press Scans database. Some good stuff in there, though there’s obviously a lot of overlap with the other magazine articles published last month…

Fourteen new Fan Fiction pieces since the last update. Are you caught up?

A nice collection of desktop images have built up in the past couple of weeks – you can find 17 new choices in our Wallpaper section. Two that really stand out for me (mostly because of the custom artwork) are Mr Guy’s Boarding Action pic, and Eric Rodrigues’ Elite. Go look at everything, though!

In keeping with the mod updates, Homefront has posted one, too. Buildings, vehicles, landscapes… go check it out. Thanks, Pballwizard.

Poor Grunty in today’s One One Se7en.