We posted a magazine article with a tiny picture of a maskless grunt this afternoon – and people complained that they couldn’t really see it. Over on the Halo Story Page, mnemesis has heard your cries, and while he deplores whining, he sometimes enjoys serving up surprises.

Fourteen pieces for you today in the Fan Fiction section. To submitters: if you feel the need to stick a huge honking piece of material at the beginning of every chapter, with, say, your cast of characters… make SURE that the actual STORY CONTENT meets our word minimum requirement, or your piece will be rejected. (If, for example, your submission is 800 words, but 300 of those are your cast of characters that showed up in your LAST chapter… we’re tossing it.) Sorry – but if you can’t find enough to write about to actually FILL 750 words with content, you shouldn’t be submitting at all. And to the guy who submitted a 1000+ word story with almost no periods at all… don’t do that again. Thanks!

Thanks go out to Tim Alvner, who scanned an article from last month’s Superplay (a Swedish magazine) and sent it in. (The June issue is now on the shelves in Sweden, so we can put this up now.) You can find it in our Press Scans section. The highlight, for me, is a gorgeous Eddie Smith piece that spans a couple of pages… but there’s also a small pic of a maskless Grunt, which should ease the pain of the masses not able to find Xbox Gamer in the US. (The Xbox Gamer scans won’t go up for a couple of weeks, yet.) Take a look! (For most of us, this one is pictures-only… Swedish is a rough language if you don’t know it.)

Hehe – Xraf posted a note on Bungie.net’s Underground forum, with lyrics for a song called ‘We Will Frag You’, set to Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’. Sketchfactor jumped in and offered a bonus:

Someone record it to music and send in an .mp3 of it! I’ll send you a prize. =)

Sounds like a deal! (I’d guess that the offer only applies to the first mp3 he receives, though I don’t know for sure; you might wanna check with him for details.)

Mike Blanton writes that his clan, GaB, made a montage video recently; pretty much straight gameplay, but with some nice editing touches. It’s a big file (40.5 mb, mpeg1 format), and I have no idea how long his clan server can hold out serving it… but he said to post it, so I’m posting it.

Weirdness. Ducain has posted a vid he made from a videotape sent to him by TablesandChairs – there are a handful of totally out-of-place grunts on the top of Halo. They’re really up there (the vid shows them shooting and yelling, though not moving) – the question is how? Getting to that particular spot is not that hard, and several people (including Ducain) have done it/filmed it, and no grunts have ever been seen up there. So how did these guys get on top? It’s a mystery… Update: apparently, they WERE moving, on the original tape; that footage just got cut out.

A new modding team has started up – the Zanzibar Project has posted its first weekly update on both the Halomods forum and the Gearbox forum. (It’s pretty interesting reading the comments on the two sites – totally different feel to the communities.) They’re reproducing the Zanzibar map for Halo CE. No word yet on a timeline. Thanks to Stefander for the heads-up.

Sector 7 has put up a new episode of Marines, their local comic strip. It pokes fun at their server’s flakey connection. Thanks to Wolfy for the heads-up.

Calvin and Halo reminds me to remove all the televisions from my house, before my kids get home from school.

What the…? Xbox Nation went to a fortuneteller to find out how Halo 2 was going to do. The prediction – there will be legal issues, the ending will be weak, and a third game is in the works. Predicted score: 7/10. This article has got to take the ‘silliest article from a respected gaming mag’ award. Earliest heads-up goes to Jeremy Hay, who found it last night.

Sketchfactor, over at Bungie.net, has put up their site stats for the past couple of months… and they’ve been doing some business! 28 million pageviews in 9 weeks; that’s some serious bandwidth! (I guess I’d worry more about the 4 death threats in that timeframe, though…) As a measure of how busy their forums are, they’ve seen 177,000 forum posts since April 13 – HBO’s forum, which is pretty darn busy, you ask me, has seen about 30,000 in that time period. Keep ’em going! (Thanks to pilotelite for noticiing the news story.)

Deimos, of Subnova, spent a LONG time hunting through deviantART and came up with a list of 17 unique wallpapers that aren’t also hosted here. Some of them are quite nice!

• My First Car
• Halo -True Soldier-
• Red vs Blue
• Master Chief
• Halo 2
• Halo Sketch
• Halo photograph…nearly…
• 7th Column: We’re Everywhere 4
• Earth’s Halo
• Falling
• MCGhost
• 7equalsMarathon
• Halo Covenant Wallpaper
• Pelican: Hell’s Bird
• Belly of the Pelican
• Halo Bliss 2
• Halo 2 Wallpaper

(There are others, but they were either submitted to HBO as well, or stolen from other sites (unattributed to the original authors), so we haven’t linked to them.)

Hehe – nice. Owl found a fun Halo-related issue of Aikida, a web comic. Good stuff.

For a very long time, we’ve been threatening to automate our Links page; there are new sites all the time, and we’ve been awful about both posting them on our news page and adding them to our Links page. All that’s about to change – because it’s an automated system now. If you have a Halo site you’d like to add to our Links page, visit our Links Submission page and drop in your info. We’ll do our best to approve submissions at least every day. (It can’t be FULLY automated, because of all those yucky people who’d fill the list with porn links and such if we allowed it.) I’ve gone through the current links page and pruned all the dead ones – if you’ve submitted your link to us in the past 6 months, you’re probably not on this list, so drop an entry on the submission page!

Andy writes to point out a Halo tournament with a $50 grand prize (no entrance fee). It’s totally unclear from the documentation, but I’m guessing (since ping is mentioned on one page) that we’re talking about an online tourney using Halo PC. (It could be an Xbox tourney using XBC, though – you might want to check with them to be sure. Signup closes in 11 days (June 25th), but there doesn’t seem to be an actual contest date posted yet. More information can be found on the tourney site, if you’re diligent.

Steve wants to point out that today is the last day for submissions for the First Annual Enkidu Fan Fiction Contest.

We’ve added last week’s Bungie Weekly Update to our Update archive – it’s a good place to find stuff like, say, the fact that Lorraine popped up this week for the first time since E3. (Sorry you’re sick, Lorraine!) Sometimes just browsing the entire collection can be fun (careful, thought, it’s over 150k of text by now).

Well, nobody found the Chief and Sarge after that nasty explosion on Friday… but I guess they’re like the cat, they just couldn’t stay away. MC, at least, is back in today’s One One Se7en, and he’s met up with a new friend (the Xbox Gamer magazine scans that this guy came from will be posted in a couple of weeks, when that issue is off the shelves). And that wraps up our Comic trilogy for the day. I hope.

Captain Keyes shows off his unusual thinking in today’s Halo: Resolution.

Ack! I forgot to post this yesterday; SESpider submitted the next episode of Miniature Halo. Very nice layout work by PsYcHoDaN, in addition to the photography and story work by Spider himself. Check it out!