Calvin and Halo shows why it’s not always a good idea to try and outsmart your parents.

Quick note for Red vs Blue Super Sponsors; you should check the Sponsors page for a link to a ‘Subscription Serviecs Manager’ – you need to make sure they have the right address by June 30. They’re printing mailing labels on July 1, and you won’t be able to change things after that.

The recent release of new hi-res screenshots from Bungie finally got me off my duff to update our Screenshots database; it’s finally up-to-date. 193 shots were added today… not a bad day’s work!

mnemesis sent word that he’s updated the Halo Story Page again – it’s a big ‘un. He’s been impressed recently with the quality of submissions… keep it up, folks! Update: And Wado explains WHY the quality is up.

Because of the massive influx of new sites in our Links database, we’ve added a small ‘New’ graphic to indicate when a site’s been added in the last week. (Thanks, Paul!) It seems some of you haven’t noticed that your site was added, and submitted again… maybe this will help.

Blade, at Teamhalo.net, put together a 6:26 long video (WMP9 format) showing gameplay on the upcoming New Mombasa map, using the Halo 2 Mod. (This is a huge team effort from a lot of talented people that mostly hang out on the Gearbox forums – a recent update on the project can be found here.) Blade’s movie is available in both high (640×480, 35.1 mb) and low (320×240, 15.4 mb) versions. His video card doesn’t really do the map the justice it deserves… but you can certainly get a great flavor of its size and scope, as well as how the new weapons work. Registration (free) is required for download.

Wow. Frankie has posted an awesome interview/picture cornucopia over on Bungie.net; a discussion with Jeremy Zoss, Associate Editor of Game Informer magazine (about GI’s visit to Bungie in preparation of last month’s article), and a collection of more than a dozen VERY high resolution images (screenshots and concept art) that were eventually used in the story. If you’ve read the magazine (or our press scan), you’ve seen the pictures… but not like this. Go read! First heads-up seems to be from Wolfy, of Sector 7.

That maskless grunt has been the talk of our forums today. Even Sarge is getting into the act – check out One One Se7en.

Halo: Resolution puts a Spartan in orbit… in a non-regulation orbital device. Good thing that armor can withstand hard vacuum!

Awesome. A week ago, Chilton mentioned a G4TV program in which John Mayer (the musician) was playing Halo with his friends. The thread didn’t go anywhere, because you either have G4 on your cable/satellite system, or you don’t. We got mail from Brian Graham, asking us WHY it didn’t go anywhere, given that anyone could watch this segment. What…? Well, it turns out that a Mayer fan puts up videos like this on his website; this one is available via BitTorrent, as a 63 mb, 640×480 DivX-encoded clip (6:19 long). It’s also available via ftp, if you have trouble with the torrent seed… but that bandwidth is pretty limited, you’re FAR better off trying to BT it. It’s a really fun piece; he spends some of it talking about the video games he grew up in (and, not surprisingly, the music in them), but the last half is all Halo gameplay/player interaction stuff. He’s a pretty funny guy, and this is worth watching.

Wow. Seems like there was some pent-up demand, that’s for sure – in the first day and a half since we posted our link submission form, we’ve added 50 sites to our Links page. We’ve had to reject a bunch of entries – folks who submitted sites with no Halo content, or sites that aren’t running yet, or Seventh Column chapters – and in a couple of cases, sites which take more than 80% of their content from us, and even go so far as to simply LINK TO OUR VERSIONS of that content, rather than host it locally… but in general, I’d have to say this seems like a rousing success, and one that allows us to add your link to our Links page without the delay incurred by having to wait for me to find time to do this. Keep up the submissions!

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.