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!

Fuzion found a new gameplay clip over at Kikizo.com, flimed on the sly at E3. It’s only 27 seconds long, but you get a decent view of some weapons that haven’t gotten a lot of show so far. Clarification: seems my wording might suggest there are new, never-before-seen weapons in this footage; that’s not the case. It’s just that there are short clips showing the plasma rifle and shotgun clearly in first-person mode, something that other clips haven’t shown much of. Sorry to get your hopes up.

Gah. In the mad rush to format 60 wallpaper submissions in the past few days, we managed to skip over a pretty amazing entry; it was released on the Red vs Blue site a few weeks ago – and we asked then if we could include it here. Nesnora said yes, so I added it to the queue – and even got as far as adding it to the ‘images to be processed’ yesterday. Somehow, though, it didn’t get uploaded. Maybe I felt it needed its own entry, on some level. In any case, it’s in our Wallpaper section now. Enjoy!

Dunno what the weather’s like where you are… but it’s pretty darn gorgeous here. I’ve just come in for a quick Fan Fiction queue-clearing, and there are now 18 new pieces for you to read. Go get ’em!

Dolbex, of Halo50K fame, has put together a nice retrospective of his local group, Been Mawed. It’s mostly interviews of group members, with some screenshots and a tiny bit of gameplay thrown in; if this sounds boring, don’t bother downloading it. It is, however, a great view into how groups like this get together, and what the cameraderie can bring to each member – and the composition is quite nice, as well. (These guys are quite good, overall. Not your average clan.) It’s sort of long (11:43), and big (64.1 mb, even though I’ve compressed the hell out of it), in QuickTime format. Some of the visual artifacts were there when I got the film, others were added by the heavy crunching. None of it takes away from the value of the retrospective. We’ve put up a pair of mirrors, to decrease bandwidth strain – you can find a copy on Mythica.org and another on files.bungie.org. If you decide you can host this as well, send us a link!

Because it’s no fun to be a Desktop creator and see 30 desktops get posted and realize that yours wasn’t among them, we’ve posted the NEXT batch of 30 – you can find them in our Wallpaper section. This MOSTLY brings us up-to-date, wallpaper-wise. Hopefully, at some point soon, the Miscellaneous Art queue can be similiarly attacked.

I posted a new Mailbag update last night, but it took me until now to recover sufficiently to post news about it. Enjoy.

There’s a new Frontline with Suzie posted, titled ‘Cancel Christmas!‘; this one is an interview with Sarge. Thanks, heavy shift.

Massive Bungie Weekly Update this week – you can find it over at Forerunners.org. You may THINK there’s nothing more to do, when they’re so close to wrapping up… but you’d be wrong. They’re all pretty busy. Read the update to see HOW busy. Proximity voice? How cool is THAT?

A few weeks ago, we mentioned a rumor that had surfaced in a recent issue of EGM – that there was a possibility of a Game Boy Advance Halo title in the works. Today, Frankie puts that rumor to bed over on Bungie.net. Personally, the fact that the ColecoVision talks fell apart is more of a shocker… but things are what they are. Followup: Interesting; there’s a note in the IGN Gameboy Mailbag about this very rumor, including an answer to Frankie’s post. (Scroll down to ‘Mini Master Chief’.)

We, of course, all can go back and forth…but I’m sticking to my guns on this. I’ve been told by multiple development sources that a Halo GBA project has at least been in the “looking into” stages since before Christmas. Anything can happen between now and then, of course, but don’t expect it until 2005 if production moves forward.

I don’t think anyone’s lying here – but it makes you wonder, is there some Marketing guy somewhere spreading this story around, in an effort to make it happen by fan pressure alone? Fun fun fun. Thanks to Ash, who found this on Shacknews.