Ten pieces for you today in the Fan Fiction section – looks like I should be doing these every-other-day updates more often! Go read…

Dave Kosak has written a funny little piece over at Gamespy on how he plans to increase his enjoyment of online Halo playing. Since it only took him 4 minutes (by his count) to write it, it shouldn’t take you very long to read it. Thanks to Finchmeister, among others, for pointing it out.

another episode of ‘Frontline with Suzie‘ has been posted; Calibrate this! has Suzie talking to Cortana. Thanks, heavy shift.

Spideroptics might have said it best – “It’s Bungie vs. BOLL. Who will win? Stay tuned.” BOLL’s latest shot over the bow is a custom 3d screenshot… and all I can say is WOW. (Hit left or right arrow, and watch the large plasma bolt’s leading edge crackle.) Because BOLL’s ISP sharply throttles traffic outside Scandinavian countries, you might want to look at our local mirror of this file (6.1 mb, Flash format), rather than the links in BOLL’s forum post.

Bungie’s Letters to the Webmaster have been updated again… and it looks like someone spiked his Thunderbird with battery acid again. If you’ve written a letter to the Webmaster recently, and you have skin that’s thinner than, say, the Pillar of Autumn’s hull plating, DON’T GO READ THIS. You’ll cry. The rest of you – go read. It’s like a 16-car pileup on the interstate… ugly, but you can’t look away. You HAVE to know if that spot is oil… or blood.

The world missed an awesome picture posted earlier this week in Bungie’s Gallery Forum – Alta, the Bungie Princess, wearing the height of Spartan fashion, the pink MC helmet (the Nightmare Armor guys have been working overtime). Achronos wasn’t willing to let this go by – so read his post, stop by the thread and add a caption!

Longtime Bungie fan Cunbelin has written a massive summary of the state of Halo Custom Edition and the Halo Editing Kit (though it’s missing some of the coolest new creations – you’ll have to follow his resource links at the end to find them), and SketchFactor has posted it over at Bungie.net. If you’re wondering what’s available, this is a great place to start.

There’s a fantastic new contest over at Bungie.net, instigated by Stosh and fueled by Lorraine McLees and Eddie Smith. Create a killer avatar for the Bungie.net forums, win some super-cool original, signed, Bungie artwork. Read SketchFactor’s summary, or Stosh’s full rules and regulations, and get going on creating that perfect avatar!

Today’s Calvin and Halo shows why you shouldn’t mistreat your children.

Battleground: Halo has posted the results of its Haiku contest from last month. You have to get through a LOT of explanation before you actually get to the contest results… but they’re there (along with the winning haikus themselves). Go see if you’re going home with MLG schwag!

My bad for not getting to this right away – earlier this week, Joyride updated their site with pictures of the Halo 2 prototypes (Brute and MC). I didn’t think it was such a big deal, since these prototypes were shown, pretty nicely, in a LOT of E3 Fanfest writeups. (A good example is Dan Chosich’s impressions – Joyride pics are halfway down the page.) However, we’ve been getting a LOT of mail, and that has only increased since TeamXbox posted a note about this yesterday afternoon… so here’s the official HBO news post, Joyride has updated its website, you can stop emailing us now. First heads-up goes to Shinigamiv20, who mentioned it to us several days ago.

Kikizo Games has put over 5 hours of video from E3 online (including about 20 minutes of Halo 2-related footage). Most of it has already been available from other sources for a while now – but there IS a new file; the 68 mb, 640×480 shakeycam version of the Press briefing, filmed off a Widescreen TV, narrated by SketchFactor, hasn’t been seen before. It’s the standard demonstration – but for folks who want to watch as many different takes as they can (all are slightly different, of course), this is worth grabbing. Everything is WMP9 format. Thanks to eddie_m for the heads-up.

Oddworld18 points out a new map designed by Baka – it’s called Frost, and it’s really quite nice. There’s a thread about it on the Gearbox forums, and it can be downloaded from The Imperium Software. Also, we got mail from Fatch about a new release he’s created, called Cover Canyon II – an open canyon with very different bases. If the first link in the thread doesn’t work, scroll down – there are some mirrors further down.

Wow. Vram has posted a note on the Gearbox forums – grab a pair of dll files from the Halo CE distribution and replace the corresponding files in the Halo PC distribution… and the ‘Crash on Map Change’ bug will disappear. (This will NOT let you play Halo CE maps in Halo PC – it simply removes one of the more annoying bugs in HPC.) As always, back up your files before replacing anything, in case it doesn’t work for you. Thanks to TURBO, on the #hbo irc channel, for the heads-up.

Gustav Larimore writes that he’s released a new movie on Effervescing Blue Productions. It’s called EBP Warthog Jumping – and that’s just what you get. 4 minutes of it, in fact. All on Silent Cartographer, all in the same stretch of beach. (Different viewpoints, though.) WMP9 format, 40 mb. The beginning gave me flashbacks to early 2002.

Rampancy.net has put up part 2 of it’s Halo: Combat Retrospective piece; this one focuses on Artificial Intelligence. It’s an interesting overview of Bungie’s approach to enemy responsiveness. Go read!

Musical Humor in today’s One One Se7en. Well… musical SOMETHING.

Light Fan Fiction update for you today – just 9 stories, including Sterfrye36’s rewrite of his first series in honor of his one-year anniversary on the site. Go read!

Has Halo: Resolution been confusing you recently? Fuzzy helps out today.

That Weasel writes that That Weasel Television is running a new poll – ‘My favorite part of E3 2004 was…’ Swing on by and vote!