We got word last night that the [-GTC-] CTF3 Downloads page was inaccessible due to bandwidth overages; it’s up and running now, but the likelihood is, it’ll go down again today. Because of that, we’ve mirrored the page here (minus a java applet and a very large animated gif) – if you can’t get to the original, at least you’ll be able to get to the mirrors! (They gained another mirror yesterday; there are now 4 sources for the QuickTime version, and 3 for the DivX version. The original news post can be found here.)

[-GTC-] has put up the third in their series of CTF Tactics movies; this one focuses on grenade-assisted flag caps, though it shows a pretty slick technique for long-distance flag-shooting on Battle Creek. These are in some cases team-only techniques; the flag carrier ends up dying, so if there’s not a teammate to finish the score, he’s wasted a life. It’s a small movie (1:20 long, 7 mb in QuickTime, 10.9 mb in DivX format), and multiple mirrors are available on their download page. (I was late getting him HBO mirror links, so our mirrors aren’t up yet – but they should be soon.) If the download page is unreachable, send us mail – I’ll put up a local copy.

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that the 2D sidescroller, Halo: Blood Covenant, had a downloadable demo to play – but their bandwidth ran out pretty quickly, and a lot of people missed it. I grabbed a copy – but I couldn’t get it to run properly on my Radeon 9600 (the screen was black). Today, Darker Industries pointed out that the site is back online, and there’s a download link at Fileplanet – which should remove the bandwidth problems. I took the opportunity to update my Catalyst drivers to 4.5 – and now I can actually play the game! It’s pretty hard – but a lot of fun. At only 6.7 mb to download, what are you waiting for?

Hogmasta Chocobo writes to point out a movie of his hosted at GameTrailers – it’s called Colorblind, and is available in streaming .mov format (or downloadable .mov and .wmv formats). It’s gameplay, set to music. There’s a forum thread on our forum if you want to leave him feedback.

Carnage sends word that UXB Internet has put up a web-based Halo server database; they check several hundred servers each day for uptime, as well as provide a real-time stats page for each server. Currently, it supports Halo PC and Halo CE, though CE servers aren’t yet collected automatically. If your server isn’t listed, you can add it.

CheatCodes.com went to E3 – and posted their discussion of the Halo 2 material on Friday. Bunch of nice photos of the widescreen plasma screen they played on. Thanks, Cortanas_Brother.

Rampancy.net has posted a transcription of the music from the Halo 2 announcement trailer, courtesy of Poop Scoop. 2.5 mb, due to the 8 pages of hi-res jpegs – and there’s also a Finale Notepad file containing the whole score. Nice!

The Bungie Weekly Updates database has been brought up-to-date, this time on time. Scary… we’re on time with something? Ouch.

Calvin and Halo reveals secrets behind the publicity business…

Got a note from Tina Leyk – she’s put up a bunch of new Halo-related artwork at her Angels of Iron website (which is sporting a new design, btw). We’ve mirrored it all here, to take the bandwidth hit off her – and added an extra tidbit. If you visit the Art of Tina Leyk page here at HBO, you’ll find that it’s now broken into sections; this should help with loading times for folks on slower connections (she’s got so much artwork that even just loading the thumbs can take a while). Updated pages today are her Fan Art page (there are two new images, an older one I somehow missed and a killer Grunt image, as well as a pair of Character Profile Sheets she and her brother did a while ago) and the Other Creations page, which (finally) contains images of the t-shirt Tina designed for us to wear at E3 this year.

Ducain continues his pattern of taking a known glitch (in this case, two known glitches) and making it his own; he’s combined his discovery of partial immunity during warthog jumps (you’re invincible for the short time you’re actually ENTERING a vehicle – or during the time the engine THINKS you’re entering a vehicle) with some cool clipping stuff to get inside the walls of Silent Cartographer – and even to get ON TOP of the map from inside. Very cool. 2:50 long, 9.5 mb, WMP9 format. Check it out.

Subnova HQ was hit with a pretty major storm this weekend – all power was out for a couple of days. This caused our mirror there to be offline (leading to the inaccessibility of the Fan Fiction section this weekend), and it killed the boot drive on the machine that hosts Subnova Hotline. The webserver is back up (so all HBO subsections are accessible again), but the hotline server is offline for a while. More details are in this post.

GamesRadar put up their Halo 2 Hands On during E3 – but it wasn’t until today that anyone in our community noticed. Thanks, Noman Husainie. (They claimed they were playing 6 on 6 – I was pretty sure all the rooms were set up for 5 on 5, but hey – what do I know?)

Yesterday, we got word from haloruler33 that a rather bizarre auction was going on over at eBay. Someone who’d registered on Thursday had started an auction for a Halo 2 pre-release playable game. There was a bit of discussion in our forum about this – many people warned the bidders that this was likely not real. By yesterday evening, things had gotten out of hand; the bidding, which had been creeping up by $50s and $100s all day, suddenly started jumping by thousands. At 11:38 pm (PST), the bid had reached $100,000. By 15 minutes after midnight, it peaked – at $99,999,999.00. And that’s where it closed, at 7:15 this morning. It’s quite possible this page will be yanked by eBay – there’s fraud on all sides, more than enough to go around – so we’ve put up a static (no working links) local copy. The exception is the Bids link – that works, and points to another local page. Bungie’s been alerted – but I’m really doubting this is anything but a scam, in any case.

One One Se7en looks at clan markings, and why yours should be picked by a friend.

Late – but not TOO late; today’s Halo: Resolution continues the Dada-ist storyline for another episode.

Once again, it seems we’re having problems with our third mirror (the one that handles Fan Fiction, among other items) – I’ve rerouted all OTHER content, but Fanfic is down until we can get the problem fixed. Bad combination of hardware troubles and a holiday weekend – sorry!

Tycho, of Penny Arcade, wrote up a nice review of the Bungie Fanfest at E3 last Friday (scroll down near the bottom) – they had a good time, it seems. (Looks like clarksbrother was the first to give us the heads-up – thanks!)

A few days ago, I digitized a bunch of videotape submitted by Michael Coffing, and posted a whole passel of new scores on the Going Nowhere Fast leaderboard. Some he submitted just because there was no entry for that level, others because he had really nice runs. One run he posted, Silent Cartographer in 5:46, I was pretty sure wasn’t going to be beaten any time soon. I was wrong. We received a new entry from Ducain this afternoon – and it shaves more than 20 seconds off that very impressive run from Michael. The time to beat for Silent Cartographer is now 5:24. Wow! (We’d show you the vid, but that would give away Ducain’s secrets – and would probably result in some faster entries. You’ll have to find the tricks for yourself!)

A public beta of Aquaduct 2, an Xbox tunneler program for Mac OS X, has been released. The big news is that it’s now compatible with XBConnect , so you’re not limited to playing your fellow Mac users any more. Grab it and get fragging!