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!

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…