We’ve added last Friday’s Bungie Weekly Update to our Archive; you can use it to learn that Frankie’s only mentioned Dave Candland twice since these started. Is this because Dave’s work is secret, or because Frankie doesn’t find User Interface progress very interesting, or because Dave spends most of his time surfing the net for Soffish porn? You decide!

Crispy Spartan points out another Weekly Update for First Strike. The majority of it discusses the new uncertainties introduced by the existence of Halo Custom Edition – more from the team when they know what they’re up against. There’s also a bit of infrmation about progress itself. Give it a read!

Today’s One One Se7en introduces that genuinely rare creature – the funny joke. Laugh at it – because you never know when you’re gonna see one of these again.

Halo: Resolution shows why practice is the thing.

Dolbex has updated the Halo50k3 site with two new photo albums; the first reproduces content that used to be on the Halo50k site (before it was unpleasantly squatted on by a porn site), the second contains almost 100 pics from the recent MLG Dallas Regional event. Pictures from Halo50k2 will be coming soon!

Paul Wisniewski posted a piece of music, ‘Run From Me’, created by his band, Four Years Gone, inspired by Halo. It’s amazing to see the breadth of styles that folks use to express their love of this game! Update: clarksbrother has provided a pair of mirrors for this, if you’re having trouble getting it from Paul’s site.

Dark Helmet got bored, and put together a short film showing two useful places to try some Shade jumping. (The 3.3 mb film is mirrored at Faulksoft.com, thanks you Yayap the grunt.) As DH says, it’s amazing to see how much air you can get with a single grenade…

Been a little while since we updated the Fan Fiction section – mostly, we were trying to make sure that Stuntmutt’s birthday present didn’t get buried. Check the section now – there are 23 stories added since Wednesday.

vector40 has written up a supplement to his ongoing Banshee discussion – this piece is called ‘Winning’. It’s quite long, and has very little to do with Banshees – it really is about winning – and losing. Worth a read, because it gets into some really pertinent discussions about what people do when you win, and when you lose. You can find it at the Junkyard.

Hawk Entertainment has released new versions of Ice Fields: Episode One Part 1. (This was originally released a week ago – but some folks had trouble with the DivX version, Hawk had trouble with bandwidth, and the movie itself was smaller than they wanted. You now have three new options: A 640×480, 40 mb DivX version (hosted by evilburger.net), a 480×360, 35.8 mb QuickTime version (hosted by us), or a 320×240, 21.4 mb Quicktime version (also hosted by us). The old options are still there. Hopefully, there is now something for everyone!

Gamespy has posted an interview with Marc Tardif, Director of Marketing and 3rd Party Relations at Gearbox. There’s some good info on what Halo CE (Custom Edition, not Combat Evolved) really is, and how it will be supported.

GameSpy: What’s the reason behind having a separate .exe for this update?

Marc Tardif: The new software was the method chosen by Bungie / MGS (Microsoft Game Studios) to deploy the things that Gearbox has done to Halo since the game launched. Given the amount of time we’ve been working on this stuff and given the value of the material that’s being released, we are really happy to finally get the software into the hands of Halo PC customers.

This, finally, explains the delay in the release of the HEK; it wasn’t as simple as ‘make sure the HEK works, and put it out there’, it was ‘make sure all the new features being added (fast shaders, better networking, other multiplayer tweaks) will continue to work properly with HEK-created material’. Halo Custom Edition is, in effect, a whole new ballgame. (Halo CE and HaloPC are NOT compatible; you will not see listings for HaloPC games in a Halo CE browser, and vice versa.) It’ll be interesting to watch how this all shakes out!

A couple of fans have compiled all the questions and answers from the Gearbox Q&A thread into a single post, for easier reading. There’s an awful lot of info in there, so read carefully. This covers questions both about Halo Custom Edition and the Halo Editing Kit; they’re separated for ease of understanding.

So says slim.

Take the night off, miss fun stuff at Bungie.net. Frankie put up a great retrospective on the life of Marty O’Donnell, who turns 107 today. It’s an inspiring rags-to-riches tale – well, gassed-canaries-to-loafer-lightener tale, actually – that gives insight into the events that shaped the man who came up with such beautiful music for Halo. Check it out! (Happy Birthday, Marty!)

The Weekly Update this week is at Bungie’s own Underground; it’s relatively light, but still has some tasty morsels. Frankie’s description of ‘skimming close to wall surfaces, trying to beat the optical illusion a bump map creates’ is so close to how I felt about Halo it’s scary. (And this is HALO 2!) Go read. (Thanks, Fuzion.)

In tandem with the HEK announcement, Cysco, over at the Gearbox forums, has changed the HaloPC forums to Halo Custom Edition forums. What is Halo Custom Edition? Glad you asked – Cysco answers some basic questions in this thread. It’s a completely unsupported version of Halo, available free to all HaloPC owners, that introduces lots of new features – including the ability to play user-created (think HEK) content. THIS is what we’ve been waiting for; THIS is why it wasn’t as simple as ‘dump that HEK out there’. There will be lots more info in the next few days about this stuff… but for now, you can discuss on our forum, on Gearbox’s forum, or at Bungie.net – it’s the topic of the moment. (Thanks to Reppyboyo and L337Mondo for the first notices.)

Stephen Cakebread, a programmer on the Project Gotham 2 team at Bizarre Creations, dropped a note in our forum about ‘a mostly complete copy of the silent cartographer exported as a circuit which can be loaded in the gotham 2 engine’… a tribute to the level as a driving challenge! (Before anyone gets their hopes up, it’s unlikely that he meant this construct would ever get released… though I think it would be really, really cool.)

SketchFactor has posted a very cheering (though vague, with respect to dates) note to Bungie.net about the Halo Editing Kit… it’s coming, folks! And it’s coming soon. W00T! (Thanks, KP, you’re not fired… yet.)

WhiteRaBbit pointed out a fun Halo/PGR 2 composite he found. Adam Daniel pointed to a different thread on Bungie.net – started by the image’s creator himself. Nice work! (Special mention goes to blinkmetoys, in the Bungie thread, who noticed it might be photoshopped.)

What’s a birthday without presents? Some HBO regulars put together a small collection of presents for Stuntmutt to celebrate the One Year Anniversary of One One Se7en.

• The Story of an Artist, Fanfic by Jillybean
• Dual Weapons, Wallpaper by BOLL
• Mmmm…, cake by c0ld vengeance

Of course, there are plenty of others that feel like this might be the perfect time to hang up the pencil… but hey, never listen to the naysayers. They’ll just say nay.