Jonathan Eaton points out the third ACM @ MSU -hosted Xbox Halo Tournament, in East Lansing, Michigan, on April 10. $700 in cash prizes, plus goodies. The web page is here.

Blade posted a 22 mb, 8:37 long movie of Blood Gulch gameplay on his TeamHalo site. Fraps makes the gameplay pretty choppy, and the low-end video card makes the image quality… well, pretty low-end. It’s mostly just a few guys running around shooting each other. You need to register on the site (with a valid email address) to download the video.

Akba and Allroy have written up a tutorial on how to play Xbox Halo using Gamespy Arcade. If you have the client already, or don’t like Xbox Connect for some reason, but you want to play online, go take a look! (You can comment in this thread.)

JM made a HUDless ‘trailer’ for Halo, and posted it (in two sizes) over at Halomods. It’s not very big, so take a look!

Wraith has put together a new model for a Covenant heavy attack aircraft; ground landings might be a tad awkward, but it looks pretty deadly. (The tail, which folds underneath like a scorpion’s, is flexible – making it a rather deadly weapon.)

Wonga. The Nightmare Armor guys updated their site – with the name of the winner of the Helmet raffle. Scott Mills, of New Jersey, congratulations! (He probably already knows, since the helmet was sent out last weekend.) Heads-up came from Madda Cheeb.

BOLL wrote an interesting paper for school recently; it’s called ‘Analysis of Halo: Combat Evolved using Game Design Patterns’. He uses a methodology developed last year by three Scandinavian researchers to break down gameplay in Halo, and determine how well the game would work without the patterns found. It’s an interesting read, so we’ve posted it in our Miscellaneous section. If he fails the class, we’ll probably yank it.

Keeping up with current discussions, that’s Finn. Not noticing until today, that’s me.

Bachus found a reference to Halo in today’s Real Life Comics… another step in the plan towards World Domination.

Hmm. Over at Rampancy.net, there’s a pointer to a new page at the Joyride Studios site, showing a ‘sneak peek’ at the Waves 4 and 5 action figures, as well as early views of the Halo 2 prototypes. However – this is just a rehash of the page posted at Bungie’s Truth and Reconciliation site, which went live back on February 14. ALL of these pictures came from the show itself, and if what you’re interested in is Halo 2 shots, then what you REALLY want is this page at figures.com (a site first mentioned by Dan Chosich on February 18). There are much better shots of the Master Chief and Brute prototypes there, including closeups.

Calvin and Halo asks the question… are tigers part of the Covenant?

22 pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today:

• Operation: Halo Part 1, by Chaos Elite
• Unknown, by Allisia
• Behind Enemy Lines, by ScorpionTankRider
• Halo: The Scythe of Death Part Nine, by LordofDestruction
• The Eye of the Storm: Prologue, by LordofDestruction
• You cannot help but wonder, by MasterCD
• Scope (Chapter 3, The Day Hell Froze Over), by The Silver Spartan
• The Blood Gulch Gig (Part 1), by Jillybean
• Halo-strike, by someone that you dont know
• The Breaking Point, by CoLd BlooDed
• The Iron Hands of the Prophets (Part 6): Turning Back, by MadJackal
• Identfying Covenant (Humorous style), by MasterCD
• Insanity, by Frightener
• When Will It End?, by Sentinel
• Prodigal Son: Part 4, by Scott Devary
• Prodigal Son: Part 5, by Scott Devary
• In Chaos and Despair: The UNSC Council, by Maraxus6
• Unintended Consequences – or – A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Ham, by Flu
• Neverland: Home to Sparta, by SOS.Odin
• Gary Young: A Lucky One?, by SOS.Odin
• Halo Heaven: Chapter 2: The Story of the Surviving Spartan IIs, by Justin Harrison, Halo Heaven
• The Other Reclaimer; Part 1; Chapter 1: Mobuto and ‘Aemasee, by Rebel Shuttle

Several good ones, but Jillybean’s comedy was a standout for me.

Battleground: Halo has some new content today – Viper’s posted a new mailbag (someone’s planning to write to Bungie and tell ’em about their dumb halo battleground dumb site), and Rams has posted a rant about how unreasonable it is that 4 of the first 11 Weekly Updates were posted here at HBO. (I guess I should stop sending Frankie chocolate now…)

To all the people pointing out that BOLL’s Warthog Launch game is now on Ebaumsworld, or AlbinoBlackSheep, or any of several dozen other sites – we know, thanks. HBO served over a million copies of the game to viewers in the first two and a half weeks it was online – and we’re still serving more than 100,000 copies a week. It was monstrous before those sites picked it up, and at least when it was here, BOLL was getting credit for its creation. It’s unfortunate that these sites feel that it’s acceptable to simply hijack a Flash game without asking the creator for permission – but I guess that’s the internet today.

Updates on a couple of films; Eclarap writes to point out that Lord of the Ring is now mirrored at Halo-Game, in France, and Verdafolio dropped a note in our forum that Elevation has changed hosting (we’ve updated the movie database for this one). If there’s time today, I’ll add the new movies from last week to the database, as well.

tLove found a profile of Chris Butcher, AI programmer for Bungie, over at The International Game Developers Association. It contains information about how Chris got into the industry, and some advice he has for those coming after him. it’s not clear when this was posted, but The Wayback Machine has a copy that dates back to March 12, 2002, so it’s at least 2 years old. (Halo 2 isn’t even mentioned.) Not a bad read!

We’ve received a bunch of links in the past couple of weeks – bad on us for not announcing them. Apologies to the sites involved.

General Halo Sites

• HaloNova.com
• Planet Zergim
• Halofiles.com

Clan Sites

• Halo OutKastz
• teamQU!K
• Silent Canary Tactical Squad
• Helljumpers
• %XF Clan

Personal sites

• Jatt Productions – Mods, Videos, Comics
• Running Riot Productions (coming soon)
• Akba.info (Art, videos, forum)

(No, none of these are on our Links page yet – neither are any of the many dozen OTHER links we’ve posted in our news in the past several months. For that, too, I apologize. One of these days, we’ll database that section, and add all the ones we’re missing (that are still active, of course).)

One One Se7en, once again, plays the prescient game; in the face of new server problems, it’s particularly poignant.

Halo: Resolution shifts away from the Nightmare Armor substory…

Battleground: Halo points out a Grudgematch on the front page of PlanetAVP; ‘Halo vs The Exosuit’. (I guess they probably mean ‘MJOLNIR armor vs The Exosuit’ – it’s sort of silly to pit an entire game against a single item from a different game.) Whatever they meant, I find it amusing that as of right now, Halo is beating AVP on its own site (53% of 726 votes).