So over the past few weeks, we’ve had a number of submissions that we simply haven’t had time to post. I’m going to try and get some of them out there. First up is a pair of speeches modeled on ones given by Winston Churchill in 1940; you can find them, along with transcriptions, in our Miscellaneous section. Thanks to Walshicus for his patience.

It’s still coming in… New Mailbag!

Homefront, the Battlefield 1942 mod, has put up new pics of an elite, their new AR (the MC looks BIZARRE without gloves on), and the scorpion tank. This picture is a joke – they’ll have him holding plasma weapons soon. (Good thing, too – Covenant would rather die than use human weapons…) Thanks to Spartan-39 for the heads-up on our forum.

Interesting. XBCTourneys is promoting ‘The Ultimate Halo Tricks DVD‘, coming soon. ‘Every trick for every map’, in DVD quality. The page says ‘Price coming soon’ – but if you click on the Preorder button, you’re paying $14.99, so one might assume that the price will be $14.99. (I’d be impressed if they really do manage to film ‘every trick for every map’ – I’m still seeing new ones on a semi-weekly basis. They must be sitting on a lot of stuff nobody’s seen before. Or something.) Thanks to ‘Nosolee for the heads-up.

Promodo answered the screenshot analysis over at Sector 7 with his own comments; you can find them (and respond to them) on our forum. I must say it surprises me that this much evaluation is going into this single screenshot… it’s FAR more than went into the first multiplayer shot, and that, in my opinion, was a more interesting picture. In fact, I haven’t seen this sort of interest since the dry spell (which had lasted a full year) ended in 2001. You never can tell, with fans!

There’s a new .comic up at Subnova; Boxer wrote an autobiographical bit about his experience trying to get out of the Maw. I’d speculate about who the other player is… but geez, it could be ANYBODY…

room217 took a shot of his garage – looks like that crew gets pretty serious about Blood Gulch!

Wonga. It lives again. Thanks to Subnova, The Fan Fiction section is open again – and there are a few stories that were in the queue before it went down (plus two more that got posted today, from folks who knew the original URL).

• Jera III, by Elizar
• untitled halo poem, by new1nab113
• Underestimated: Part 1, by Ikabuianman
• Halo2: The Covenant Wars [part 2], by Thomas Harper
• Purgatory: Part 1 , by Lord Spark
• war and blood, by new1nab113
• the maw, by new1nab113
• Don’t Look Here! Get out before it is too late! No!!!, by Frightener
• Assault Part 1: Ambushed, by Joe Ehret
• Halo Heaven: Chapter 1: The Story of the Surviving Spartan IIs, by Justin Harrison, Halo Heaven

Go to it!

She does it again – Tina Leyk let us know about two new pics she’s done; her fan character, Dre’al, an a Hunter closeup. You’ll find them at the bottom of the Halo Fan Art section of her local page. I’m lovin’ em.

Wolfy, over at Sector 7, has gone to the trouble of writing up a full article on the new screenshot.

Gustav Larimore (T B34NZ) writes about a movie he’s made called ‘A View from the Top’ he’s hosting it at Effervescing Blue Productions. It’s 2:30 long, 640×480, 25.4 mb, WMP9 format, showing some high jumping in various netmaps.

KingPhreak is setting up a Halo Trivia bot for IRC; it will sit in a channel, asking trivia questions, and keeping track of who answers fastest. The problem is… he needs more questions. Instructions on how to submit them can be found in this forum post. If you have some Halo trivia that you think might stump the masses… jump in!

There have been so many HUDless screenshots recently, I was going to implement a policy of a single update each day, with all the links in it. However, there are two posts tonight by CuBaNo which simply demand personal attention. The second batch, especially, contains some of the best shots posted on our forum to date, in my opinion. The first post was here – and it’s pretty good. The second post… wow. (Warning – these pics are pretty big.)

Just when you thought it was safe to read *NM* posts on our forum again… BOLL strikes. Call the office of Homeland Security!

On the plus side, Halo Babies has posted a new strip; I think the MC needs balance lessons. On the minus side, 343GS.com has posted that they will no longer be creating EchoFourNineteen strips (and, in fact, are no longer hosting their existing strips). And so it goes.

The Bungie Weekly Update this week went to… well, Bungie. (NEPOTISM!) You can find Frankie’s musings on the Underground, Bungie’s very own public forum. It’s short – but it’s tasty. The tidbit on realism on ‘an Earth level’ left me drooling for actual gameplay… the bit about Jaime fine-tuning Enemy AI got me intrigued, and the bit about Marty had me laughing. And oh, yeah, the Mister Chief artwork hits new edges of quality. And if the update weren’t enough, there’s also (finally) a new, hi-res screenshot, the one that’s been floating around the net for a couple of weeks in illicit magazine scans. All the arguments about ‘is that really a needler?’ and ‘wait, who’s falling?’ and the like seem rather silly now, with a 1600×1200 reference piece to look at… what? You’re still here? Why aren’t you at Bungie.net, reading?

FlyingV, over at Battleground: Halo, sat down with MonoxideC and talked to him about modding Halo, and about Halomods.com. Go check out the full interview!

Red vs Blue episode 27 is now out for Sponsors. It’s called ‘Nine-tenths of the Law’, and it points out that each team has a pretty weak link – and they’re both getting more disturbed. Some great one-liners. Thanks to Cybrfrk for the heads-up!

Marc, from Halo Universe, writes to say that they’ve uploaded some screens from the E3 2003 Halo 2 Demo trailer. In his words “for all who doesn’t know the movie a duty and for all others a nice reminder…” Go remember!

Yesterday, we posted a link to some pretty classy X-shots from Mills; in his original note, he stated that he had hi-res versions of the shots (1280×1024) that were available if anyone was interested. Folks WERE interested, and he uploaded them… but I completely forgot to do anything with them. Situation rectified; in his original post, there is now a ‘hi-res’ link under each picture, which you can right-click/option-click to download. (Filesizes are included, so you know what you’re in for.) That menacing grunt is truly awesome at the larger size!