Because, I guess, she wasn’t content with wowing the crowds with her awesome Halo art yesterday, Tina Leyk has sent along a NEW piece this morning; you’ll find it on the bottom of the fan art section of her Art page here. It’s called Gold Elite Bridgebattle… and it’s BEAUTIFUL. One day in the not-too-distant future, that page will be a bit more flexible (searchable, and the like) – for now, just scroll down a bit. If you missed the release of this stuff recently… look around. It’s something to behold.

EmptyShadows found a new piece of Halo-related fan art – The Master Chief vs Shadow. hehe… nice.

Whoa. SanchezTheLlama has posted the weekly Project Halo update… and it’s a doozy. Very cool shots of the new map! Check it out.

You may or may not have noticed that HBO is struggling a bit right now. Don’t worry – it’s not that the servers are dying again – well, they are, but it’s not because of a failure, it’s overload. BOLL’s Warthog Jump flash animation got picked up by Ars Technica this morning – and by afternoon it was on several large Flash-oriented game sites, the biggest (at least that we’re seeing) being AddictiveGaming.com – they’re sending us about 200 people per minute. That’s doing a number on the available resources for serving the REST of you. Luckily, these things are transient – the crush will be over by tomorrow.

One One Se7en starts another series – though I doubt the timing is accurate. Hold on tight, boys and girls… this one’s gonna get ugly.

Keyes and his insecurities continue to be the focus of Halo: Resolution – check it out. Incidentally, Fuzzy asked that a public statement be made about Resolution sprites; they’re not for distribution. He doesn’t mean any offense by it, but he’d rather people stopped asking him for them, because he’s not planning on distributing them. Thanks!

We got mail this morning from Strato99, pointing out a bunch of purported Halo 2 screens. (The originals were housed on some student webspace in Sweden, but Strato said he found them in a forum somewhere.) These have been confirmed to be FAKES – please, if you see them around the web, don’t perpetuate the myth! (Credit where credit is due – they’re very good jobs.) You can see them here:

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Congrats to the creator, whoever you are! Update: we got mail from Joakim Danung, the creator of these screens – seems they SHOULD have been an April Fools gag, but he was afraid they’d conflict with the rollout of the new Bungie.net. (I’d have to say he’s being pretty pessimistic; I’m hoping the new and improved b.net will be comfortably worn in by the time April 1 rolls around…) In any case, some of these images will be resbumitted as miscellaneous art, in altered forms – so keep your eyes open!

Greg Irvine put together a spreadsheet to keep track of player stats for his local LAN group. He’s now made it available to the community as a whole. You can grab it from our Miscellaneous section. (Read the page for instructions about use.)

Halo Babies has released this Friday’s comic a bit early – for sponsors. You can find it in the Sponsor’s forum. There’s also a new incentive to donate: drop off some money, get a halobabies.net email address. Go sign up!

Wow. Eclipse points out that Monoxide has posted to the Gearbox forums that ViperNeo has worked out some of the problems in porting AotCR to multiplayer – and it might even be out, as a mod, in the next week or so. Won’t THAT be a blast!

Wow. In the last month or so, a lot of links have been forwarded to us about Halo-related websites out there. I THINK I’ve culled all of them from our mail – but I might have missed one or two; apologies if that’s true.

• Forums:
  • Covenant Grounds (Halo forum)
  • [MSM]Gearbox (HPC Clan forum)
• Clan sites:
  • Covenant Genocide (Xbox clan)
  • High Clans (home of the Jackals, HPC clan)
  • [PU55] (European Xbox clan)
  • [HOH] (HPC clan)
  • SIN team (HPC site – downloadable trailer at Halomods)
  • Halo Hellraisers (Xbox clan)
  • identification: Doom (HPC clan)
• Tournaments:
  • The V Games (30-city, 5-game tourney. $10k for Halo)
  • National Electronic Gaming League (Northern California-based league – Xbox Halo to start)
• General/News sites:
  • Halo Universe (not new, but newly redesigned German Halo news)
  • FreeLancers (Halo fansite)
  • Echo-413 (general Halo site)
  • Halo 2 Grunts (grunts fansite)
    Content is mirrored at Tripod, with a different design

Whew! We’re really sorry for the huge delay here. (Please don’t write, asking us when we’ll actually get these added to the Links page – I don’t have an answer for that question.)

ORACLE writes to point out a continuous Halo tourney in Pace, Florida (near Pensacola). Every Friday night at 6 pm, Homefield Sports and Games hosts a tourney; entry is $10, first place gets 40% of the take, second place gets 10%. (I suppose that means the house gets the other 50%.) He provided an address for the store… but I could find no listing for it in any phone directory. If you’re in the area, check it out!

vector40 has posted the third segment of his ongoing series of articles on Banshee stategies – this one’s entitled ‘Applying Reality’. It focuses on the nitty gritty stuff – less abstract, more ‘I don’t care if it’s pretty, I just want to kill him’ stuff. It’s available at Subnova and Rampancy.net as well as the link vec asked us to use this time – the one at The Junkyard.

Back in November, we reported about a bundle being marketed by Best Buy – a controller and a DVD with Halo material on it. At the time, it was $19.99. (The DVD contained no ‘new’ material – but it did contain a hi-res version of the ‘Inside the Xbox’ documentary that showed at X03 last year, and that we put online in December.) By Christmas, we had reports that this bundle had jumped up to $39.99; it wasn’t such a great deal at $20, it seemed like a silly purchase at $40. Well, Bentllama, your friendly neighborhood Halo 2 animator, happened to notice that TechBargains is reporting that Best Buy has dropped the price to $8.99, shipped free. Now it’s not such a bad deal!

A couple of days ago, we got an email from Tim Leyk, who wanted to point out a Halo fan comic created by his sister, Tina Leyk. I visited the site, and was blown away by what I found – she’s a fantasy/furry artist, and Fur-lo (her Halo comic) incorporates furry art with Halo themes and not a little bit of humor. The work, quite simply, rocks. Browsing the site, I discovered an entire treasure-trove of Halo-related art, ON TOP of the comic strip – and Tina was kind enough to let us archive her work here so that Halo fans could enjoy it. So here you go: for your viewing pleasure, there’s a subsection devoted to Fur-lo, Tina’s Halo Furry Fan Comic… and another section devoted to her Halo Fan Art. Enjoy!

Eclarap points out that not only can you get the updates in German, as we mentioned earlier today, but in French, too – just stop by Halo-Game and see what they’ve got!

DocOctavius continues his rendering experimentation with an appropriately named image – ‘Action’. I’m lovin’ this stuff!

Stefan, from Halo Orbit, has pointed out that you can now read Frankie’s Weekly Bungie Updates in German, if you so desire – and they’re fully searchable, as well. Visit the archive for more details!

343GS.com updated their EchoFourNineteen comic series (check the downloads section) with a new strip on Friday – but we didn’t notice. (Thanks, snowy_duck, for pointing it out.) Interesting perspective on the Jackal language…

Ouch. Subnova has run out of money… it doesn’t look like it can afford to offer the services to the community that it’s been offering. (If you weren’t aware, roughly half of HBO’s pages have been running on Subnova servers for the past month or so.) We’re going to do our best to keep this from affecting the HBO day-to-day running… but the bottom line is, it’s expensive to run a not-for-profit website… and not everyone has bottomless pockets. (Not everyone has my aversion to donations, either – if you’re feeling generous, there’s a donate link in Subnova‘s sidebar.) We’re gonna miss you guys!