And AGAIN, he forgets. 🙁 Today’s Guest One One Se7en is from Chris Fraser, and warns of asking for things you might get…

Fourteen bits of Fan Fiction for you today:

• A Resurrection of Death, by Steve Ollett
• The Enemy Within-Chapter One: In the Shadows, by Mind_Affecting_Parasite
• Athenians-II Chapter 7: Mark Two, by ZackDark
• marines nightmare part 1, by crayola
• The Siege of Zion Base; Part One: Mission – Chapters 1 & 2, by Scimitarex
• The Siege of Zion Base; Part One: Mission – Chapter 3, by Scimitarex
• The Siege of Zion Base; Part One: Mission – Chapter 4, by Scimitarex
• The Siege of Zion Base; Part One: Mission – Chapter 5, by Scimitarex
• Halo: Dark Aftermath Ch. 3: –Covenant Pursuit–, by Nick Kang
• The Soldiers of Angelon: At Angelon They Wait, by Jinkaiden-XI
• Chapter One of Halo:Armageddon, by Chris Luchterhand
• Air Force Wing: Part 4, One Way Ticket to Hell, by teemus
• Souls of War.: Part 1: Tides of Battle, by Dark-NiTe
• war on planet Hedge IV- Part 1- nigotiating, by Preston

Not bad, for a site that was down most of yesterday…

Marc Friedrichs, of Halo Universe, pointed out an item on the World of Games website (a Swiss site). He followed it up with an email, and learned that it is a special release, a cooperative effort of WoG and Microsoft Switzerland. The release date has obviously been bumped back… but the package itself might be of interest to Halo collectors; it will be Halo 2, as well as ‘some other goodies’ (unspecified), packaged in a metal tin. It’s possible that other shops will be able to sell this as well. Sounds intriguing – if we hear more, we’ll pass it along!

An interesting article over on the BBC News website; entitled ‘Probing Halo’s enduring appeal‘, it looks at why Halo is still getting as much attention as it is, 2 years down the road. This is the sort of article I’d expect from a fansite… it blows me away that it shows up in the mainstream press. (It’s not as though I can’t relate, though…) Thanks to SIDEARM for sending in the link.

Update on the CPL Extreme World Championships 2004: a couple of weeks ago, we noted that the president of the CPL had warned that the Halo Tournament might be cut from the event if more teams didn’t sign up for it. Last night, Tonya Welch, CPL Community Liason, posted on the CPL forums that Halo would NOT be cut from the event. That’s good news! Thansk to [FOoM]T3muJin for pointing out the thread.

Valentine’s Day best wishes from gutupio and Devin Olsen.

The 13th episode of EchoFourNineteen was released yesterday (Friday the 13th) at 343GS.com. (Check the downloads section.) Seems corn is infectious… (Thanks to Spartan-39 for the heads-up.)

I feel really bad, because some of this info has been waiting on ME for over a week now… but sometimes, things just get away from you. We’ve got a double-armor update for you; Chris Bryan has sent along a bunch of progress pictures of his solo effort (pretty amazing work – works so well with his gun!), and the Nightmare Armor team has put up a new website, with all-new full-body shots of their armor, being worn. Also pretty amazing work! (gotta love those green eyes…) Comments for the Nightmare guys can go in this forum thread, started by Webshift.

Eep – almost forgot; earlier today, SketchFactor posted a note over on Bungie.net discussing Toy Fair 2004, the big annual toy convention; JoyRide Studios was there with some pretty cool stuff! They’ve put up 10 shots in the Tru7h and Reconciliation Gallery of waves 4 and 5 prototypes… go check ’em out!

Jake ‘Evergreen98’ Billo writes to say that he’s mirrored the Geocities site mentioned in Frankie’s Weekly update this week; the original link is already down, victim of a small Geocities bandwidth allotment. If you were curious what Frankie had to say, go look at the Junkyard’s mirror!

I posted this to our forum earlier, because HBO wasn’t reachable. (It’s STILL not reachable, for the most part, but that’s not going to stop me from updating.) MacSoft has stepped up to the plate and released a 1.04 updater less than 2 days after the PC updater came out. The Press Release is brief and to the point:

MEDIA ALERT
MacSoft Releases Halo 1.04 Update

MINNEAPOLS, MN -February 13, 2004 – Destineers’s MacSoft unit announces that they have released a patch for their hit game, Halo. The patch brings Halo for Macintosh to parity with the PC version, which was released just 1 day ago. User’s wishing to apply the patch (v1.04) must already have Halo v1.03 installed.

The patch is available now at
http://nikon.bungie.org/misc/halo_103-1041_updater.sit

Mirror:
http://files.bungie.org/halo_103-1041_updater.sit

You should be aware that there might be keyboard issues with this release – there have been a few reports of oddness. (At least one was phrased in a pretty obnoxious way.) These have been reported to MacSoft; hopefully the issue will be resolved quickly. Update: Links have been replaced with the 1.041 updater links, to avoid confusion.

Frankie’s Bungie Weekly Update for February 13 has been posted at Rampancy.net… it’s exactly what the older fans are expecting, in terms of Updates. Covers where the team stands, who’s doing what… and throws in some Frankie-specific humor, as well. Good stuff!

Today’s One One Se7en, as well, should be posted before the clock turns over. Don’t worry – U2 would be happy if you missed this one.

Before the day is gone, I’d like to put up today’s Halo: Resolution – it looks at a fear I had from the first time I played the level Halo. (Silent Cartographer, too.)

Singh Commando posted a 16-part comic this morning on our forum. He wasnt’ sure how long the bandwidth would last, so we put up a mirror of it for him; it’s quite good. (I even stole his Slideshow code to display it, though I cleaned it up a little.) Check out Master Chief vs Darth Vader, a humorous look at what might have happened had two universes collided.

No Red vs Blue episode this week – there was a note on the Sponsors forum from Burnie Burns; he’s not well, and the audio recording couldn’t get done. They’ll be back next week. Thanks to Cybrfrk, who noticed the post.

SESpider has released another Miniature Halo; this one is more of a Thank You to those who have helped along the way, and an apology for the delay in the storyline. The Official Storyline will be continued in Episode 17 – thanks to the help of PsYcHoDaN, who’s also designing a new website. Be on the lookout for it!

MarkHawk has posted a set of desktops to promote his upcoming Halo: Ice Fields movie, due out next month. They’re HUDless shots of Halo in snowy environments; you can find ’em in two sizes on this page.

Bungie.net has an update on the Halo PC Worldwide Championships; the finals take place next Tuesday, in Gardena, CA. Details can be found in this news post… we want reports from anyone there! Update: The official press release for this event got sent to us this morning.

You may have noticed that HBO was offline this evening. We made some major changes – hopefully, they’ll help alleviate the frequent outages we’ve been experiencing recently. (If this DOES work, everyone owes Deimos Fawkes, of Subnova, a HUGE thank-you.)