Again – we’re behind. Lots of cool stuff has come in over the past few weeks. It’s all still here – and I hope I can get to it soon. DeWayne Muse sent in a few shots of a customized Stikfas Master Chief – he’s pretty slick! Check out the pics.

The Art submissions here at HBO have gotten way, way, WAY behind; there are backups in almost every section. I’m really sorry about that. I’ll be doing my best to clear as much of this as possible in the next few days. First up – a bunch of desktop images for the Wallpaper section, submitted in the first half of January. (If you submitted a desktop recently, and it’s not in this batch – please don’t panic; this is less than half the queue. I’m putting up 20 images today, and I’ll do it again in a day or two, and so on, until they’re all up.) Some pretty cool stuff in here; I particularly like Eric Rodrigues’ view of a sexy Cortana. See what you can find!

Mothergoat of Clan Boomstick, dropped off a pretty cool piece of music he put together. Here’s what he says about it:

This isn’t any sort of easy remix or anything, this tune was built with full instrumentation from the ground up. Matt Cox (me) of the band Windsor Medium wrote this new theme for Halo, inspired by Marty O’Donnell’s favorite melody. I play every instrument heard. NOTE: This is just a 2-minute clip of the 5-minute song it will be soon. I will be adding piano and strings to the final version.

This is the kind of music I want to hear while searching, then bullet-dancing with Gold Elites…with a butt-load of explosions, too.

Go grab Hail to 117 (1.8mb, mp3) and look for that Gold Elite!

Finn digs deep into the Halo Story Page mailbag, and pulls out a healthy dose of speculation and analysis. He also sheds some light on one of the comments made recently in the mini-Interview with Eric Nylund we posted yesterday. Those of you whose copies of First Strike were NOT eaten by dogs… get to work!

One One Se7en continues to bring in guest comedians. Improvement? You decide. (I’m waiting for Robin Williams to call.)

Halo: Resolution looks at a potential problem with a half-ton of armor…

Oops – another lost one. Last week, we mentioned a comic that had been started (but never finished) by elmatto. It was hosted on Freewebs, though, and bandwidth ran out soon after we mentioned it. We’ve put up a local copy of the strips themselves, with the permission of the artist – if you didn’t catch them then, go catch them now!

Looks like we managed to miss last week’s EchoFourNineteen at 343GS.com – it, too, is taking shots at multiplayer lag. (Check the Downloads section.)

This was noticed on our forum on Monday… and posted on Bungie.net yesterday, but I guess I just forgot to put it up. The Bungie Store is selling a new Grunt t-shirt; it’s a nice grey (though I’d LOVE to see it in a long-sleeved version).

CENOBITE has popped up in our news before – he’s released Halo-related Tribes skins, and submitted a pretty interesting piece to the Pillar of Art contest last year. He’s back – with a COMPLETE set of Halo skins for Tribes 2. You can see pieces of the skins in this forum thread at the Skinners Guild, and download the whole package (just under 5 mb). (If you like his work, and play Tribes 2, go ahead and take a look at Starsiege 2845, a Tribes: Vengeance mod. He’s a texture artist on the team.)

3Suns points out a writeup of last week’s Halo 2 announcement and new screenshot over at Computer and Video Games – there’s no information there that hasn’t been covered on a few dozen sites by now, but the last paragraph is interesting:

[…] Bungie has also dipped into its vault and pulled out the first ever screenshot from the sequel’s multiplayer mode. We’re, erm, sure it’s a lot more interesting to play than it looks.

I guess they’re unhappy that it’s barren…

The Junkyard has turned the Spotlight on Robert Sogomonian, better known as Psyrixx, of Psyjnir.org. Swing by to read what makes this guy tick. (Be aware that although it looks like psyjnir.org is finally coming back online, most of the internal links aren’t working at the moment.)

There wasn’t any Fan Fiction updating this weekend… so we’re back up to older numbers. 22 pieces for you today:

• Prophecy, by Daan Timmer( I’m Dutch)
• Too Close To Home Chapter 1, by phil451
• The Second Ring (Part 4), by Jason
• Desecrating Providence (Chapter 1), by Marty
• Neu Haven: Chapter Two, by Blue Jaguar
• Super Weapon Bowl, by Steve
• Halo:Sgt.Johnson’s War Chapter 2:revenge, by Sgt.Johnson
• The fight for Omega Centauri. Part three: assuming command, by Aonghus Maher
• In Light of Destiny II: Death and Liberation, by Jinkaiden-XI
• The return to Halo, by Covenant Prophet aka Grunteater
• Halo Installation 01, Chapter 1, by FOrunnER
• Spartans Return to Earth (Entering the City), by Tommy Miller
• Forced Betrayal (Chapter 6: Tears of Blood), by CoLd BlooDed
• Earth’s Darkest Hour, by Divination
• Halo: Speed of Darkness (Prologue), by Thanatos 117
• A Series of Wierd Events – Sequel, Part Eight[H_K], by Hunter_KIller
• Halo: The War of the Grunts (Part 1), by David Li
• Never trust a Forerunner, by Daan Timmer
• Redesignation 1of 2, by Stuntmutt
• Redesignation 2 of 2, by Stuntmutt
• Eldar Counsels Log Epilgoue Pt.1-Dreams of Eternity, by Blue Angel
• Underfire, by Puck Nny

You might recognize a name near the end of the list – a name not normally associated with Fan Fiction. Let’s say he brings the same dry wit to writing that he does to his art.

Blackstar points out that the March 2004 issue of MacAddict magazine contains a nice review of Mac Halo. It got 5 bullets (‘Awesome’ – I miss the Max days of ‘Freakin’ Awesome’, but what can you do?) and does something very few other reviews have done – it adds spoiler-laden pics and descriptions of the later game elements. We’ll post this once it’s off the shelves.

Today’s Calvin and Halo is from Warbow – and I’m tempted to get away from this computer and go outside. Really.

Today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from SHARPE – and looks at hardware incompatibilities. If you ask me, them Covenant are pretty silly…

Dan Chosich has updated his Tetraboxing reminiscences with a writeup, to accompany his movie. Looks like today’s Dan’s birthday, too – Happy Birthday, Dan! Update: Blood, as well, has updated his content – there’s now a text writeup to go with his pictures on Bloodgulch.com.

The Cyberathlete Professional League is threatening to cancel the Halo portion of its Extreme World Championships 2004, to be held this summer in Texas. Angel Munoz, president of the league, sent out an email to registrants warning that if registration didn’t pick up by Friday, February 13, they would cancel the $50,000 Halo tournament. The admission discount period has been extended until that point; $60/gamer for the 5-day event will increase to $80/gamer after the 13th. Thanks to synide, of Cooked Gamers, via Rampancy.net for the heads-up.

tsudico points out that Red vs Blue is on Pulse on G4TV this week. Next air date is today, 2 pm.

Yesterday afternoon, Frankie posted a writeup of the Bungie Pentathlon, an event that takes place annually and pits the employees against one another in mortal combat, divided among seniority lines. Frank brings his own inimitable style to the writeup, but fails to obscure the fact that his team (the Newbies) got soundly thrashed by everyone else there – in fact, I haven’t seen such ownage since the 49ers trounced the Broncos in Superbowl XXIV. We got a lot of mail about this one, but the first note came from Pete Brown.