Ten Fan Fiction pieces today:

• Tel Amir, by Steve
• Forced Betrayal (Chapter 4: Vulnerable but Vital), by CoLd BlooDed
• On A Pale Horse: Frozen Typhoon, by Silent Hunter
• Air Force Wing: Part 2, The Assault, by teemus
• The Flood: A Force to be reckoned with (Part 6), by crashedwarthog
• In Chaos and Despair: Bellerophon 3, by Maraxus6
• Long Time Gone Part 10, by grylsy
• A Series of Weird Events – Sequel, Part Two[COLD BLOODED], by Hunter_Killer
• A Series of Wierd Events, Part Seven[H_K], by Hunter_Killer
• Athenienses-II: Chapter 5 : Secrets Within, by ZackDark

The load’s getting manageable…

Oops – forgot to post yesterday’s Halo: Resolution. Too much to do! Wait… maybe I’m just lagging…

Wow. Rapture posted a screen from a Halo PC game last Friday… this was about 5 hours in. That’s a LOT of kills.

There’s an interesting article on software piracy (and how it relates to Mac gaming) over on Yahoo news today. Peter Tamte participated in a round-table discussion on piracy, and reiterated that in the month since Mac Halo’s release, more people have stolen it than bought it. “From what we’ve been able to extrapolate, the lost sales are already in the millions.” This is pretty bad news for gamers in general; if a software company can’t make any money selling its product, it’s not going to MAKE any products… and there won’t be any games to pirate. (This argument has been scoffed at in the past – but in those days, pirated copies were a relatively small fraction of the total copies out there, not more than half the total.) Buried deep in the discussion is a nugget that might make some Mac gamers happy:

“Now that Halo is finished and has been updated to version 1.03, Tamte said that MacSoft is focused on bringing forth a demo version of Halo.”

This is good news for gamers who’ve been wanting to TRY Halo, but haven’t wanted to plunk down $50 to do so. Thanks to Sep7imus for noticing both the article, and the demo mention.

Yesterday, we mentioned that Circuit City is selling Halo for $19.99. kapowaz pointed out that Tesco, in Great Britain, has made it available for £19.99, as well; still more than the US price, but a significant markdown from its normal rate in GB. Never been a better time to buy Halo – on EITHER side of the Atlantic!

We’ve added last Friday’s Bungie Update (originally at Subnova) to our Frankie’s Bungie Updates database. There’s a small note over at Subnova explaining the problems this weekend; it was a hardware problem, not a network or software one. Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen again!

Rampancy.net has put up the second part of its ‘High Ping Bastard’s Guide to Halo‘ – this one focuses on Weapons. Again, there is information in here of value even to those on fast connections; lag in Halo PC is an unfortunate fact of life, and while it’s worse for dialup (or faraway) visitors, it’s present for ALL of us. Thanks to Narcogen for the heads-up (and for writing the article).

So the buildup to One One Se7en number 117 has been pretty big; last week’s (Stuntmutt-drawn) strips have all been teasers for it. Several people on our forum speculated that it would be tied, somehow, to the Plinth of Art announcement we made yesterday… but it was noted that main strips don’t come out on Sundays. (I was amused that the Sunday strip that DID comment on the Plinth of Art, and that preceded the 117th strip, was number 17… you just can’t get away from that stuff.) Anyway, the fact of the matter is, Stuntmutt DID go all out for this one. It’s a special 4-page comic; I’m pretty sure he takes the prize in ‘Halo on Legendary at Lightning Speed’. Go check it for yourself…

SESpider has sent along Page 13 of his Miniature Halo comic. Way cool the way weather in the comic tracks weather in the US in the present day…

Wow. XLNC continues to make hudless screens – and this time, they’re from a pretty amazing vantagepoint. Check ’em out on our forum!

In December, Halo’s price dropped to $29.99 – and a lot got sold. Konrad9 mentions that Circuit City is now selling them for $20 – might be a good time to buy! (It’s unknown how long this price will last.)

Yesterday, we posted the movie Cheers, a stock Halo music vid with decent timing. Almost a thousand of you have grabbed a copy, and we haven’t gotten any death threats or hatemail about it… so we’re going to continue with the plan; today, we’ve got a pair of these for you. They’re both put together from Halo 2 trailer footage, and both nicely synchronized to their respective music. Summer Wind, submitted by Fortune a couple of weeks ago, is set to (not surprisingly) Frank Sinatra’s ‘Summer Wind’, and weighs in at 4.8 mb in WMP7 format. The Boys Are Back was submitted by Erik Vogt (who previously created Wonderboy, no longer available at its original location, but which can be found here), and it uses the Thin Lizzy song with the same title as its soundtrack. (Eric offered a larger, less ‘small and gritty’ version… but I think this one fits nicely.) It’s in QuickTime format, and is a lightweight 6.6 mb. I THINK that clears out the queue of movies I felt we could host, despite their not meeting the letter of our Movie Posting Guidelines… but you never know, there might be more.

Stuntmutt weighs in with his own thoughts about the Plinth contest in today’s One One Se7en. I’m gonna let the strip speak for itself. Update: Oops; in the translation from Stuntmutt’s submitted strip to what appeared on the page, a (rather critical) piece got missed. My bad. Fixed, now.

Homefront, the Battleground 1942 Halo mod, has posted a big patch; it includes bug fixes, a new pistol model, a new map, and new controls for the dropships. Read the details at their site, or download the patch from FilePlanet. (It’s 11.3 mb.)

SanchezTheLlama posted a status update for Project Halo, a Halo-like game under development. Lots of pics of early models…

On December 6, 2003, we announced the Plinth of Art – a contest for the rest of us, conceived of by Stuntmutt as a way to promote his One One Se7en strip in an ostensibly more elegant manner. On January 17, 2004, the contest ended – and today, we bring you the results. Congratulations to our winners – you can find full details, as well as all the entries, on the Plinth website. Enjoy, and have a great evening!

EDBIS.com has previewed Halo 2; some questionable statements, but a preview is a preview. Info seems to come from a combination of online movies and print articles. Thanks to Battleground: Halo for the heads-up.

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, has begun a series of articles dedicated to helping those with less-than-stellar net connections still have fun playing Halo. The first installment of the High Ping Bastard’s Guide to Halo, focusing on vehicles, is up now. This is worth a read, even if your connection is good; all of us have experienced lag on Halo servers, and some of the suggestions are as applicable to LPBs on laggy servers as they are to HBPs everywhere.

Last night, Frankie posted the Weekly Bungie Update over at Subnova. The idea of the updates, beyond bringing a few morsels of Halo 2 goodness to the masses, is to introduce those very same masses to the various sites in the Halo universe. Lots of traffic is directed to the site by an update, and a certain percentage of those visitors stick around and check out what ELSE is available. During the yearlong period of Matt’s Halo 1 Updates, a policy was worked out whereby the site receiving the update would have it, exclusively, from Friday night when it was posted through Sunday night. At that point, any site that wished to archive the updates was welcome to do so. Because of this policy, I declined to allow anyone to post the full text of the update in our forum last night, even though Subnova was having problems. However, this morning the site is STILL down, and some of the larger Halo sites have put the update online already – so I’m going to bow to common sense and suggest that if you want to read it, you visit Rampancy.net or the Junkyard while Subnova is still offline. (We have it, as well, but I’m going to hold off until Monday to post it; I simply don’t feel comfortable doing it now.) I’m really hoping this doesn’t change the way the updates have worked; I really believe that the spreading around of information (and bringing people to sites they might not otherwise have visited) is at least as important as the info itself. Long after these updates have been relegated to irrelevancy by the game’s release, the sites themselves will be up and running, bringing you Halo goodness. Something to think about.

There’ve been a number of movie submissions recently that have gone back to the roots of Halo fan movies; gameplay (or sometimes just cutscene action) set to music. Normally, these would simply be passed over; they don’t meet our movie posting guidelines, the concept isn’t original, and (in most cases), the music is either poorly chosen or not integrated into the actual footage. However, these recent creations don’t suffer from this latter problem… and I found myself enjoying watching them. For that reason, I’m going to release a few of them. This isn’t an open invitation to submit hundreds more – we still abide by our standards most of the time. These are small movies, though, and in each case, brings something fun to the table. First up: a movie from Joe S., set to Cheers, by the Trytones. 3:29 long, 320×240, 11.5 mb, in QuickTime format. We’re hosting this on our new files2.bungie.org. Enjoy!