For those interested in that astounding Nightmare Armor we’ve mentioned a couple of times recently… Webshift posted a note saying that they’ve put prices up for the individual pieces. Take a look!

Took a little while… but the Dialogue Databank has been updated with almost 50 new snippets. Some are simply cleaner replacements for older entries… but 44 of them are brand-spanking-new. 43 of those come from Captain Spark, and the last one comes from Patrick Naedele, who submitted a slowed-down, reversed jackal recording with a clear message. There’s some classic stuff in there… check it out!

Since Halo PC was released, some people have had problems with the game spontaneously dumping them off a server. TURBO posted a solution that worked for him; he had a Linksys router, and once the router’s firmware was updated, the problem went away. There is at least one datapoint that suggests this is more than an isolated solution…

c0ld vengeance has posted solutions for the HBO Xmas Puzzle Carnage quiz. It was actually won several days ago, but the puzzles were left online for anyone who wanted to try and solve them for fun. And now the results have been posted for any frustrated souls that couldn’t get through one part or another.

Only 13 entries in the Fan Fiction database today:

• Battle for the Norah: Part Twelve, by Sterfrye36
• An Even War:Part 3:Victory , by D4rgant
• Just One More Chance, by Sentinel
• Old Style: Revelations, by Horror
• Lightning Strike: The White Sar Reinforcements ride in, by Booney
• ES05 – Eternal Sunder (part 05): The Eye of Time , by Wado
• Tides of Destruction(part 3, valley of death), by teemus
• Together we Stand, by teemus
• Have Hope, by CoLd BlooDed
• Halo: Hunted-Part Two, by Overwhelming Force
• The Sword and the Shield chap 2, by Marshall Purewal
• Shadow Ops II: Chapter Six, by Agent Shade
• Rebirth – The Freefalling Jaeden’Seul, by KnightmareWolf, Shadow, Archangels_Blade, Spartan415

Again, lots of poems.

Now, I’m not saying Stuntmutt is prescient or anything… but he submitted this One One Se7en Sunday strip without knowing that it would air mere hours after I went to see this play, which actually USED that quote. (My guess is, poor Mr. Rumsfeld will be living that quote down for a LOONNGG time.) Of course, it has the patented Stuntmutt corn spin… wouldn’t be One One Se7en without it. For what it’s worth, the play was terrible.

Warbow, while disavowing any similarity with the production excesses of One One Se7en, has submitted a Sunday Calvin and Halo for today. I can’t even give him a hard time about it, because the sentiment of the strip is so spot-on.

For some time, we’ve been getting astounding material from Chris Bryan – you can see some of it in our Miscellaneous Art section, and you can check out his working Halo 2 Battle Rifle. For the last couple of months, he’s been working on a wearable Master Chief suit, and we’ve finally gotten around to putting up the pictures he’s sent. You can find them in our Miscellaneous section. (As he sends more, we’ll add to this page.) I wanted to get this stuff posted, because the interest in this sort of thing is rising rapidly, spurred by a recent post about a group called Nightmare Armor, making full body armor that you’ll eventually be able to order. They have a helmet coming in the next few days – but the site is constantly being tweaked (nothing like a bit of interest to inspire the web guys 🙂 ), and Webshift has posted an armor strength tidbit to our forum. I think it’s fantastic that there are multiple projects like this going on… a testament to the inspiring force of Halo!

Today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from Lt Devon, and blames US for the ninja conflagration that is Halo 2. Hrm.

(GT)Juggler has posted a new movie on his site – this one’s called ‘Car Bombing (Random Insanity)’, and weighs in at 14.2 mb. It’s a 2:09 long story of a guy who goes to work, then gets blown up when he leaves for home. Feel free to add comments to this forum thread.

I’ve seen this done on Xbox, when you get a dozen people together in one room, on a closed system… but never over the internet, on an open server. Kudos to the obsessives who made this happen.

IGN has put up the first part of a video comparison between Halo and Halo 2, for Insiders (part 2 will be posted next week). It’s 55 mb at 640×480, or 33 mb at 400×300. It shows side-by-side analogues from each engine, pointing out how Halo 2 improves on the original. (The one mistake I caught was the assertion that the MC model has more polygons in Halo 2 – from what I remember, a Bungie employee said that the poly count actually DROPPED, but that the bumpmapping and lighting improvements made this irrelevant.) If you’re not an Insider, this isn’t worth buying a subscription for; it’s all footage you can find yourself on the net,and anyone with a little extra time could put together the comparisons… but if you already have a subscription, it’s a fun download. Thanks to rendar for the heads-up.

T3muJin wrote to us to ask us to get the word out; apparently, The Stronger Than All League stated if enough interest was shown in Halo PC, they would start a league for the game. If you’re interested in a league where you can play on set nights and times (as opposed to the random environment of the ladder sites), you should post a note in this forum thread.

News on the Battlefield 1942 mod Homefront, for those keeping track of this stuff; there are new screenshots posted (some are rather bizarre, if you ask me), and a release set – Christmas Eve at 6 pm EST. Thanks to MADDA CHEEB for making me look.

Hmm… interesting find by Nick. There’s a job offering on Microsoft’s site for a Software Development Engineer to work on Networking for Bungie. This job is NOT listed on Bungie’s Jobs page. Hmm…

343GS.com has put up episode 7 of EchoFourNineteen; it’s a Christmas episode. Take a look! (Visit the site, hit the ‘Downloads’ link. While you’re there, look around; there’s quite a bit of new content since last we mentioned them.) Thanks to IXIGhandiIXI for the heads-up.

The Junkyard continues with their Spotlight series, this time covering Matt ‘Viper’ Anderson, of Battleground: Halo. Take a look!

Wow. We got mail from Webshift, one of a team of what looks to be pretty talented folks. They’ve got a site called ‘NightMare Armor‘, and if you click on the Gallery link, you’ll see some astounding pics of Halo armor. There’s a Store link (currently empty), which suggests they might be selling this stuff before too long… Whoa.

Inky writes to say that the 10.3.2 update to MacOSX (released yesterday) cleared up some framerate jerkiness he was experiencing with Halo on a tricked-out G5. Good deal! On the PC side, ATI just released their Catalyst 3.10 drivers for Radeon cards on WinXP machines… and they fix the black-box-when-zooming-with-IR problem that I (and many others) experienced. Goodness for everyone!

Hehe – Putamee says Halo got him in to college. Not bad…