Whoa. I want one. It’s not plushy… but I want one. SketchFactor posted a note to Bungie.net about some preliminary work being done on Grunt action figures. They’ll be part of Wave 4, due out next spring. Theres an uncolored closeup… and some early color ideas. Gimme Gimme Gimme!

One of the ‘under the hood’ changes in the 1.03 Halo PC patch is that Anisotropic filtering is enabled by default. This is a function of higher-end video cards, and it makes the graphics crisper… at a pretty big price, performance-wise. If you’ve got a good graphics card, and saw a huge framerate drop when you started playing 1.03, you might want to check out this post by Gearbox programmer vatoloco, over on the Gearbox forums. It’ll walk you through disabling the feature.

Almost 3 weeks ago, we posted a Flash animation created by GLADIATRRR3000, called 343 Guilty Stick. Well, he submitted 3 new chapters for this very soon afterwards… but we lost ’em in the archives. 🙁 They’ve been resurrected, finally, and added to the original page; they’re quite a bit smaller than the first one was. Sorry for the delay!

XLNC posted three spectacular screenshots today – 1600×1200, no HUD, no weapons. (He explained how he did it in this post, if you want to make your own.) Wow.

I think Stuntmutt must have fallen and hit his head on the Plinth. When I went into the studio this morning, I found this, on the floor, with smudges of peanut butter on the reel. Someone send a doctor…

Who says your options get limited when you get older? Well, One One Se7en does…

What limits fights in Halo? Halo: Resolution checks out the issue.

The Halo PC 1.03 patch is now available at Bungie.net (bottom of the Files list). My in-game updater isn’t working (yet)… but the patch is only 4.4 mb, so grab it! (Thanks to progamerz for pointing it out.) Looks like a mirror list will be going up soon.

The Halo PC 1.03 patch is now available for the Halo Dedicated Server; grab it from Bungie.net. (That article also contains links to the full 1.02 server, if you don’t already have it (this patch is not standalone; it requires 1.02), and the mapfiles, if you don’t have those.) The client patch will be available starting at 1 pm PST (9 pm UTC). The readme for the server is available in RTF format from Bungie.net, or in HTML format here at HBO. The wait is over!

MacGamer is giving away 5 copies of Mac Halo in this week’s MacGamer Giveaway; submit your best photoshopped image of the Master Chief on vacation, and if your entry is among the 5 funniest, you’ll walk away with a free copy of Halo. Details (including submission rules) can be found at MacGamer. Thanks to RavenEA for noticing!

Team Sexy has released Sidewinder King 2 – a followup to their popular Hall of the Sidewinder King video. It takes the fight to (where else?) Blood Gulch, and introduces dialogue. Mostly, it works pretty well. (Great camera footage in the second half…) It weighs in at roughly 20 mb (18.5 for the QT version, 20.6 for the DivX version). You can get it from the Team Sexy forums (you need to register, then look for a thread in the TS.Films forum entitled ‘SK2 is realeased[sic]!’). For a limited time, we’re helping out with Mythica.org bandwidth (for both the QuickTime and Divx versions). Grab this one while you’re waiting for that 1.03 patch for Halo PC!

A couple of months ago, Edge Magazine published an article in their Equip Xbox issue called ‘The making of… Halo’; it was a fascinating look inside the development process. It was released online, in truncated form, at Gamesradar.uk, in late October. Not long after that, we received a scanned copy of the full article, from broony, and we set about getting permission from Edge to put it online. We never did receive an answer from them… but the issue is now long off the shelves, so you’ll find it in our Press Scans section (which is otherwise woefully backlogged – scanner’s on the fritz). broony did a pretty good scanning job, and I did my best to make the result as readable as possible without being too hard to download. Enjoy!

Shacknews is running their own Game of the Year poll; Halo is up for PC Action. Go vote! (Thanks to Jamirus99 for the heads-up.)

Today’s Guest One One Se7en was sent in by Chaos Ferret, and looks at the better part of valo(u)r… or maybe it’s something else. Hmm…

Lightweight Fan Fiction update today…

• The Rise of Humanity: Part 1 (Revised!), by [ridiculous combination of non-printable characters deleted]
• Fight or Flight: Chapter 6 (The Big Boom), by teemus
• Fight or Flight: Part Seven (Final Finish), by teemus
• MSOG: Chapter 6: Pilot and Escape, by Sprtn117John
• MSOG: Chapter 7: Violence begets violence, by Sprtn117John
• Shadow Ops II: Prologue, by Agent Shade
• Earth’s Destruction Chapter 4: One-Ship Assault, by Sentinel
• No Way Out: Part 1, by Arthur Wellesly
• Fight for New Tatley (Chapter 7: Covenant Crusade), by CoLd BlooDed

No problem, right? (For the record: The Fan Fiction section is NOT an appropriate place to submit theories about the game’s backstory. Please mail those theories to halostory@bungie.org. Thanks! Also: please don’t create usernames full of characters that simply don’t translate to the web; next time, I’ll delete the STORY instead of the name.)

Two new movies over at HaloGT today; Rocketopia is mostly just a warthog jump vid, but near the end there’s some cool weapons-crossing-glitching going on. The other one… well, you gotta watch it. Maybe you’ll get it. Forum thread for comments is here.

Awful timing indeed, on my carelessness… Monday’s One One Se7en introduced yet ANOTHER new character. Keep an eye on this one – they say that old ones can be wiley.

Eep – for the first time in a very long time, I forgot about the comic updates yesterday. First up – Halo: Resolution, which continues to have n00b problems.

Wondering where the Halo PC 1.03 patch is? Cysco posted a note on the Gearbox forums stating that it was delayed a day, and will be out Tuesday, December9; the Dedicated Server will be released in the morning, and the client patch will go live in the afternoon. Thanks to -BERZERKER-, on our forum, and hotsoup, via email, for the heads-up.

Stuntmutt sent along a sort of visual FAQ about what ‘on the subject of art’ might be interpreted as, for those confused about the Plinth of Art. If you’re stuck, check it out. (Remember, there’s over a month before your entries are due; don’t panic if you’ve already sent something you’re not happy with. There are no limits on the number of entries you can submit.)