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.)

Whoa. The Battlefield 1942 mod ‘Homefront’ (mentioned a few times in our news) is almost ready for release… and it’s looking pretty good! There’s a 36 mb movie (encoded with XVid) available for download, and some hi-res screenshots, all over at the Homefront site. (Thanks to Ross Mills for pointing it out on our forum.)

Press release is right here… but the bottom line is, the Macintosh version of Halo went into duplication late Friday night, December 5th. It’ll be hitting store shelves soon! Mac owners… it’s time to see if you can keep up with your PC brethren.

Massive Halo Story update last night – apologies for overlooking it before now. Some serious information in this one – there’s more tying-together of disparate posts happening these days. Thanks, Finn!

Thanks to PC, who pointed out that gfunk, of Red vs Blue, has put up a note on the main page that he’ll be interviewed on a Santa Cruz radio station this morning at 10 am PST. (That’s 1 pm Eastern, or 6 pm UTC – 2.5 hours from now.) There’s a link to an online stream for anyone who wants to hear this.

SeeMePlayMe is hosting another online Halo tournament tonight; 2v2 team play, with a SMPM Gold Account in store for the winners. Be in the Halo lobby by 7 pm Central to join in!

sir_zyn posted a note on our forum this weekend about a 2d Halo project he and some friends have started. A screenshot is linked at the bottom of the post. Take a look, leave them input!

Rams, from Battleground: Halo, writes to say that they’ll be adding two new feature articles each week, on Mondays and Thursdays. They start off with Two Betrayals, dealing with the team-killing problem in Halo PC. They’ve also organized the existing collection of articles already on the site. Finally, they’re accepting guest articles if anyone would like to share their views on Halo, the Halo community, or any fan creations.

Yes, we released over 30 new One One Se7en strips to the Archive today… but that doesn’t mean the standard collections stand still. Stuntmutt created a new Sunday Strip and even introduced a new character – maybe we need to rename this website?

Light weekend reading – just 13 stories today in the Fan Fiction section:

• Manors Maketh Man: Part 1, by S7N
• MSOG: Chapter 5: Surprises and Plans, by Sprtn117John
• The Trials of a Displaced Master Chief Chapter 1: Ritchie, by stan
• Appocalypse-Sector6, by FF Echo
• The Eve of Genesis, by Mainevent
• Earth’s Destruction Chapter 3: Glassed, by Sentinel
• The Covenant’s Double Entende, by BrutalArt
• Fight for New Tatley (Chapter 6: Airfield Arrival), by CoLd BlooDed
• Closing with the Enemy Chapter 6 Night Fighters, by monitor101
• Good vs. Evil: Prelude to a story, by rogue_spartan
• Ever Since They Came, by CoLd BlooDed
• Fall of Fate: Special Edition(Parts 1-2), by ‘Nosolee
• Warriors of Valor: Part 6: Is that a light at the end of the tunnel, or a train, by Ghost Sniper

Get to it – I’ve got to go shovel.