Gah. All these Halo reviews… the Screenshots database was out of date. I’ve just added 18 collections (334 shots) to bring us up to the weekend. It never ends…

You ever play with folks that don’t seem to do much except take credit for your team’s win? dustin has… and he made a Guest One One Se7en to commemorate the activity.

Gah – nobody showed up! SeeMePlayMe held a tourney yesterday… and the HBO team of synide, goatrope, jayWHY, and devin were the only folks there. 🙁 People – try this out. It costs nothing to enter, and there are prizes to win. (Next tourney is Thursday, a 2v2 event.)

While I was having my backside handed to me in online Halo (Anonyme, I’m not letting you have any more rocket launchers!), SketchFactor posted a new contest up on Bungie.net. It’s a Halo-ween Pumpkin Carving Contest! Make a cool Halo-related pumpkin, take a pic, send it in. Win stuff. More details in the article. Excuse me, I need to go find a band-aid.

Just noticed this on the Gearbox technical forum, it’s a bug that’s bitten me, I figured it could use wider dissemination. Eternal (a Gearbox programmer) explained the ‘night vision black patch‘ problem that Radeon users with the Catalyst 3.8 drivers are experiencing; it’s a driver issue, and something that will require a new driver patch from ATI to fix. Eternal suggests a couple of workarounds while you wait.

Well, it’s been a whole 48 hours since our last Review roundup… guess it’s time to look again. GameOver, JIVE Magazine, YiYas (in German), and 3DAvenue. Comments ranged from ‘mind-bendingly, stultifyingly, dull and repetitious’ (GameOver) to ‘one all-around tight package’ (JIVE magazine). Blue’s News found these for me.

Gah. I gotta get a better junk filter. The MLG press releases get filtered right into my Junk folder, when they’d be far better off on HBO’s front page… Major League Gaming announced on Friday that Matt “Zyos” Leto, a member of The Dream Team (a group MLG sponsors), walked away with top Halo honors at the World Cyber Games tourney in Seoul, Korea last week. (He pocketed $20,000.) Streaming video of the event is available on this page… you’re looking for ‘Leto vs Hebbada’. (The blow-by-blow is rather bizarre.) Go check it out!

Got word from Steve Campbell that forerunners.org and cortana.org will be offline for several days, as they migrate to new servers. This affects our Great Halo Scavenger Hunt… but hopefully, the downtime won’t be too long. Update: Apparently, the downtime was measured in minutes, not days. They’re back up. 🙂 (Why is a Star Trek movie ringing in my brain?)

Just a reminder – there’s a 4v4 Halo PC tournament over at SeeMePlayMe this evening; 7 pm Central time. Grab the SeeMePlayMe client, jump into the Halo lobby, and you’re off! (There’s at least one HBO-related team playing tonight.) Top prize is a SeeMePlayMe Gold account (which, among other things, allows you to create on-the-fly HaloPC servers all the time, instead of just when they’ve made them free to all.) Details on SeeMePlayMe, for those who missed them last week, can be found here.

One One Se7en contemplates the frightening possibility that the the internet has spread quite a bit by the 26th century…

Today’s Halo: Resolution looks at the little things that fortunately don’t get in your way while playing…

10 Fan Fiction stories for you today:

• Kirk’s Odysee, by Gasman
• Chapter 6: The Trap, by Ace
• Chapter 7: Defeat and Capture, by Ace
• A pilot’s life: Chapter 2 Fallen Angel, by Captain Rasc
• Countdown Earth: Hour Eight, by Mainevent
• Plasma Burns and Bullet shells-chapter 4, by Myth
• Spartan III’s, Part 5: The discovery , by FOrunnER
• Halo: A Troubled Galaxy Ch. 3, by Ghost
• Plasma Burns and Bullet Shells-chapter 5, by Myth
• The Rise and Fall of the Flood Chapter 12, by BlackValkyire

There were many more, but one was a potentially offensive poem, and 6 others were reposted from May; the beauty of our Series link is that you don’t NEED to repost stories you’re returning to six months later… folks can STILL read them as a unit.

GameSpot has posted a Halo Game Guide; it requires basic registration (free) for the web version, and paid registration for the downloadable Acrobat version. Lots of interesting information for Halo newcomers, and 27 new screenshots. Thanks to Scimitarex for the heads-up.

Mat Noguchi’s blog answers another niggling question about why a certain glitch occurs. You may have noticed that the Scorpion tank can be used as a catapult, of sorts; if you’re standing on an upside-down one, and flip it (‘Press X to flip’), you’ll be launched pretty darn high. (This was first noticed about 2 months after the Xbox was released.) Now we know why. (This phenomenon has ALSO been exploited for some of the coolest high-jumps out there that use a Warthog; Dark Helmet discovered that if he climbed to the top level of the Blue Beam towers, then launched a Warthog with grenades on the ground below him, he could use the ‘Press X to flip’ temporary invincibility to get the hog to bump HIM into the sky. This can be seen in several released films – here’s one.) Thanks to Sir Fragula for noticing the article.

Team Sexy has been working on a new movie called Damnation – but it’s been delayed, for technical reasons. To tide you over, they’ve created a movie called ‘Too Much Time’, which parodies most of the gameplay movies out there (their own included). To get it, simply register on their forum, then download it from the Too Much Time thread. To help out on bandwidth, we’re mirroring this for a day; you can also find a copy on files.bungie.org, until tomorrow. It’s 28.8 mb, and encoded in DivX format.

(GT)Juggler created another Halo GT video – this one’s 5:18 long, and available in two sizes; a high-res version at 56.5 mb, and a lower-res version at 12.7 mb. (They’re both 320×240 screen res; one just has less compression.) It’s full of tricks, funky places to go, weird camera angles… fun stuff to watch. Almost all of it has been seen in other vids, but the synchronization with the audio is quite good. He’s hosting both versions on the HaloGT website; check the Halo Media page. (This news was originally submitted a couple of weeks ago, but I managed to lose it.)

Another server browser, Qtracker, has now added support for Halo. Yet another option if you’re unhappy with the internal browser built into Halo PC. Thanks, Blues News (via Ash).

Today’s guest One One Se7en comes from Experiment_01, and looks at one of the downsides to careless multiplay.

You’d have thought that we’d have planned something clever for news post 7777, wouldn’t you? Something suitably Bungie-oriented, maybe mysterious… definitely cool. Yeah, well, it crept up on us. Meleed us in the back of the head, even. Sorry; there’s nothing here. Not even a clue (even an obscure one) for the Great Halo Scavenger Hunt. Hmm…

As a reminder, the list of places you can grab the 131 mb Halo PC Demo has grown to more than a couple of dozen, in many countries. There’s still no official word on dedicated Demo servers… but have no fear, they’re coming.