Another Halo Preview – this time it’s over at RadiativeNZ. Short, and with a few minor errors – but a nice job on the 16 screenshots, showing vehicles and weapons. Thanks to AlStrong on our forum for pointing it out.

Wow. It’s been a LONG time (two full weeks) since we updated the Miscellaneous Art section. There are 6 entries today. Check ’em ALL out. (And forgive me the huge lag in posting…)

Blinded Witness has put up a few movies – most are hosted by Fileplanet, but the links can all be found on the Blinded Witness site. Take a look!

Whoa. First words from anyone at Westlake in a LOONG time. macteens interviewed Phil Sulak, President of Westlake, recently, and the results are up on their website. Really short recap: reasonable minimum specs, no tools (bummer!), macs and pcs will be able to play together. Read all the details over at macteens! Thanks to Ramius for the heads-up.

Very nice new screen over at Gearbox’s Projects page – The MC with a flamethrower, on Boarding Action. Burn, baby…

Today’s Guest One One Se7en is from nicholas – who wonders where the MC’s mind is.

Once again, 14 stories for you in the Fan Fiction section:

• Chapter Three: Rise of the Phoenix, by Blue Jaguar
• A Series of Wierd Events, Part Five, by Hunter_Killer
• THe Adventures of Lt. Jake, Part Five, by Hunter_Killer
• The Ghosts:Project Ghost(Chapter 2), by Sergeant B
• ES03 – Eternal Sunder (part 03): Queen of the Neeps, by Wado
• Homeworlds VI, by Mainevent
• And now all hell will break loose Part 3, by metallicafan
• Chapter Four: Rise of the Phoenix, by Blue Jaguar
• The Battle of Evermore Part 3: Rush, by Gruntkiller
• At’Klin, by At’Klin
• Better Off Dead. Part 1 In The Begining…, by I_Love_You_Bungie
• Halo Trilogy: The Tears of War (Chapter IV), by Alpha Lance
• A Marine Named Peters: This Time it’s Snowboarding, by GLADIATRRR3000
• Scar’s Last Battle, by The Scribe

How does that keep happening?

In a first since the countdown was instituted, the Remaining Items list has CLIMBED on Gearbox’s Projects page (from 1 to 2). This also happened at an unusual time of day; normally, the count is updated at midnight, Central time… but this happened before 7 pm. No word from Gearbox on what’s going on… Update: Now the countdown is gone entirely. Hmm…

ViolentlyHappy noticed that Westlake has updated its project status page; Halo Mac is now at Alpha. (This isn’t really as dire as it might be if the port were being done entirely by Westlake; it will move along much faster than a normal port because much of the work porting the Xbox code has already been done by Gearbox.) Not that much longer to wait…

Another nugget of info about the third Halo novel, ‘Halo: First Strike’, from Eric Trautmann, our favorite Halo Bible expert. Being added here so that when people jump onto our forum in two months and say “What do we know about the next Halo novel?”, folks can point to this news post.

One last offsite vid for you: Dinky, of HaloJuggaloProductions, has put up a large (31 mb, DivX-encoded AVI) movie showing how to get video footage from your PC onto a DV camera. If that sounds like a lot to download for something you could explain in, say, a text-based FAQ… check out botman’s suggestion for straight-to-disk recording. Supports up to 1024×768 resolution (better than the DV camera’s 720×480) – though you’ll need a LOT of disk space for the movies… roughly 1 gb/minute. Also, framerate drops more than 50% (on my system, with reasonable action on the screen, average framerate went from ~45 fps to ~20 fps when recording was turned on.) Still, it’s easy to implement, and makes pretty high-quality movies…

More vids – this time from halo_playa. You can find his list of offerings on his website, Nick’s Halo Site.

Ghôlsbane points out that the UK World Cyber Games ended this past weekend; there are some photos on the iGames UK site. Even Halo PC made an appearance… and the whole shebang was mentioned by BBC Online. Go take a look!

Zowsky & Kabuki have put together 4 movies showing some multiplayer stunts in Blood Gulch and Sidewinder; we’re not hosting these, so we aren’t bothered by the fact that all of this has been shown before. Grab what’s of interest to you:

• Clipping – Getting into BG walls
• SWOut – getting out of Sidewinder
• SideScrolling – Ghost jumping in BG
• Tower – climbing to the Tower (and beyond) in BG

All movies are in WMP7 format, and range from 1.8 – 3.5 mb in size.

Another Halo PC preview over at Gamers Depot – again, it’s single-player only (Beta 1.5 had only LAN networking), but they took a few nice screenshots. Thanks to Nick Danger for the heads-up.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned a CGI Halo movie being worked on by Mic Fedusenko. He’s popped back into our forum with word of another few screenshots of his progress. Check ’em out!

For what it’s worth: Yes, we know that an older beta of Halo PC has been leaked. (Yes, Gearbox knows it as well; each build was individually numbered, so tracking down the leak shouldn’t be too difficult.) We’re not going to point you to web links for the download, or tolerate posting of such on our forum; we’d ask that you show respect to Bungie and Gearbox, and wait the few weeks until the full retail version is on the shelves. It won’t be long now! Update: The official Gearbox response can be read on their forum. Update 2: The entire thread (all 600+ posts of it) have been yanked; there is no more official word from Gearbox. Update 3: Turns out I still had a window open with Marc Tardif’s response in it. I think it’s worth reading; I’m fine with the loss of the other 600 posts, but I think people should see his words (109k) on this one.

37 new dialogue snippets added to the Dialogue Databank today; 30 from Captain Spark, 7 from Electric Monk. Two new categories: Jackal and Hunter. There’s no really good way to identify the Jackal snippets… so they’re simply numbered. Again – all of these were collected in-game, no hacking. (We’re not accepting sounds collected via hacking, for two reasons; Marty O’Donnell (and Bungie as an entity, for that matter) has expressed unhappiness at the bulk collection of private assets… and in truth, it simply isn’t sporting.)

Do Halo fans get annoyed when other games begin to look like Halo? One One Se7en’s MC does…

Hehe – Gearbox’s Projects page lists a total of… one remaining work item for Halo PC. I wonder what it could be (and how long it’ll take them to clear it)? Look for the game to go Gold pretty soon now…