Last Friday, Homelan Fed put up a followup article to their Fanstock Impressions article we mentioned a bit ago. (I blame our missing it on the Labor Day weekend. Yeah, that’s it.) A few new screenshots (now in our Screenshots database as well), and some comments about the beta version they’ve been playing with… worth a look!

Remember Salmon vs Teal, the Red vs Blue parody? Now there’s a SvT tribute strip in the One One Se7en series. This place gets more and more like Deliverance every day…

Nick the Roadie points out a Halo 3-man Team Slayer tourney at Cyberjocks, near Buffalo, NY this weekend. Entrance is $45/team, and prize money is based on the number of entrants. (The site is framed, so you might want to go in through the front page; the Halo tournament is listed at the bottom in the ‘upcoming tournaments’ section, and full rules are listed in the ‘Events’ section.)

Goodness – looks like everyone stayed inside during Labor Day, and wrote. 21 Fan Fiction pieces today:

• The Battle of Evermore Part 2: Break, by Gruntkiller
• Chapter Two: TF Resolution, by Blue Jaguar
• The Alliance: Part two, by pooman
• Attack on ERISTOCK-Part 1: Introduction, by xitWOUND117
• Spartan III’s, Part III, by FOrunnER
• Halo Trilogy: Destroy th ‘Judgment Day’ (Chapter II, part 2), by Alpha Lance
• The Covenant: Chapter 1, by William
• Why Bother, by Alpha Lance
• Homeworlds III, by Mainevent
• Chapter Four: Stranded Eagle, by Blue Jaguar
• And now all hell will break loose Part 2, by metallicafan
• Reclaimer, by Alpha Lance
• A Series of Wierd Events, Part Three, by Hunter_Killer
• The Adventures of Lt. Jake, Part Three, by Hunter_Killer
• Nothing to Lose Part II, by hornet34
• Battlefield Earth: Mission One, by Master_Chief189
• Chapter Five: Stranded Eagle, by Blue Jaguar
• THe Fall of the Covenant- Chapter 1, by MC117
• Chapter One: The Rise of the Phoenix, by Blue Jaguar
• The Ghosts: Silver Eagle Down(Chapter 2), by Sergeant B
• Its Just One of Those Days (Prologue: 05), by Elfster

More tomorrow, I’m sure.

Woohoo! Blackstar has posted a huge movie (48 mb, 720×480) showing highlights of a lanfest held here at HBO HQ last weekend. Read about it in this forum post, go pick up the movie at Blackstar Productions. Image quality is up to Blackstar’s usual standards. Format is MPEG-4; you’ll need the latest drivers for whatever viewer you’re using. It’s a testimony to how many people we had that in the 3:21-long movie, I’m not in a single game; we had 9 Xboxes running at one point (and only one of them had recording equipment connected to it). Was a rockin’ good time, nice to see some of the footage I wasn’t playing in!

Timing rocks, sometimes. Stuntmutt turned in a One One Se7en strip referencing BOLL’s Flash Pelican game – I worried that by the time it aired, folks would have forgotten about the game. Skavenger reminded the world just a day or two ago, though, with his monster forum tale…

Forum regular Lion spent the day at the iGames Summer Season Regional Tournament yesterday, in Tennessee – he’s written up his experience on his website. Check it out! (Notification was here, on our forum.) Update: Ernest Miller, of Game Jockeys, points out another writeup, this time of the Regionals in Southern California. Check it out!

Nine Fan Fiction pieces for you this Sunday:

• Chapter One: TF Resolution, by Blue Jaguar
• In Light of Destiny Part VI: Within Range, by Jinkaiden-XI
• The Probe, by Master_Chief189
• The Wasted, by Alpha Lance
• Halo Trilogy: Destroy the ‘Judgment Day’ (Chapter II, Part 1), by Alpha Lance
• Grunts & Spartans, by Alpha Lance
• Homeworlds II, by Mainevent
• The Ghosts: Silver Eagle Down(Chapter 1), by Sergeant B
• Derailed Part 3, by Dispraiser

Go outside after you read – beautiful day. (Well, it is HERE, anyway…)

Wow. It’s taken a LOONNG time, but the Easter Eggs page is finally up-to-date; two eggs (the Megg, and the Chinese seven on the pistol) have been added, and one egg (the Gametypes screen, as corrected by ZechsGX recently) has been updated. Dunno why I hadn’t done this before…

Every once in a while, Serious Sam comes up in a discussion of what Halo is missing (due to its more-than-two-player full-screen coop play). Stuntmutt looks at what it DOESN’T have, in comparison to Halo, in today’s One One Se7en. Ouch.

I’d have to say that this is getting out of hand. Luckily, it seems to be the last piece… Go read the rantings of Skavenger’s feverish mind. You might scratch your head once or twice… but if you’ve spent ANY time at all on our forum, I guarantee you’ll laugh at least a little.

The last Halo PC Fanstock participant has written up his experiences… and the wait was worth it. He wanted to include information that required the 2.0 beta of Halo PC – and he did just that. Go check out Dolbex’s Fanstock and Beta Review!

Today’s Guest One One Se7en strip was originally posted in our forum… I’d have to say it would be funnier if it didn’t happen so often to me, dangit. Thanks to Geeoff for pointing out my weaknesses.

Fourteen Fan Fiction pieces remain after deleting the stuff that doesn’t meet the basic guidelines:

• Homeworlds, by Mainevent
• Chapter Three: Stranded Eagle, by Blue Jaguar
• Elite Black Spartans [episode 1 the cruisers menace], by Marshall purewal
• A Marine’s Tale: Vengeance is Mine , by pj-NYkr90
• Charge of the Grunt Brigade – Part One: Colonel, by Walker
• The Skull, by Walker
• The Flood: A Force to be reckoned with (Part 4), by crashedwarthog
• Nothing to Lose Part 1, by hornet34
• Derailed Part 2, by Dispraiser
• That&#4294967186s my lucky number, by Wado
• Another ONI Black File: Halo &#4294967190 We Got There First: Part 8 , by Arthur Wellesly
• Defection: Part 1, by Zach Laskaris
• Halo Trilogy: Take Back What Belongs to Us (Chapter 1), by Alpha Lance
• And now all hell will break loose Part 1, by metallicafan

For those who didn’t notice it – Wado’s back.

…wait, that’s the Peace Corps. Never mind. It’s Friday… so it’s time for a Halo PC Weekly Update. This week, it looks like Sketch is doing the writing, instead of Michel Bastien – Michel is too busy helping get the game finished, and Sketch needed a break from playing Halo PC online, anyway. In fact, the update is mostly a recap of what worked (and didn’t work) for him in gameplay. Get jealous, or file away the knowledge for future use… but whatever you do, go read it.

New comic over at Halobabies.net… the Warthog Jump theme continues. Man, I feel sorry for ‘Yomama… or whatever his name is. (mrsmiley pointed this out in our forum.)

Eep – forgot to put this up earlier. Dan Chosich’s Halo PC Beta footage (discussed here) has been moved around a bit. Currently, there are two mirrors each for the QuickTime and Windows Media Player versions:

• QuickTime (33 mb) at files.bungie.org and rampancy.net
• WMP7 (15 mb) at the Junkyard and files.bungie.org

If you haven’t gotten a copy yet, grab it now… it’s nicely filmed.

Continuing on their one-new-map-a-week schedule, Microsoft’s Official Halo PC site has put up 5 new screenshots in the Multiplayer section, this time of Danger Canyon. You can get a good sense for the scale of the map, if you didn’t have it already… take a look! Thanks to quickfire for pointing it out. We’ve gone ahead and added these to our Screenshots database, simply because we just brought it up to date yesterday, and I’d hate to begin getting behind so soon…

Gearbox’s Project page, which was offline for a while this morning, is back up with a new screenshot (feel sorry for the Blue Base)… and a countdown of remaining work items left on Halo PC (before it can go gold). Total at the moment: 146. (That’s not very much; I remember Oni’s bug tracker had over 3000 items in it a week before it went gold. They weren’t all bugs… but they were things that needed to be addressed.) Woohoo! Thanks to Sedgr for the heads-up.

Red vs Blue Episode 17 has been posted for Sponsors; it’s pretty bitter, but in a funny way. Effects rock. Pay ’em the lousy 5 bucks and get it now, instead of waiting until Sunday (and then sending us email that we’ve forgotten to put up a Red vs Blue post for the week). C’mon… you know you want to.