I missed it yesterday, because we were pretty busy cleaning up… but Red vs Blue managed to resurrect the lost Public Service Announcement #3 from the failed hard drive, and it’s now available to everyone (sponsors and regular visitors alike). It’s pretty damn funny, on several levels. I nearly spit out coffee at the thought of a Milli Vanilli tattoo…

Tycho, from Unreal Ops (an Unreal fansite), came along on the Halo PC Fanstock event last week. He’s posted his own impressions of the game (as well as three new screenshots, snapped from a beta build we were given) over at the Unreal Ops site. A nicely non-Halo perspective… go read it!

Ever since E3, I’ve been wondering how easy that Ghost hijacking trick’s gonna be. Seems Stuntmutt’s been wondering, too… check out today’s One One Se7en.

What happens when you drive your warthog too fast? Why, the wheels catch on fire, of course. (DivX and QuickTime formats, 15-18 mb.) Blood Gulch looks amazingly bleak… and the weapons mods are pretty hilarious. BOLL continues to turn out seriously entertaining hacking vids.

Blackstar has put up a nice little photo gallery of yesterday’s Summer Slaying lanfest here at HBO HQ. This screen says an awful lot about the skill of Geeoff; give him a pistol, you die. That simple. (I’m having trouble figuring out why SAAACK is 12th, though… I’m not 100% sure what they were playing there.) Comments can be found in this forum thread.

A word puzzle was posted on our forum a few hours ago. It’s not clear that the solution has been found yet, though folks have made quite a bit of progress… there some interesting stuff waiting for the first 3 correct answers, so give it a shot!

Exogenesis dropped off a report from the Penny Arcade Game Day at Lanwerx yesterday. Sounds like it was a fun time! Update: there’s a report from Randy Glass, too, on his Warthog Jump site. (News for August 24, in case it’s scrolled down…) Turns out MANY of the replies in thread are from folks who were there; read the whole thing.

Very nice Randy Pitchford interview at Belgian Webgaming Forever (there’s a Dutch version too). Great overview of where he came from, and what drives him to make outstanding games. Thanks to ash for pointing it out.

Did you ever wish you could make the Warthog go faster? Check out BOLL’s MonsterHog, and see why that might not be the best thing… faster speed, yeah, but much harder to control.

Beginning to scrape the sleep out of my eyes – last night ended at 3:30, and started at… hmm, about 9 pm the night before. Decent lanfest, except for melting the wiring in my garage… There’s quite a bit of stuff to get to, but it’s going to take most of the day to get to it. First up: CPL has announced its prize distribution for the Halo PC tournament at the CPL Winter Event; first prize is $9,000. More numbers and lots of links can be found in CobaltNova’s forum post. Good money, if you’re skilled enough…

So here I sit, surrounded by snoring lumps, trying to wake up the overnight guests for the Summer Slaying lanfest starting in about an hour… updates will be pretty sparse today. On the bright side, though, there’ll be a LOT of Halo playing.

Today’s Guest One One Se7en was drawn by Andrew Katz, and attempts to match Stuntmutt’s style pretty closely. (It also tips a hat to RvB.) Check it out!

Woohoo! A new Halo Babies has been posted (#6) over at Halobabies.net. Check out what happens when you try warthog jumping with water balloons… thanks to the heads-up from mrsmiley in our forum.

Gearbox has swapped out its dogfight-on-Death-Island screen that was posted this morning with a much wilder (and never seen before) shot of Banshees dogfighting on Gephyrophobia. WAY cool. (Hmm… wonder if the comment I made earlier had anything to do with this…?) Kudos to Fein for noticing. Update: Hehe – rule number one: never let your ego get too big. cartesian over at the Gearbox forums noted that the two Banshees in the first shot were on the same team… a far better reason to swap the pic out.

As mentioned by Sketch in the Halo PC Weekly Update, the Multiplayer section of Microsoft’s Halo PC site has been updated with 5 new screens of Gephyrophobia. One thing I noted to a few people was my impression that the bases in Gephyrophobia have an Unreal Tournament feel to them… lots of pillars and ramps. Well, one of the new shots gives you a chance to see whether I’m out of my mind or not.

The second Halo PC Weekly update was posted a couple of hours ago on B.net… Michel Bastien, having taken up residence in a refrigerator in the back rooms of Gearbox’s Plano offices, sent in an exciting report describing… well, mostly playing a lot of Halo. Tough life the guy’s got!

Just a heads-up… The Red vs Blue team had a hard drive failure last night, and the current work is (at the moment) unreachable. They’ve got hopes for it, and in any case it’s only the most recent work; all past episodes are doubly backed up on DVD. To tide over Sponsors, there’s a trailer for a movie Buzby and Matt did a few years ago posted in the Sponsors forum. (Makes me want to find the whole thing…) Everyone else… just sit tight.

We just got word of a new Halo movie, made by Stephen of MXB, showing off some hacking stuff. (Mostly projectile switching, but also some vehicle spawning, and the like.) It’s all based in Blood Gulch. It’s 6:26 long, in WMP7 format, and weighs in at a tad over 10 mb. It’s hosted by MXB.

4 new themes have been added to the 7th Column roster – you can make your Chapter over in one of three Halo-related themes (Shotguns is pretty cool), or (my favorite) a 7th Column theme known as Euphoria Station. SketchFactor also managed to slip in the information that there are two new members of the Bungie Online Team – Claire and Zoe (last names and handles were not included). Welcome aboard, from your dedicated fanbase!

9 stories in the Fan Fiction section today:

• Swamps, Marshes & Keyes [H&R 2], by Jillybean
• Anathema – Chapter 3, by Bloodcider
• Halo: White Battleground (Trailer/UPDATED), by ShadowWolf Forsythe
• The Rise and Fall of the Flood chapter 6, by BlackValkyire
• The Lost Colony Part One: Severed Contact, by xitWOUND117
• Operation Rubicon, Part 1, by Jim Jo
• Stranded at Home Part 5, by Dispraiser
• Halo 2: Revenge of a Spartan, Chapter 9, by LostRock
• The Last Stand Of Humanity part 1 (Greetings Humans), by bloodsoldier4

A couple of these came really close to being rejected for lack of proofreading… folks, put a LITTLE time into presentation, okay?