3DCenter, a German gaming site, put up a Halo PC preview last week; Kooky Bastard found it for us today. It contains 15 new screenshots (serious spoilers, for anyone keeping track), and shows what I think are the first shots we’ve seen that demonstrate how the graphics scale down on lower-end graphics cards. The shots are at 800×600, and are missing some bumpmapping/reflection mapping that we’ve come to expect – but they still look pretty good! (The cards used in the testing PCs are all decent… but not DirectX9 cards, and now you can see what that’ll mean for you.) The preview, unfortunately, is in German, which means I have no idea what it says. If you read German, though – check it out!

Hehe – good thing that Warthog is indestructible… today’s One One Se7en is posted (on time!).

Once upon a time, there was a major Halo site known as Haloplayers. (They were big enough to be in the rotation for the original Halo Updates.) In early 2002, they went through some bizarre problems, and reemerged as Realhaloplayers.com. Again, they ran into trouble… but in late February, 2003, they came BACK online. And in early March, disappeared again. Well, Barak says they’re back, for good. He’s got a new site design, but needs some help fleshing out the site. (After all, they’ve got a few years of content to catch up on…) If you’re interested in joining the team, Send Barak some email – or look for him on #haloplayers on irc.quakenet.org.

Red vs Blue has released Episode 15 for Sponsors – go grab your copy now. And don’t adjust your monitor when it starts… it’s supposed to be that way. If you’re not a sponsor, you’ll need to wait until Sunday…

Dolbex, from Halo50K, writes that the competition stats and over a hundred photographs taken during Halo50K2 last week are now posted. Go check out the action!

Beginning in a few hours (August 8, CST), The Master Chief will go up against Aeris in the GameFAQs Character Battle. You’ll have 24 hours to help MC defeat the Final Fantasy Flower Seller… go vote. (We’d credit this to someone, but we’ve been getting notes about this since MC defeated Golden Sun’s Felix, over 3 weeks ago. Go visit GameFAQs… and vote! (And stop writing to us about this, okay?)

Cybrfrk, recently back (and vibrantly bouncy) from a 2-month vacation (yeah, some of us have pretty cushy jobs), has posted a major update to his Faces of Bungie Webcam page, with 36 new (and unidentified) images. How about you visit, and point out some names for him?

fireburner, bryn, and gravityman played with the flamethrower/gravity gun hack, and captured this footage of the gravity gun killing a player on Mount Wanker (their name). DivX-encoded AVI, 549K, and there seems to be a problem with the sound (though it’s not really necessary to see the action). Interesting… Update: Tons of pics of the Gravity Rifle (not visible in the first vid), plus extra video footage, from BOLL and company on our forum. Check it out! (Read the whole thread. There’s much more info about the killing possibilities…)

Team Ice, Blade’s programming/gaming site that was doing some movie mirroring for the Halo community before it went offline for bandwidth overage, is back up and running. Downloads are now handled by a separate server, so the chances are good that the overage will not occur again. Blade is still in the process of uploading popular movies, so check back in the next day or so if there’s something you need that isn’t available elsewhere. (For example, XboxOttawa.ca, home of Fire Team Charlie and some very popular vids, went offline recently, also for bandwidth overages; Team Ice has the .AVI versions of the FTC films up now, with the QuickTime versions coming soon.) When one falls, another rises! This community rocks.

Seven pieces of Fan Fiction for you today. (There were 8, but one was unreadable.)

• Halo: Mercy Ch: 2, by ssj9000chilango
• Earth, A Place for Death. Part 5: Attack on the Gods Hands., by FuManChu
• Halo 2, an Elites version, Part III, by FOrunnER
• Four Plagues [2]: A New Enemy, by Kancer
• Marines: Rise from the Fall/ Section 1, by Delta117
• The Tragedy of Red vs Blue, by Puma109
• Halo: The MCconto Chronicles(?) Part 5, by JCDenton

Go to it!

A long time ago, some screenshots of the Halo Flamethrower (in the Xbox version) floated around the net – speculation from Bungie employees at the time revolved around someone with access to an XDK (Xbox Development Kit), and the willingness to break their Non-Disclosure Agreements. When pushed, the producer of the shots in question backed off – and the matter was dropped. Well, this morning, PfhorSlayer (programmer behind Aquaduct, the Macintosh tunneling app) popped into our forum with some surprising pictures. A couple of hours later, Nick posted more of his own. Nobody in the thread was willing to answer HOW this all happened… and speculation raged about whether this was a hoax or not. This afternoon, BOLL got some info from Phforslayer, and recorded a movie that would be very, very hard to fake. You can’t hurt anyone with this (since the code was yanked, there’s no damage information), and it looks… unfinished (as well it might be), but it’s certainly real. And it was accomplished with just a modded off-the-shelf Xbox (NOT a Dev Kit), and a bit of ingenuity. Wow. (If you have a modded Xbox, Macegac has written up a short tutorial on how to get this for yourself. If you don’t have a modded Xbox… please don’t ask us how you get one.) Update: BOLL points out that you CAN kill people with the flamethrower… but only if they’re in a ghost. (Well, other vehicles might be possible, as well; he and Macegac only tested a ghost.) Oddness continues…

Ross Mills pointed out some new screenshots over at the Home Front website (a Halo total conversion for Battlefield 1942 – we mentioned this about a month and a half ago). Models look a bit flat in their desert environments… but that’s probably gonna change. Check ’em out!

And their fame grows… BBC News has done a full piece on Red vs Blue, and its use of the Halo engine to tell a story. It’s well-written, but more than that… it’s mainstream. Thanks to Ulf for the heads-up on our forum.

Adam Vehige, the Grand Prize winner of our Pillar of Art contest, received the final piece of his winnings today – so we finally feel comfortable showing you what he got. (Be a bit unfair if you got to see it before he did, wouldn’t it?) Lorraine McLees outdid herself on this one – it wasn’t created for the Pillar of Art contest, but it suits the task of Grand Prize admirably, especially with more than 4 dozen Bungie signatures adorning the matte…

Wow – is it tomorrow already? This one was gonna be on time! Wednesday’s One One Se7en looks at the inevitable outcome of a successful run…

Jason Mad writes to tell us that The Halo 2 Site is now up and running, with more updates coming soon.

Whoa. It’s been a little while, but SketchFactor notes that a new Bungie Soapbox article has gone live! CJ Cowan, a member of the Halo 2 Cinematics team, discusses…air conditioning? Man, those Bungie guys are wimps. (It’s a pretty funny read, all in all…)

Halo Mac has changed from First Playable to Pre-Alpha on Westlake’s Project Status page. Thanks to Harbinger, on our forum, for noticing.

Bungie, not to be outdone by rabid fans, has released 30 new dialogue snippets in their OWN Dialogue archive (not to be confused with our Dialogue Databank) – some of these are not actually accessible in the shipping game, so you wanna get ’em from Bungie. I don’t think we’ll add these directly to our collection – but the nice thing is, they’re classified by what action is needed to find them, so dialogue hunters might have a chance of collecting SOME of them the old-fashioned way… Bungie’s page isn’t searchable, but the latest additions are marked ‘new’.

For those who noticed some difficulties getting to a few Halo movie mirror sites last night (or the Rockets on Prisoner site) – that’s what slashdotting‘ll do to you. We held off until now to say anything, because when this kind of thing is happening, telling people about it only makes things WORSE… but on the plus side, there’ll probably be a much wider audience voting for ‘best Halo movies’ now.