A couple of interesting (and colorful) desktops today in the Wallpaper section. Check ’em out!

11 Fan Fiction bits for you today.

• Running Riot- Part 1, by Simon James
• Shadow Spartans, Chatper 4: The Running Prophet, by Agent Shade and Arinoth Koby
• The Homecoming – Part 1, by Tim Ricciardello
• Running Riot-Part 2, by Simon James
• The Fall of Fate: Raid (10), by ‘Nosolee
• A Final Shot – Part 2, by James
• Chapter 1: Key to Survival, by Shinai Purugganan
• Oblivion Chapter 5, by Reclaimer
• A Marine’s Tale: The First Days, by pj-NYkr90
• Project: Shadow Spartan, Chapter 5, by Agent Shade
• Buried Treasure(4), by Frensa Geran

Read ’em, make the authors happy.

After a long span with no entries, we received another submission for the Halo 2 disk cover collection. Good to know folks are still thinking about cover art!

Derek Brown is starting up a new site called haloevents – he’s hoping to create a database of upcoming Halo events around the nation. Visitors will be able to search this database for events near them. This requires input from you; the more events submitted to this site, the more people who will come to search it for information relevant to them, which will make the pool of event-submitters larger, which will help the database grow, and so on, and so on. In addition to events, there will be reviews of multiplayer gear, suggestions for LAN party hosting, and multiplayer setups. Go visit, and submit content!

IGN PC wraps up its week-long Halo PC coverage with two new articles; a general one is available to all readers, and gets a few last answers out of Randy Pitchford, and a more specialized, Insider-only one contains a 78 mb, 7:48 video interview with Pitchford. There’s a lot of feel-good discussion about Halo, and a bunch of info which has come up elsewhere… but the mod info (which was touched on in the free article) is, once again, really positive. Good news for low bandwidth multiplayer users: 56k modems will definitely be supported, and able to play against LPBs. Thanks to Da Loaph for pointing this out.

voX has put up the first of 5 pieces of a new series, called The Two Betrayels (sic) at his site, Halo². The trailer is quite short (33 seconds), but sets the stage for another nicely filmed movie. (5.3 mb, DivX 4 avi) I’ve gotta say, I really appreciate what Red vs Blue has done for the Halo moviemaking community – all this storytelling is fantastic.

Jake ‘Evergreen98’ Billo, over at the Junkyard, is taking a pretty close look at the PC version of Halo, comparing what’s in it to what’s in the Xbox version, and helping you decide where YOU want to be playing once it’s out. It’s a three part article – Part one is up right now. Thanks to vector40 for the heads-up.

Never got a movie up at Mythica yesterday, and dang, if the bandwidth usage didn’t drop below 7 Mbit/sec. The inside of the pipe’s gonna start feeling lonely – not enough bits passing through! Next up is a movie we should have posted a while ago; it seems to have gotten slightly lost. This film is a trailer for the Ninjas on Fire Forum Exclusive XBC Tournament. Nothing in the documentation sent with the movie (or at the NoFF Tournament website) gives an actual date (or dates) for this gathering… but the vid is nicely put together. It’s only 6.4 mb, in WMP7 format. I’m a little surprised at some of the misses… but hey, everybody’s got off days, right? This was submitted by zhakahunterDARK, and more information can be found at the Ninja Tournament website.

We don’t do this very much… but then, b.org staffers don’t have babies that often. Lophan hasn’t been around much in the past year… but this is one of the things he’s been working on. Brandon Jennings was born on Wednesday morning, in Doylestown, PA – and Loph is already looking for an S-controller that might fit him!

These came in yesterday, but life got busy. Owm88 submitted three new dialogue snippets for the Dialogue Databank; I actually haven’t heard any of these in-game. I’m not sure how submissions are going to work in the next week; I’m on vacation, and I’m not sure I’ve made a decent-enough interface for the other guys to be willing to add stuff… so if you submit files, and they don’t get added right away, please be patient. We’re gonna be doing our best!

In under the wire… Friday’s One One Se7en continues the Gordon Freeman lovefest. Wonga.

Last night, broony pointed out new renders and concept art at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. I didn’t have time to look for ’em… but he was right. (Last four images on the Renders page, last image on the Concept Art page.) Thanks also to Iceman1330, whose post today made me actually go looking for the new material. Update: Thanks again to Iceman1330, who convinced me that the last three Outro storyboards are ALSO new.

Live in south central Connecticut? Got nothing to do tomorrow? Tommy K’s (a video rental chain) is holding a Halo tournament at the North Haven and West Haven stores. $5 to get in, you get a free rental just for registering (so that’s most of your $5 right there)… top prize is a year’s worth of free rentals. Thanks to Konrad9 for the heads-up.

Quick heads-up (which probably won’t be read by anyone actually AFFECTED) – the datacenter this server is housed in wants to move the server to a different switch; we’re looking at about 5 minutes of downtime, maybe an hour from now. If you visit then, and can’t get in, you’ll know why. (Alternatively, if you’re reading this after about 3 pm EDT on Friday, and you couldn’t get in recently, you now know why. 🙂 )

Red vs Blue has released Episode 13 for sponsors – and I can’t tell you much about it without spoiling stuff. Caboose, however, has proved himself to be dumber than toast. After sitting on the counter for a week. (It’ll be available to non-subscribers on Sunday. Please – don’t send us mail on Monday, telling us we forgot to mention this episode…)

Back in mid-May, we mentioned a tournament called the Killtacular Classic, put together by CobaltNova. Well, it seems like that tourney has joined up with iGames to become the Halo: Killtacular Classic, iGames National Championships. Looks like you’ll get another chance to call yourself ‘national Halo champion’! (Plus, if you win, you go home with lots of cash.) Thanks to andy for the heads-up. Update: Oops… looks like it’s not finalized, yet. We’ve yanked the links, and the dates… they’ll go back when things are more stable.

IGN continues their Halo PC coverage with an article about Halo Graphics. (It’s available to all, not just Insiders.) It includes a five-question interview with Randy Pitchford about the visuals. (They say 4, but there are 5. Weird.) Interesting tidbit – “I tend to run in 1600×1200, but the game can go higher.” That’s definitely new – at E3, 1600×1200 was max, and the game ran in slideshow mode at that res. Nice! Thanks to Infininja for noticing. (More Halo PC content coming tomorrow, they say.)

Dinky writes that HaloJuggaloProductions has put up a new trailer for the HJP Intro Video (hey, I just write what I’m told) – WMP7 format, 6.8 mb. Go grab it on his site.

Xbox sales and marketshare are growing, according to Microsoft’s “chief Xbox officer” Robbie Bach (quoted in this Reuters news article). Yeah, well, he would say that, it’s one of the things he’s paid to do. However, there was one interesting bit at the end:

“Bach said Microsoft’s focus now is on more-lucrative game sales. The heavily anticipated “Halo 2” is expected next spring, and a sequel to the successful “Project Gotham Racing” is set for this fall.”

Notice that it’s not perfectly clear who a spring release is “expected” by, but it’s worth a mention.

The ongoing Making of the E3 Demo series continues at Bungie.net with The Artists. A great discussion with Marcus Lehto, Dave Dunn, Shiek Wang, John Butkus and Nathan Walpole… read it and learn cool things!