And, while we’re clearing that art box, there were two Halo logos to be posted, as well… check the Logos section.

Four new banners posted, as well – one small, and three large (with a VERY large variant of one of them). Take a look! Update: whoa, just as that update went up, another one came in. This one should be at the bottom of our forum, or something…

The art backlog has been building; there’s finally been a free minute to clear it out. 10 pictures (plus a variation)… check ’em all out in the Miscellaneous Art section! Update: DRslamAlot’s Commander Jackal has been updated with a larger picture. (I really gotta check the uploads sites more often…)

c0ld vengeance has written up a basic guide for Halo moviemaking. It covers setting up your equipment (probably the most-asked-about subject we see in reference to moviemaking), and gives some general tips for making movies. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in putting together a project for the Halo community! For the sake of convenience, you’ll find a direct link to it in the upper right corner of our forum.

dolbex has been hanging out over at the Gearbox forums, and today picked up some interesting Halo PC info from Dave Mertz, Lead Level Designer. Read about it in this forum post!

This morning, Visual posted a request on our forum, asking for some hi-res shots of the color-select screen at the beginning of Halo. (You know, where you pick your multiplayer color.) Evil Otto, ever the fan pleaser, dropped off a hi-res TIFF file with all 18 colors inside (along with a pretty dang useful alpha channel). Snag it from our Miscellaneous section – it weighs in at just under 700K, zipped.

Mr. Smiley has been working on a full-blown Bungie documentary (it was mentioned in the recent Fanfest Flashback story at Bungie.net). Now, you can download Episode 0 from Bungie.net. 10.9 mb QuickTime, or 12.3 mb WMP9 – it’s not the documentary, but it’s a Red vs Blue-style intro to the documentary! Take a look.

Doug Radcliffe, a freelance writer, is working on Sybex’s Official Halo PC Strategy Guide (due out in September), and has posted a request on our forum for feedback on what you, the Halo player, would like to see in a Halo PC Guide. He said he’ll be checking the forum for responses… but email is preferred. Now’s your chance to get in a vote for coverage of editing tools, or multiplayer strategies… or whatever else you can think of that would make this guide rock. And oh, yeah – he’s real. 🙂

Simpsons Rule created a pair of Simpsons-related Halo desktops. They’re being hosted by a couple of forumites; you can see a preview of one of them on Lion’s Truth and Reconciliation site (bottom of the page), and both are also hosted by guy who doesn’t post….too often.

The silver lining in the cloud that is my forgetfulness is that occasionally, you get three consecutive days of One One Se7en. (Okay, that’s really only gonna happen when I forget to post Fridays and there’s Sunday content… so it’ll probably never happen again. Enjoy it while you can.) Today’s strip finishes up the Unreal Championship series. Still funny, even if not 100% accurate any more.

10 stories for you today over in Fan Fiction:

• Shadow Ops, Chapter 4: The Alliance, by Agent Shade
• Halo: Attack of the Banshees Part 1, by Super Beast
• Halo 2, by System Failure
• Covenant Invasion! Part Five, by Hunter_Killer
• Mercenary – Prolog, by HockeyPuck
• Death’s Angels: Chapter 2, by Space_Moose
• Human vs. Covenant War: Part One, by Ronald Maszk
• coccon by flood, by Cpl.C.Hicks
• A Marine Named Peters: Run For Your Life, Fight For Others, by GLADIATRRR3000
• Halo Zero /p3/ Sniper Position 07, by nicholas

Can you get through all of them before the next batch?

Salon.com has a pretty funny article about Julia Roberts’ Halo obsession. Worth a read. (If you’re not a Salon.com subscriber, you can watch a 15-second commercial for a daypass, which will let you read the remainder of the article.) Thanks to Robert Reichle for the heads-up.

Z points out a pretty cool little movie on xboxottawa.ca (it’s the last thing on the page). 6.9 mb, DivX format (make sure you have an up-to-date version), 720×256. They’re working on more, but they’re all in school or working fulltime… so there’s no timeframe on the next product. You wanna see a slick multiplayer move… grab this film.

Took a little bit of finagling, but there’s a Sunday strip for One One Se7en today. This is a totally random feature; it will not happen every Sunday, or even every other Sunday; it’ll happen whenever Stuntmutt gets the inspiration for a Sunday strip. This one is just in time for the Red vs Blue forum members to get their hands on episode 10. (It should be available to the general public later today.)

Thanks again to BOLL – the Flash Pelican game is once again online, though now without a high-score option. Play it for fun. 🙂

Wow. We haven’t updated the Wallpaper section in almost a week… and now there are 21 new desktops for you. 10 come from kapowaz, and are just interesting renditions of opening screens on each campaign level. (Each one is available in 5 sizes, as well.) The other 11 (two of which come in multiple sizes) are individual submissions. Total number of new screens (including variations): 63. Wonga! Check the Wallpaper section.

Sir Fragula points out that his Halo Role Playing Game Combat Test system (a single in-game room that allows player to fight against all currently implemented enemy encounters, in an attempt to generate feedback) is now online, thanks to NeXuS and goatrope. (The download links are here and here.) More details about what this is, and what’s working and not working, can be found in this forum thread. The download is about 3 mb.

Apologies to all who were enjoying the Pelican Flash game (or, more accurately, attempting to get on the high-score list for the game). There were so many of you playing at once (and submitting scores at once) that the server’s been bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. For the sake of the REST of HBO, I’ve pulled it offline for a while. I’ll try and figure something out with BOLL so that you can play this without killing the site. I’m sorry…

Dang – once again, a busy day gets in the way of remembering to post the new One One Se7en. (To make up for this, we’ll post the first Sunday strip tomorrow.) In the meantime, Friday’s strip is now available; the Unreal Championship series continues. Mercenary? Of course.

Okay, it’s not COMPLETELY done yet… but it’s good enough for government work. A few days ago, BOLL released his Pelican Flash game… and folks loved it. It was only one level… but check out the thread of folks nailing that high score. Made us happy enough to crank it up a notch. BOLL went back to the drawing board and added 4 more levels… and I added a high-score backend for the website. Now, when you play the game, you pick your level… at the end, you add your name, hit ‘submit’, and you can check out how you compare to other site visitors. It’s a work-in-progress; BOLL might add more levels, and I’ll probably be adding more features to the high-score list (stuff like ‘number of times played’, that sort of thing)… but it should work, as is. Give it a try! Warning: your score will be ignored if you hit submit without adding a name. Keep that in mind. (Nothing says you have to submit at all; there’s a restart button right under submit, you can try again without putting the score up.) Update: There seem to be a LOT of you playing this game, mostly at the same time. (There are a few thousand new scores in the database already…) If you get an error upon submission, it’s likely because the database is being updated by someone ELSE at the same time. Sorry about that.