Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, has written an opinion piece on the future of interactive gaming. Give it a read!

One One Se7en takes potshots at Metroid Prime’s shortcomings… check it out.

These guys STILL don’t have the hang of the Series field in the database (6 of these 11 Fan Fiction entries had the series set incorrectly)… but we love ’em anyway.

• The Fallen : Chapter 2, Section 2, by Hikaru-119
• The Fallen : Chapter 2, Section 3, by Hikaru-119
• On A Pale Horse: Two Cruisers, by Silent Hunter
• Unknown Apprentice, by Apache119
• Covenant Invasion! Part Six, by Hunter_Killer
• Shadow Ops, Chapter 5: Rescue, by Agent Shade
• Its Just One of Those Days: 03, by Elfster
• Price of Glory Pt. 2, by loserman
• Black Knight Pelican Attack: Hot LZ Chapter 1, by JK Hazard
• Shadow Ops, Chapter 6: The Outpost, by Agent Shade
• Forsaken Forefathers part VII: Arctic Warfare, by AlphaBravo343 and Havok

Go read.

Yesterday, I said that the art queues had been cleared out, and if your work hadn’t been posted, it was because we either rejected it, or couldn’t tell who it was from. Well, there was a third possibliity – I could have just missed the piece. 🙁 There were three – two Wallpapers and one Miscellaneous Art – that escaped me. They’re up now. Sorry about that!

Live in Virginia? Like Halo? There’s gonna be a tournament on August 9 in Virginia Beach. There’s a site with almost no info… but you’ll find some more details on our forum.

Hehe – a LAN party site wrote up a list of predictions about what would happen after Halo 2 is released. It’s pretty funny. Thanks to The Friendly Greek for the heads-up.

More awesome movie content. MaverickJ has put together Part II of CTF Flag Getting 101… and man, your jaw’s gonna drop when you see some of these. (Try ’em on XBC – your opponents will tell you you’re cheating.) It’s available in two formats; a 11 mb WMP9 file and a 29 mb MPEG. For now, it’s just available at the Project Spartan forums (registration required) – but as soon as we get bandwidth back, this is in the queue. Maverick says a FAQ is coming, so hold your questions for a bit.

Sometimes, you just gotta grin.

Darksage (aka Benjamin Jacobs on our forum) put together a little video for a contest over at the Red vs Blue forums. It was nicely done – enough so that we thought it would be worth the effort to reduce the filesize by about half. (It’s now 17 mb, zipped, in QuickTime format.) If you didn’t download it yesterday, when he mentioned it on our forum, grab it now. Bandwidth is very tight these days, due to Mythica’s downtime… so any mirrors for this would be appreciated. And if you enjoy it, let him know in our forum – and wish him a Happy Birthday, while you’re at it!

Thanks to Dan Chosich, who pointed out that UGO has put up a Halo PC preview with a set of ‘exclusive PC screenshots‘ (there are three of them, but the third one has been out for a while), and a Halo 2 preview. He found this info over at the Junkyard. Good stuff!

Finn says he’s put up a little Halo Story Page update. Yeah… and the Hulk is a little bit green. Good stuff in this one…

And finally, last but not least… two new desktops for the day in the Wallpaper section. This clears out the art queue entirely. If you submitted something, and it hasn’t been posted yet, one of two things happened: we rejected it for not meeting our Image Posting Guidelines… or you submitted it with no attribution; we don’t know who you are, we don’t post your stuff.

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. 🙂