Breandan Conaghan points out that Gamer’s Logik has a front-page poll asking what E3’s hottest title was. As of now, Halo has almost 30% of the 382 votes. Feel free to add your 2 cents. (It’s definitely a console site; Half-Life 2 isn’t even on the list.)

kiro69 points out that the July 2003 issue of MacAddict shows the results of a poll they held; “What would you most like to see ported to the Mac?” Halo placed first with 29%. (I gotta ask… what were those other 71% of respondents thinking?)

Episode 9 of Red vs Blue has been posted for Sponsors. Once again, there’s some AMAZING footage… and Sarge is back, with an item we ALL want. Go get it! (If you can’t pony up the $5 to become a sponsor, you’ll have to wait until Sunday for this one.) Thanks to CYBRFRK for the heads-up.

Seven entries today in the Fan Fiction section?

• ONI Black Ops Part Eleven(Finale), by Havok
• Desperation- Part One, by Sterfrye36
• True Purpose(8), by Frensa Geran
• Halo 2: Revenge of a Spartan, by LostRock
• The Fall of Fate: Trapped , by ‘Nosolee
• .halo, by Neo//hack
• Halo from the Flood’s Point of View: The Sergeant, by Simpsons Rule

How did that happen?

The Nightrider points out that Bungie’s Halo PC FAQ gained 3 new questions yesterday – check ’em out for info about playable demos, beta tests, and the Mac version of Halo.

In our third Halo50K post of the day, Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Mathhews of the Junkyard writes to let us know that a spotlight of dolbex is now up in their Spotlights section. (I like his favorite sites list.) While you’re there, you should read the spotlight posted a couple of days ago of Michael ‘Fluffy’ Karlsson, the site director of Battleground: Halo. Mhaddy also mentioned that in the next few days, there’d be spotlights on some Bungie and Gearbox guys… so check back!

Ninja on Fire has put up a LOT of pictures (over 100, I think) from his Halo50K experience, right here on HBO. (He was a member of Team HBO, after all.) There are lots of pictures of unnamed teams… so if you’re here, and not labeled, let nof know! This layout should give you a sense of the chaos of the event… and its scope.

Another mini-movie from HUNTR-KILLR. This one shows another setting you can toggle with a modded box – it’s called ‘magnetism’, and it determines whether marines (and the MC) will automatically exit a warthog when it flips. (It also keeps you from being ejected from a Banshee if you hit something, or fly vertically.) I’m POSITIVE that some of the moviemakers out there could find a use for this feature… the movie’s only 3 mb (QT, no sound), so grab it and see what this looks like! (Driving upside down is pretty funny.)

Bigsauce writes to let us know of a competition over at Gamefaqs.com. The Summer 2003 competition is a popularity contest; who is the most popular video game character of all time? Master Chief is ranked 3rd in the East division. Go register and vote! If you pick the winning characters, you have a shot at cold, hard cash.

dolbex, of Halo50K, writes to let us know that the website has been updated with lots and lots and lots of info. All the details from the first competition (in Atlanta, in April) are now online; you can see how everyone did in tournament play. They’ve also instituted a new Team Spotlight feature, for you to get to know the teams involved. Halo50K2 is coming up in August, in New Jersey – will you be ready?

Welcome back to the madhouse. Apologies for the up-and-downtime of recent weeks… there’s another short outage coming this weekend, when the server this site runs on is ripped unceremoniously out of the rack and stom- um, replaced with a better-functioning alternate. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to synch the data between the two machines… details will be posted on our forum. In the meantime, we have to hope this puppy can limp along until UPS does its delivery thing.

It’s not quite Thursday, UTC… so I’m still not late posting today’s One One Se7en. This one’s sort of special…

SketchFactor has posted part 1 of his FanFest Flashback; a look at the history of the Bungie FanFests, as well as the events leading up to this particular iteration. Good times, good times… go read!

Hehe – BOLL has put out yet another enjoyable Halo-inspired creation. It was for an intro course in animation… the main character may not LOOK familiar, but he sure SOUNDS familiar. (2 mb, QuickTime format) I love this guy!

SketchFactor has stepped into a thread about the imminent release of the E3 Demo video with a bit of information.

…it is definitely not coming out today or tomorrow. However, I can say with certainty that it’s very close to being released. We know everyone is eager to see it and trust me, we’re eager to get it out there. While it’s not a huge ordeal to prepare it for release, it does take time and being the perfectionists that we are, there are a few little things that the team wanted to address.

Stay tuned… we’ll be sure to let you know exactly how to get your grubby mitts on this, as soon as we know ourselves.

[WSD] has put up their second monster movie (18 minutes long, 88 mb) for you to grab. It’s predominately 4-player gameplay – 2v2 or 4-player FFA – except for the last 5 minutes, which is an unedited 6 player game of Rockets on Prisoner. Editing overall is pretty well done. If you enjoy watching Halo gameplay, grab this file (it’s in the Media section of their website). WMV format (v7, so it’s watchable by Macs, too). Thanks to [WSD]-Deus for the heads-up.

It was posted during E3, but somehow we missed it; Gamespot put up a Hands-on impression article of Halo PC a couple of weeks ago. It’s got a bit of dodgy information, but mostly, it says the reviewer was happy with what he saw. Thanks to Clefton Twain on our forum for the heads-up.

Brannon Boren points out that Halo is featured in yesterday’s Dork Tower cartoon. Got a chuckle out of me…

Scott Velasquez of Gearbox points out that if you want to see a pic of the Gearbox team, you can find them on top of the building they work in in the latest issue of Computer Gaming World (which has a 4-page Halo PC spread). We can’t add the article to our Press Scans section until it’s off the shelf… but you can find it in your local newsstand right now.

Shacknews has interviewed Randy Pitchford, of Gearbox – there’s a boatload of tasty information there. Of great interest to many HBO regulars is the support Gearbox plans to provide to the mod community…

The degree to which Halo is huge on the PC is the degree to which we?ll support the modification community. We believe it?s going to be huge. We?ll be talking about our initial steps to help a modification community grow around the title soon and will be talking about what kind of tools and other SDK material we?ll release and how it can be used sometime around the launch. Dave (Mertz) and Matt (Armstrong) have been really looking forward to doing it…

Sounds like the tools won’t be released with the game itself, but soon afterwards, instead. He also touched on where the differences between the Xbox version and the PC version lie:

Randy Pitchford: From a content point of view, single player is pure. The new content and features we?ve added have all been in the area of multiplayer.

We have, however, corrected a few much less than significant issues that have been discovered by some of the millions of Xbox customers and we?ve been able to pick and choose between feature differences in the PAL and NTSC versions of the Xbox game (as we have both code bases). This manifests itself in a few different ways that are mostly really subtle – I?m interested to see what kind of changes/differences the most hard-core fans actually discover. I hope you understand that we wouldn?t be doing our jobs if we actually advertised such subtle adjustments…

Read the rest of the interview; there’s info on input devices, film capabilities (or lack thereof), coop possibilities, new multiplayer game play features, new vehicles (note the emphasis on the plural), new weapons (yes, the flamethrower is in), and more. Three pages of juicy Halo PC Goodness!