IGN has also put up an Insider-only article containing updates on the Halo 2 info beyond that which you can glean from watching the trailer. Much of this info is available elsewhere (our forum, for example, in the form of reports from the show or the fanfest), but some was new for me. Probably the most interesting bit was that the covenant mortar (referred to as a ‘turret’ by Marty O’Donnell at the show) you see early on in the trailer will be a controllable vehicle, much as the Shades are in Halo: CE. I’m lookin’ forward to some serious shelling!

Rage Reset points out that the front page of IGN Xbox contains a poll asking your opinion about the Xbox game of the show for E3. Halo 2 is currently stomping the competition with almost 70% of the vote… but hey, a poll’s a poll.

BOLL has added another 20 panoramas to his HaloRAMA collection. You can view all images in the default mode, or you can check out just the new images. There are some stunning ones in there! (The Flash interface needs to be updated – by BOLL – before it can show these new images, so for the time being, it’s straight html for you…)

Xbox LAN AZ showed up in force at E3 and the fanfest; their fanfest pictures are now online. Thanks to Cybrfrk for the heads-up.

Miscellaneous Art, too, was submitted while we were gone. Three pieces – including a shot of Danung, a rockin’ Grunt. Check ’em all out in the Miscellaneous Art section.

Clearing out the desktop queue; there are 9 images built up since we left for E3 (two are variants, so there are only 7 visible on the main Wallpaper page). Some pretty amazing stuff this time around…

Gamespy snagged Hamilton Chu for a discussion of Halo 2, and it went live yesterday. It’s a very nice piece; I particularly liked this bit of game development philosophy:

You want to give the player choice — or, in a certain sense, the illusion of choice. As a designer, there’s the one best experience — in our genre, that is. There’s one best experience you want the player to have. Usually you want to make it clear to the player what they’re supposed to do, and sometimes if you’re good they’ll think they thought of it themselves.

Go read the rest of it. Thanks to Halo-Game‘s Eclarap for the heads-up.

One of the articles that came out last week that we neglected to mention was a Halo PC piece at IGN PC. There’s some tasty stuff in there… but the most surprising thing (to me) was this bit (in a list of things that are new in the PC version):

Flamethrower: You heard correctly. Though Randy didn’t elaborate any, there will be a flamethrower in the game. How do you like that information? Flame on!

This was not visible at all in the multiplayer levels being shown at E3… I’m intrigued. Thanks to Da Loaph for reminding me I hadn’t posted this.

Evan Grant wrote to point out a small flash game he’s made; there seem to be a few glitches (I could never figure out whether shooting was possible, and the score seems to remain zero no matter how many Banshees I avoid, and in some browsers moving forward quits the game), but it’s pretty small, so loading it isn’t too much of a pain.

Some time ago, BOLL started work on a Halo-related mod for Sven Co-op, itself a Half-Life mod. He’s decided to give it away, because he no longer has time to work on it. You can read the details in the Sven Co-op forums… or simply download the existing package. Update: BOLL clarified that Sven Co-op actually allows custom models to be built right into maps; BOLL’s project, although including custom models for monsters and weapons, is still just a map. (I think we’re simply describing the same thing with different words… but he’s right, we should be more accurate in the description. 🙂 )

Gah! We got behind because of E3 -I’m really sorry. There are three new episodes of One One Se7en for your viewing pleasure. (These are the episodes for last Wednesday, last Friday, and today.) I’ll try and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Dan Chosich created a 50 minute video for the AGP Spring Tournament this year… and has put up the trailer for it on his site. We were asked by Jay Umboh, the president of the AGP, to mirror this… and it’s pretty dang cool, so that’s exactly what we’re doing. You can find a copy on Mythica.org, which has a bigger pipe than ever before (something we’ll be putting to the test in the very near future…). Screensize is 720×405, filesize is 16.5 mb, duration is 1:30, and format is QuickTime. Enjoy!

Ross Mills, among others, pointed out that the Greg Snook interview we mentioned a couple of days ago is available for download at BreakManX.com. (The site was down from overload earlier today… but it’s up at the moment.) I haven’t had time to actually LISTEN to it – it’s over three hours long, and weighs in at 85 mb, zipped – but it’s had some decent reviews on our forum. Check it out!

Nice find by Gholsbane; Mat Noguchi, Tools Programmer for Bungie, is represented in a pretty cool manner by his brother in this image. I like it!

One last one, before I collapse: To the hundreds (no joke!) of people sending us Halo 2 trailer links… feel free to stop at any point. They’re out there for anyone who wants them, but we’re not going to link to them. We’re waiting for the official version from Bungie, which is likely to be released later this week. (Marty, Jay, and Joe have to get together, record a copy and compress it for the web, and then distribute it to sites that can handle the bandwidth spike. There’s no real timeframe for how long this will take… but later this week is a pretty good bet.) We’re not saying you shouldn’t watch the 800 recompressed versions of the shakeycam recordings that Gamespot and IGN snagged that first night – we’re just saying that we’re not gonna link to any of them. Again, if you want to see them, they’re really, really trivial to find. You don’t need our help.

Interesting. There seems to be a passel of new screenshots at Boomtown, a Danish gaming site. Conversations with Bungie employees this past week led me to believe that these shots wouldn’t actually be released… but it seems that Boomtown has a source that thinks differently. The article is in Danish, but Mr Leut, who pointed out the screens on our forum, says that the text describes being able to use human and alien weapons simultaneously. Check ’em out – as far as I know, some of these pics haven’t been seen ANYWHERE else, online or in print. (There are several that appear, in modified format, in the OXM article… but these have backgrounds that the OXM shots don’t have.)

Several people (first here) have pointed out on the forum that this page at Xbox.com has Halo 2 listed as “Halo 2: Truth and Reconciliation”. However, according to Lorraine “mehve” Reyes-McLees, we have not discovered a subtitle for Halo 2. This wouldn’t be the first miscommunication between Bungie and Microsoft’s PR department. So please stop sending it in 🙂

Back from LA, and utterly exhausted… but hey, you guys are worth it, so here’s a Fan Fiction update:

• Halo: Aftermath 02, by Cpt Crapper
• ONI Experimental Vehicle and Weapons Database: Volume 1, by LordofDestruction
• The Prologue, by Simpsons Rule
• The End, by Clark S.
• Critters the Reckoning part one, by Caleb Generoso
• ONI Black Ops Part Six, by Havok
• Chapter 5: The Beginning, by Ace
• Halo 2: The Covenant Wars [Chapter 1], by Thomas Harper
• To Kill a Mockingbird continued, by sunscorpian
• Chapter 3: Friendship, by Vinny

There’ll be more stuff later today, I think… it’s unclear whether there’ll be time for it; I’ve been gone for 3 days, and there’s some family stuff to attend to. To the people who wanted to know why the artwork they sent in 24 hours previously hasn’t been posted yet… um, I’ve been gone.

Another batch of pics has gone live at the E3 2003 coverage page. Check out the top news post over there for more details on my thoughts about them. I promise, there’ll be more updates in the next few days… but right now, we’ve got to get ready to go see the Matrix.

Thanks to iZoD, who points out an interview with Greg Snook, a member of the Halo 2 dev team, today at BreakManX.com at 2 pm central time. This translates to 7 pm UTC, for those who care.