Dolbex writes to say that the Halo50K site has been overhauled completely, in anticipation of Halo50K2, coming up this August in New Jersey. 64 teams, $15,000. Sign up now!

12 Fan Fiction pieces for you today:

• The Devils Brigade Prt. III, by Spinks
• (Chapter 1) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• (Part 2) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• (Part 3) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• True Purpose(3), by Frensa Geran
• Unexpected Surprises Part 5, by JediKnight114
• Covenant Elite Morphology, by Mr Yun
• ONI Black Ops Part Three, by Havok
• Prologue: The Master Chief, by Ace
• Spartans: Combat Evolved Part One: Paintball Wars, by LordofDestruction
• Chapter 1: Reporting to Earth, by TheGladiator
• The Flood: A force to be reckoned with (Part 1), by crashedwarthog

Enjoy.

The MC has a crisis of identity – check out the latest One One Se7en comic from Stuntmutt.

As mnemesis said… Whoa. The long-awaited overhaul of Bungie’s Truth and Reconciliation site is complete… and man, is there some good stuff for you to much on. Lessee… New screenshots, new concept art, a new render, a new storyboard, the final level of Bungie’s Legendary Walkthrough… dang. You should be finished reading about the time the E3 stuff pours into your brain.

That Weasel steps up to the plate and mirrors Lethal Rage – always nice to have extra bandwidth! New movie coming tomorrow…

Holy flaming bacon, Batman! Bungie.net has put up a look at what’s to come at E3 next week… and just reading the text will clog your arteries. If you’re young and healthy, swing by and read up… if you’re old and fat, be careful. (There are also juicy details on PC Halo , from Michel Bastien, its producer… go read. And read. And then jog around the block a few times.)

We’ve had a few interesting movies submitted recently. We can’t put them all up at once, because we’d kill our kind bandwidth hosts… but here’s the first one. Called ‘Lethal Rage‘, it’s a sordid tale of murder and gang violence in the city… all set on Sidewinder. Parts are rather dark; blame me, not Pico, the creator. (Well, the original was pretty dark in those places… but not quite THIS dark.) Sound issues are NOT my fault. 🙂 5:37 long, 26 mb big. QT format. If you can mirror this, please, let us know!

Cool details from AEG, a PR firm that works with Microsoft:

Fragmasters and gamers alike are encouraged to get in on the Halo PC action at E3 for the chance to win a coveted Halo PC T-shirt. Gamers who attend E3, the annual video game convention taking place in Los Angeles from May 14 through 16, will get the first chance to play the new Halo PC multiplayer in the Microsoft booth (#1246). Winners of each four-player match will receive a Halo PC T-shirt and earn bragging rights over their friends. The competitions will take place throughout all three exposition days.

Nice! Gonna be a lot of people running around in Halo T’s…

Good news from Bungie, about the online version of the Trivia Contest to be hosted during the fanfest:

• Because they get screwed in almost all contests, international fans are welcome to participate in this trivia contest. If you win, Bungie’ll be happy to mail the prize pack to wherever you live.
• Because 7-11 pm Pacific time is an inconvenient timeframe in some parts of the world, and because Bungie’s already recognizing that international people will be playing along, the contest will be online here from 7 pm Pacific on Thursday (2 am Friday UTC) through 7 pm Pacific on Friday (2 am Saturday UTC). You are responsible for figuring out how that translates to your local time.

We’ve added some insanely hard questions, so the likelihood of multiple perfect scorers has dropped precipitously… but in the event of a tie, the winner will be chosen at random from the pool of leading scorers. All decisions made by management are final and not open to discussion. Don’t mess with us – we’ll send Ling-Ling to deliver you a world of hurt.

Snoppydude points out a new Xbox online linking tunnel, called X-Link Messenger. There’s very little information at the website – but if we learn more, we’ll let you know.

Team Overkill has put up a writeup of their Halo50K experience – go check out boatloads of pics and some funny commentary. (There’s a big one coming from NOF, of Team HBO, as well; in fact, it’s been online since last week, but there are currently almost 250 images loading on the single-page writeup… until we adjust this a bit, it’ll kill both browsers and the server. Soon…)

More Lego stuff, thanks to Fury Three: another Warthog design, and the first Lego Banshee published to the internet. Check ’em out!

When you absolutely, positively need to get there overnight, and the elevator just isn’t working… BOLL to the rescue. Pretty funny stuff.

IGN has a couple of features that mention Halo. Their Top 100 Games of All Time (which still has the top 20 to post) puts Halo at #39 – thanks to the dozens of outraged Halo fans who pointed this out to us – and their ‘Big Game of E3‘ article puts Halo 2 at #1 on the Top 25 Most Wanted List, based on fan data. (Thanks to Dan Carroll and Furiouspumpkin13 for the heads-up on this one.) So there you go.

A month ago, we mentioned a team tournament in Madison, WI. Today, Poocho reminded us that the tourney happened last weekend; results and gaming impressions can be found here.

SketchFactor has put up a massive article at Bungie.net describing how things are going on the way to next week’s fanfest, and what the fan at home can expect to see (and get) during this time. Lots of cool stuff, but here are a couple of tidbits. There’s a Fanfest Q&A database that Bungie.net users can add questions to – anything submitted before Monday will get collected by Sketch, and some of the best will be answered by Bungie employees in attendance at the Fest. (Check the ‘Have Questions? Get Answers’ section of the article for more details on what can be asked, and so on.) There’ll be an online version of the traditional Bungie Trivia Contest, hosted right here at HBO – but it’ll only be available on Thursday night. Be sure to stop by after 7 pm PST (2 am Friday UTC) to try your hand! (The online winner will receive a Bungie Prize Pack.) The Bungie webcam will be at the show, so remember: Someone Has To Watch The Webcam. Go read the rest of the piece – and start drooling!

Bungie has posted the names of the finalists in its America’s Biggest Halo Fan contest – congratulations go out to Paul Gelardi (who posts on our forum as Elan Sleazbagano), Geoff Fink (gfunk over at Red vs Blue), and Jeremy Roos. See you guys in LA!

One One Se7en continues with MC speculating on the relative benefits of various armor…

Thanks to Jota Rota, who noticed a One on One with Glenda Adams over at IMG; there are a couple of brief mentions of Mac Halo. Worth a read!

CobaltNova wrote to let us know that planning is underway for the Halo: Running Riot Invitational 3, the

“third edition of the wildly popular series pitting 4-man teams against each other in the now universally copied NO ELIMINATION format that has drawn teams from as far as Texas, Colorado and even Ohio.”

More details can be found at the CobaltNova website. Date is June 14, in Phoenix, AZ.