To the eight million and one people sending us info about the OXM scans… Yes, it’s true: the June issue of the Official Xbox Magazine has a massive Halo 2 article, with some pretty incredible pictures. Yes, they’re allowed to print those – they got their permission straight from Bungie. Yes, we know that there are literally DOZENS of places where you can download these scans now. No, the issue is NOT on the shelves yet – only subscribers have their hands on it right now. No, we are NOT going to post these scans, or link to them; our policy with magazine scans is that we will NOT put up anything from a magazine still on the newsstand shelves. (June’s OXM isn’t even ON the shelves yet… forget about being OFF them.) By scanning these pages early (or downloading them and choosing not to buy the magazine because you’ve already read the article of interest to you), you’ve taken money from OXM, and increased the chances that OXM won’t be in business to BRING you cool articles like this a year from now. It’s not clear to me why we have to state this policy over and over, every time a magazine puts out a major Halo-related article… but it seems we do.

Another movie for ya – Fight or Flight, from Dancing Grunt Productions. 4:30 long, this movie is full of fun little snippets, mostly from single player or coop. From it, you can see stuff like coordinated marine rolls, cheating death by using vehicles, and some nicely timed warthog tosses (one into a blue beam – it’s tossed right back). It weighs in at 20.9 mb, and is hosted by mythica.org, with a backup on the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server. (More folks should take advantage of this resource – transfer rates are high, and the collection of movies is enormous.) Enjoy!

More art clearage, including a pretty amazing Maya render of the MC, and a tiny little icon… Check the Miscellaneous Art section for five new entries.

Beginning the clear-out of backlogged artwork – here are three desktop images for you, two of which come with variations. Check all five out in our Wallpaper section!

To the folks sending in Megg movies and screenshots – thanks, but you can stop now. We’ve got several pretty high quality movies… but Meg’s out of town until Tuesday, and plans to handle the PR when she gets back. We’re going to hold off until then to post stuff, but we certainly don’t need more. Thanks!

Roger Wilco rocks.

We’re a bit late… but Episode 4 of Red vs. Blue has been available for sponsors for about 10 hours now. The public version will be up Sunday at noon, as usual. This one starts slow… but it had me laughing at the end.

In an interesting turn of the tables, Bungie’s SketchFactor has interviewed Frank O’Connor, Executive Editor of the Official Xbox Magazine, about his life and job. OXM is running a pretty big Halo 2 spread in next month’s issue (on newsstands in a bit more than a week), so the timing is pretty good. Take a look!

A sad, sad day in Bungie-land… Matt Soell has posted a farewell message on our forum – today is his last day as a Bungie employee. All I can say is… we’re gonna miss him. Hopefully, the Bungie Way will find a new Keeper, and not be lost.

Just a quick reminder, courtesy of Bungie.net – today is the deadline for entries to the America’s Biggest Halo Fan contest. Get that video to them NOW!

A monster update for the Halo Story page today; typos, disease, and Stephen King! More tidbits than you can shake a SPNKR at… and while you’re there, don’t forget to check out the new digs!

Due to server problems, the fan fiction section hasn’t been updated for almost a week. Here are the 15 stories submitted in that time.

• Legacy Part Three, by Havok
• Fallen Angel 13: Curse of the Gods, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• Halo: The Three Day War Chapter 01, by Cpt Crapper
• Halo: The Practice, by Howlin’ Jackal
• The Virus Part 2, by monitor101
• Taking Halo: Chapter Two, A Clash of Heavans, by Steele
• In the end [short but good], by Grunty thirst
• Grunt thirst, by Grunty thirst
• Halo: 3rd Armored Cavalry Division 1, by HunterKiller
• Data Entry:Covenant Stronghold 301, by Dan Mitteer
• Another ONI Black File: Halo – We Got There First: Part 2, by Arthur Wellesly
• Another ONI Black File: Halo – We Got There First: Part 3, by Arthur Wellesly
• The Road to Earth Part Two, by John Morris
• part V: Black Night Squadron, by AlphaBravo343
• Legacy Part Three, by Havok

That should hold you for a little while…

A large number of videos were dropped off in recent days – we’re going to have to be careful about doling them out, since Mythica (our main bandwidth candyman) is already pushing 5 megabits/second out of its fat (but not infinite) pipe. The first one we have for you is a two and a half minute QuickTime flick called Halo Crank Yankers – modeled on the Comedy Central program of the same name. It weighs in at a bit under 11 mb… be gentle.

Oops – another one we missed during the outage. Bungie.net ran a request from emildux for you to submit your suggestions for gametypes for the upcoming iGames Summer Season. This is your chance to get your favorite game variant known!

HBO was down while this was going on… but BOLL started a thread a few days ago in which he posted a series of panoramic views of Halo. (These were created, as you’d find by reading the thread, by standing in one place and rotating slowly… then running the resulting movie through a homebrewed program that stitches together the same column of pixels from each frame.) Count Zero turned a few of these into QTVR panoramas; the end result is a nice 360° view of Halo in several different places. Oh, the ingenuity of fans…

And ANOTHER new Halo site – Black Ops HQ. This one is also still being fleshed out, but the main design seems finished, and the forum is up. The community continues to grow…

A week ago, we mentioned a Halo RPG that’s being worked on by a forum denizen. This week, a website for the project came online, and many more screenshots have gone up. Take another look, if you want to see a rapidly-evolving role-playing game being developed.

SketchFactor has posted a note to the Fanfest 2003 Chapter to let folks know that a special mystery guest will be appearing at the Fanfest. Want to join in the speculation on who this guest might be? Hop on by, and post to the fanfest forum! (You don’t need to be a chapter member to post.)

The Halo50K tournament is well on its way to becoming a truly monster hoedown. Current prize purse is hovering around $8000, with a bunch of TVs to be given away as well. They were planning to accept registrations at the door, but they’ve decided to limit the tourney to 56 teams total (they were at 42 a couple of days ago), so there’s a deadline for registration of tonight, at 11 pm EDT. (That’s roughly 11 hours from now.) Team HBO will be there to represent this website – will you?

Thesomeone writes to say that Halo.CombatEvolved is now online. Still being worked on, but many of the sections are live. Take a look…