Lightweight Fan Fiction update, as they go these days:

• Wild Weasels, by Dirty Commie
• Halo: Captain Keyes Story Part 2, by monitor101
• Falling Stars From Heaven., by HALO MASTER DAWG
• Life of a UNSC Marine Part III, by Tygpj

Go for it…

Check this out. Bungie’s instituted a new pay-for-content service called Bungie.net Pro. For $7/month, you get access to boatloads of webcams, an online version of the Halo Story Bible, Developer diaries, daily Halo 2 screenshots… and MORE! Go read about it. Then sign up. (I got in early – I was subscriber 20. Not too shabby!)

Pimps at Sea goes Live! Check out the Pimps at Sea page over at Bungie for some pretty darn cool hardware to accompany this amazing almost-ready product. (Yeah, we know, it’s not Halo-related… but the more-than-half-dozen Halo-related items posted this morning at Bungie.net have fallen victim to a new build of their server software, and this was the only thing left.)

Wow. Yesterday, Eclarap pointed out a link to the PC Halo Strategy Guide. It’s not for sale yet, but that was the first we’d heard that it even existed. (I, personally, figured that the Prima guide would serve.) There was a bit of speculation on our forum about the comments that there would be new vehicles and weapons in the PC version. (The common belief up to this point was that it would be more or less a straight port.) Well, a contact at Westlake (the development house doing the Macintosh port) contacted us late last night with a pair of screenshots to whet people’s appetites. Now, I know what you’re thinking – it’s April 1, this is all a joke. What you have to realize is that we had nothing whatsoever to do with the timing here. Eclarap found that strategy guide yesterday, the day before April 1 – and the discussion about it generated the email that got us the images. I seriously toyed with the idea of holding off for a day, and posting these tomorrow, so that folks would KNOW they were real… but I figure there’s enough in them to vouch for their veracity that people could look past the date we’re putting them up. Things to notice:

• The incredibly beautiful hi-res textures here. (blow up an existing screenshot and see what it looks like)
• The new weapons. (Okay, they’re not new – they’re back. How cool is that?)
• The aspect ratio. (Xbox shots are taken at 640×480, max… these are 1280×1024. The ratio is no longer 4:3, it’s 5:4.)

We’ve been told (though we haven’t seen for ourselves) that a modified Shadow (not the new one, but a version of the original Shadow) will be available in multiplayer games – and that there are two new outdoor levels to take advantage of this vehicle. Okay, enough talk. Visit our Screenshots database and check out the shots – one campaign, one multiplayer. Personally, I can’t wait for summer! (For those still holding out, be warned – these do contain spoilers.)

poena.dare has taken the cleaned-up covers of GURPS Halo and interpreted what can be found in the text. Keats and new taglines… go read about it at Bungie Sightings!

c0ld vengeance, back from a long absence, has found what might be a pretty cool easter egg – the letters ‘TR’ (for Truth and Reconciliation) written out in the lights of the ship of the same name on the level Keyes. Clever!

mnemesis has put up a nice review of Halo: The Flood, over at the Halo Story page. There are minor spoilers in there – but mostly for the Halo storyline, not for the book. Suffice it to say, this book will shake up what you thought you knew about Halo. And it’s available in stores today! What are you waiting for?

After a long time with no submissions, the Logos section gets another entry. We’ve also put up a layered Combat Evolved document (photoshop format, 1.1 mb, zipped) that appeared on the web – in a much larger size – for a short time about 18 months ago. If you want to make your own Halo logos (i.e. without the word ‘Halo’), this is the puppy you need.

Next up in the ‘clearing the queue’ game… 6 art pieces for our Miscellaneous Art collection. Everything from Zelda/Halo crossovers to armed school invasions. Check ’em out!

Wow. I wonder if this really has a market? A company called CodeJunkies has created a product called ActionReplay, a $39.99 package (£19.99 in the UK) that uses a specially-modified 8 MB memory card to move saved games from your PC to your Xbox and back. (The package comes with ‘powersaves’ – saved games from critical points in Halo, and other games.) More details can be found in a writeup at XBOX365, which was pointed out to us in our forum by Tomass.

Nice find by Eclarap – looks like the Official Strategy Guide for the PC version of Halo is being done by Sybex (the Xbox version was done by Prima), and it should be released on June 15, 2003. According to the Amazon.com listing for it,

The PC product refines and improves upon the Xbox version — which many consider the “best first-person shooter ever” (EGM) — with greatly enhanced multiplayer capabilities and new weapons and vehicles.

Wonga… should be nice to get hold of this!

Gonna try and clear out the art queue today. First up: desktop images. We’ve got 7 for you – you’ll find ’em in the Wallpaper section.

Fan Fiction from the weekend:

• Old Memories, Forgotten Weaknesses, New Strengths, by AlphaBravo343
• Last stand part 3, by grylsy
• A Single Motion: part 2, by Arthur Wellesly
• fallen angel 10: Ground, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• Just Getting Started Chapter Three, by James Kinsella
• Halo: Law & Order (Part 2 of 3) , by el_halo_diablo
• Part I:The GHOSTs, by pj-NYkr90
• Cortana: Knowing the Record Before the ‘Lost Time’ (First Part), by Traumatised Marine
• Cortana: Knowing the Record Before the ‘Lost Time’ (final part), by Traumatised Marine
• Epilogue-Farewells, by Ultra Sonic 007

Don’t forget – stories without titles simply cannot be approved. (There’s nothing to link to…)

Both 2 and 2 make 5, over at Subnova, and Doggone, on our own forum, have cleaned up the recently unearthed (but damaged) front cover for GURPS Halo. Check the pics out, and speculate away!

Oops, forgot this one – Sector7, which opened a while back, then died, is back online. Or… at least, it’s supposed to be. (All I get is a flash animation of the title…)

guy who doesn’t post… too often wanted to point out his Halo site. Take a look.

Team Overkill is the first to post a summary of the Dead Rabbits event that happened here at HBO Headquarters yesterday. (They won’t be the last, I don’t think…) It’s a good read, and covers the spirit of the day pretty well. I’ll say it was an honor to be killed so many times by these guys… (Thanks to E.S. for the heads-up.)

Hehe – nice pickup by oddworld – this week’s Photoshop Phriday at Something Awful contains a pretty nice Halo parody. Check it out!

Another day… another lanfest in the past. Apologies for the sparse updating yesterday, but there were 26 Halo fanatics here yesterday, from as far south as mid-New Jersey and as far north as the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border… 5 states were represented, and the carnage was nonstop. Mostly the games were just for the heck of it, but we did have one 2v2 Team Slayer tournament running during the fest. Congrats to the winners, Geeoff and Tom! Back on the Halo news front, Subnova has received a damaged, but readable, image of a proof of the cover of the Halo GURPS manual. Curiouser and curiouser…

News will be sparse today… Dead Rabbits kicks off in less than 2 hours. 30 Halo fanatics, all crammed into my house, shooting each other and making the dogs crazy. Should be fun!