Okay, I’m probably gonna get some flak for this one, because of all the movies we’ve declined to host recently… but hear me out. Rory Hartley and Bill Copeland put together a movie they called ‘Blood Gulch Ballet.’ It’s three and a half minutes of Blood Gulch gameplay, set to classical music. (I recognize the piece, but can’t name it.) It weighs in at 15.4 mb; it’s smaller than it was when it was submitted, but I didn’t reduce the quality very much. (It wasn’t great to begin with.) What tipped the balance for me were three things:

• There are some really nice moves in here
• We haven’t posted movies recently, so Mythica’s not heavily loaded
• It was dedicated to Brian Morden (sue me, I’m sentimental)

Grab the QuickTime-encoded movie at Mythica.org, or the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server. Update: Thanks to Ninja on Fire and Stuntmutt, who both pointed out that the music is Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’. (Appropriate, no?) If you’re ever in Portland, Oregon, look for Rimsky-Korsakoffee’s, the best coffee house in the northwest. (I miss it.)

Six new desktops for you, too, in our Wallpaper section. Some rockin’ good stuff in there…

Once again, the art queue has built, a little bit. Here are five pictures submitted to the Miscellaneous Art section over the past few days… Update: Gah, missed one. It’s from almost 2 weeks ago, even.

Following up on yesterday’s news glut on the Halo 2 ‘delay’, JPSartre points out that CNN Headline News is currently running a piece on how Halo is being pushed back. (It’s titled ‘Hello Halo’.) Let’s hope the coverage of the actual GAME is this big…

The Halo50K Tournament is fast approaching (less than seven weeks away now), and in an attempt to clarify who’s coming and who’s just talking, the deadline on the $75/person ($300/team) entry fee is March 22 – after that date, the fee goes up to $360/team. Get your money in soon!

æ­µsic.ign.com has put up an article about a panel of musicians that convened to discuss the importance of melody in video game music. Apparently, there were some major audio/video problems – but some interesting discussion was still reported. Marty O’Donnell was among the group (which is why it’s getting a writeup here), and he had some several comments about the purpose melody serves in a video game:

“But you don’t want to keep repeating that over and over again, you want to have it play, but you want to have it always played in some place that people go ‘Oh yeah, that’s Halo ‘ And to me there’s nothing more valuable to brand a game than to have some sort of melody that is instantly connected with it and it’s in everybody’s head.”

Read it soon, since it’ll likely be behind the IGN Insider barrier before too long. (Thanks to Doggone for the heads-up.)

Pretty cool – TechTV has an article (and an associated video) about videogame playing on US military submarines. The funny thing about the video – though everyone talks generally about ‘videogames’, and ‘playing games’, the 5 or 6 clips of actual gameplay are all…yup, you guessed it, Halo. Not another game in sight. Thanks to Tirion (shameless Psyjnir fanboi) for the heads-up.

The Swedish Halo site Halo-Se is being taken down (lack of staff, it seems). We’ll yank it from our Links page soon. (Thanks to BOLL for the heads-up.)

Red Loser, who seems to want his own day (but started WAY too late to succeed, sorry pal), has written up a History of Halo: Combat Evolved which brings to light some heretofore little-known tidbits. Or maybe just the type of mushrooms he’s been eating lately.

Red Loser has put together an interesting page of speculation linking Halo to the Bible. He let us know about this yesterday, but time constraints kept it from getting posted; for the masses, he referenced it on our forum. It’s worth a read, if you’re at all interested in what RL calls ‘The Persecution Parallel.’

Red Loser, a forum regular, has written up a Guide to Recognizing Spam. (No, not the luncheon meat… the annoying blather that sometimes fills our forum.) The aim is to give people guidelines on what does, and doesn’t, constitute spam on the forum, in order to improve the overall signal-to-noise ratio. Worth a read, if you’re a regular forum poster.

Wow. The ‘Not in 2003’ news on Halo 2 is big enough to be reported by Reuters. Now that’s impressive for a videogame release date status update… (Thanks to mnemesis for the heads-up.) Update: Griffon points out that it made the BBC news, as well. When was the last time you saw this sort of coverage for a videogame development status update? Update 2: Hehe – just to be complete, poena.dare (whose day it is not) has compiled a sizeable list of news sites that have grabbed this story. Wonga.

And the Fan Fiction keeps rolling in. The latest installments:

• Life of a UNSC Marine Part I, by Tygpj
• The U.N.S.C. Thunderbird, by Tommarrow
• Chapters 1 & 2, by LostRock
• The Battle for Rackma VI: Part 1, by gwinnalex
• Legend Hunting Part Five, by Dispraiser
• Assault on Edina 2, by Steele
• Part 3-The Incursion, by Ultra Sonic 007
• CT1 – Fromble, by Tru7h
• 6 Way War: Ch.2 Mechanical Humanoid Robot Suit?, by Demosthenes

I’m still working glitches out (this is the first major section to come online without rigorous testing, and the first to be subjected to some pretty serious diversity in user sophistication), but we’re getting there!

If you’re like me, there are certain comics that simply made you sad when they stopped. Bloom County, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes… well, our very own Warbow has resurrected one of these classics and updated it for the present day. We’re proud to bring you the first four strips of Calvin and Halo. As more get added, we’ll let you know.

Fan Fiction writers: early submitters have pointed up a couple of errors in the system. The biggest one, however, was simply a misunderstanding; folks didn’t seem to be able to figure out my explanation of why their ‘filename’ was being rejected. I’ve rewritten a section of the directions to clarify this problem. (Scroll down to ‘Title’.) Also, some of you actually tried submitting stories while I was working on the page last night; you probably got errors. Two stories were recovered (Ultra Sonic 007 and Tygpj) – if you don’t see a submission you made in the next update (later today), drop me email or try again.

::crosses fingers:: Okay, I’m approving the first batch of user-submitted Fan Fiction; here’s hoping it all works properly. Stories for you today:

• Halo: Reunion from Destruction Part 4 of 5, by Frensa Geran
• 7- The Flood Zero, by nicholas
• 5 Way War Part VI: unwelcome neighbors and Part VII: Redo’s new life, by Demosthenes
• Chapter 2-Explanation/Touchdown, by Ultra Sonic 007
• The Mind That Made War (part 1) and Part 2, final chapter, by Traumatised Marine

Go get ’em! (Don’t forget to let us know if there are any problems…)

I’m fallin’ out of my seat, laughin’. We got a note from ed, asking us if we knew anything about the new Halo 2 shots showing at Giga.de, a german TV affiliate of NBC-Europe. In ed’s words,

Giga is a well-known show about all sorts of internet-themes, and I don’t think they would lie, but I wonder if these pics are real, because they have no Bungie-logo on them, and they are still not shown at Bungie’s T&R-site.

To see the pics, follow this link, then hit the ‘Shots’N’Pics’ link underneath the action figure picture. Alternatively, here’s the frame in question. When you’re all done, follow this link, posted on our news last week, and if you want, you can even follow the internal links from there for the original source. When you’re all done with that, sit back, laugh, and then send Roger Wilco some email, telling him just how cool his work really is. (ed, you were right to be suspicious… but if you ask me, those are good enough to be in the game anyway.)

PlanetXbox has posted what they call a ‘narrowed down’ release date of Halo 2: someone who works for PXB who was at the GDC heard from someone that the ‘slated release date’ is Q1 2004. Now, given that Matt Soell (who is DEFINITELY more of a known quantity than an unknown source at a gaming conference talking to an unnamed staffer of a general Xbox site) has said, as recently as yesterday that there is nothing more firm than ‘2004’, this info should be taken with a grain (okay, a pound or two) of salt… but we didn’t want a few dozen of you writing to let us know that you KNOW when Halo 2 is gonna be released, and we’re way behind on the news. (Thanks to Team Overkill for the heads-up.)

Okay, I think it’s ready. The Fan Fiction section now has an online submission form, and it’s the ONLY way we’ll accept stories. (Upload them, or email them to us, we’ll politely point you to the form, the first time. After that, we’ll simply discard them.) Now, it’s been tested, but not RIGOROUSLY tested; I figured authors wanted it online more than they wanted assurances that there are zero bugs left in the code. This means that if you’re a Fan Fiction author, make sure you keep a backup of your story until you see it on the site. If you run into a problem, tell us – we can’t fix what we don’t know about. All that said, go to it – read the revised guidelines, then head to the submission form, and submit your story according to the directions listed. Stories will be reviewed and approved once a day or so.

Hehe… BOLL is building a new desktop, and needs help with a caption. Do your stuff. Update: Looks like BOLL changed his mind – he doesn’t want captions. (The pic is still worth looking at, though…)