A window into Bungie Culture… ouch. (A little more detail can be found here.)

Spec Ops Elite came up with a pretty cool technique for taking screenshots that are similar to Bungie’s cursor-less shots. They require a modded Xbox, and it only works in the latter half of the game – but if you meet these requrements, the basic steps are described in this forum post. Examples of what you can do with it are here, here, and here. (All of these images are under 50k each.) The possibilities for moviemakers are mouth-watering…

Random Hero took BOLL’s recent tri-monitor desktop and created a single-monitor version with all the images. You’ll find it in our Wallpaper section. Update: oops, missed one – here’s another from Michael Jensen. Enjoy.

9 new pieces of non-wallpaper art, including two cool tributes to Brian Morden. There are a couple of other gems in the bunch, as well – check out the Miscellaneous Art section!

A number of Halo sites have come online, or dropped offline, or whatever. These are the ones who’ve asked for some coverage. Kyle Gallagher has put up Kyle’s Halo Website. Bullet, who started Halo World almost 2 months ago, has pulled it down and replaced it with a page about a band. Firestrike (now Shadowfox) wrote to ask for feedback on the site design (and a plug) for Wams.Fireion.com – but when I suggested (politely) that the design was pretty much of a ripoff of THIS site, and that maybe content should be fleshed out a bit, he told me to blame the site designer. And that’s the link news as we know it.

Whoa. Back… and faced with thousands of emails. The nice part is, Count Zero has taken care of a large chunk of the Halo ones. One thing he left, though, was artwork – there are 8 new desktops submitted in the past week, and you’ll find ’em in our Wallpaper section. There are also 3 images submitted last week that got their own page; BOLL requested that they be submitted, individually, to the Wallpaper section. Miscellaneous Art coming soon. (If you submitted a desktop via ftp, and you don’t see it in this collection, it’s probably because you didn’t bother to tell us who you are.)

Westlake Interactive, the folks doing the Macintosh port of Halo, have updated their progress page with the news that Halo has reached the Prototype stage, which they define as “far enough along to have some interface drawing and most data files loading, but not far enough to actually play.” (Westlake and Gearbox are mostly independent at this stage, so this news has no bearing on the progress of the PC version.) Thanks to Michael Paulus for pointing this out.

Looks like Mythica, our main movie bandwidth provider, will be up and running sometime this week – most likely late in the week. For all those who are jonesin’ for movies… fear not, we’ll have access again in a few days!

Quick update from the guy who doesn’t post… too often, on the Brian Morden Memorial Halo Lanfest, held last night at the Morden house. Sounds like it was the place to be.

iGames, the folks who sponsored the National Halo Winter Season Tournament, has set up the iGames National Halo Spring Season. This one is a doubles tourney – two-player teams. Entrance is $15/player for the local tournaments, $20/player for the regionals. More info can be found on the iGames site. Thanks to ninja on fire for the heads-up. (I’m not really back yet – gonna spend all of tomorrow on a plane. Thought I’d try and fill in while the rest of the staff pay their respects to the Morden family in Pennsylvania, though…)

The entire remaining staff of HBO is currently en route to Brian Morden’s memorial, so the news has slowed down a bit. Things should be back to normal by Sunday.

Bungie.net has posted an interview with Curt Chiarelli, Sculptor, the actual creator of the Halo toys spotted recently. Thanks to Red Loser for noticing this.

On the forum this morning, Lacsap posted a link to an article about the recent resurgent interest in movie tie-ins with video games. Obviously Halo is mentioned as being shopped around. But it’s not just some little title being bandied about, it’s actually, according to the article, backed by one of the largest agencies in the biz, CAA, which was once Michael Ovitz’s home.

Of course, Matt, Official Bungie Spin Doctor, had a while back mentioned how suspicious Bungie was of the whole movie tie-in thing. And can you blame him? Still, we’d be foolish not to keep our ears to the ground on this one.

Update: Matt has chimed in with an explanation. They’ve been signed up with CAA for quite awhile, and as far as Bungie is concerned, CAA is only poking around to see who’s interested. Bungie’s busy with Halo 2 at the moment. A Halo movie is not something they’re at all concerned about.

A new artist has appeared on the forum, and despite rampant self-deprecation the drawings are very good (the post originally referred and linked to “Marine killing unspecified things”, Postman updated his page afterwards). My favorite is definitely this one.

Bungie.net has tracked down one of their own and interviewed Doug Zartman, who left Bungie around the time of the Microsoft acquisition. Lots of fun stuff in there about the upcoming toys and novel!

Yet another nugget of Halo trickery comes out of level 2, first partially described by The halo destroyer and then captured by Dark Helmet. This isn’t the first time the “drunk driver” dropship has been mentioned, but it’s the first time anyone has gotten close enough to see this bit.

An email from the raVen tipped us off to an interview with Bungie artist Shikai “Shiek” Wang. Woohoo, UIUC!

This came in a while ago, but got missed – vacation can do a number on concentration. Halo Command Central has overhauled the site design, and content is growing. Graphics work is stunning. (Check out the extracted characters and vehicles!)

BOLL sent us a collection of three images, created from Bungie.net shots and NASA images, that are designed to be used together on a 3-monitor array. If you’ve got the screen real estate, this is a pretty fine desktop collection to use on it! And because these came in to our FTP site, they’ve reminded me that we’ve recently gotten many uploads with no attribution – if we don’t know who made it, we’re not going to post it. Drop off a small text file, containing the relevant info (name, email, what file you’ve uploaded, that sort of thing) – just like BOLL did!

A new composite desktop is now available in our Wallpapers section.