Recently, there was an impromptu art contest on our forum. A couple of the contestants were Postman and Shishka – both have have their entries added to our Miscellaneous Art section. (There are a couple of OTHER images in today’s update, as well. Check ’em all out!)

A pair of desktop images were submitted recently – you’ll find ’em both in our Wallpaper section.

Thanks to Whoknew – his Halotics server is the newest mirror to grab the new Halo50K Framework movie from. (As one discerning viewer wrote, this movie “was so good it was scary.” He warn’t kiddin’, either.

Holy Paperbacks, Batman – Halo: The Flood is now available for pre-order at the Bungie Store! (Wallpaper from the cover coming soon. Read about it here.)

Some Halo 2 tidbits at SPOnG.com today – some information we knew about, some that might be new. (The ability to sprint was mentioned in a few print articles… but that the MC lowers his weapon (so firing is out of the question)? That’s new, I think. And the ‘Expect a hands-on opportunity at the May’s E3 in Los Angeles’ is DEFINITELY new.) Thanks to eva05 for the heads-up. Update: Ouch, seems I’m being burned by the double-reporting bug, too. Opie301 points out that the info from SPOnG was reported in both the GamingWorld X preview (posted in September), and (more damning for its freshness) the Bungie.net Halo 2 FAQ put up by SketchFactor a couple of weeks ago. Sorry, folks! I’ll get back into the swing of it all soon. (Put this one down to rustiness.) The hands-on stuff, assuming it’s not just conjecture, is still new. Update 2: Matt sez, “It’s conjecture.” I’ll get you for this, eva!

Yee-haw! Mythica.org is back online (as some of you have already noticed), and we’re gonna stress-test it RIGHT NOW. Dan Chosich, who’s proven himself to be a pretty talented moviemaker, has created a full promo movie for the Halo50k event coming up in Atlanta in a couple of months. (Yes, there have been other movies made by him for this event… but this is the big enchilada, the piece he’s been working towards for months.) It’s oh-so-professional-looking, and should inspire you to want to kill your friends. (In a game of Halo, of course.) There are two flavors – a big one and a small one, both in QuickTime format. (Warning; I had trouble running the large one on a slower machine; if you experience this, grab the smaller one.) Currently, only Mythica and the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server have copies of these movies… but we’d LOVE to hear from you if you have bandwidth to spare; we’ll add you to the mirror list. Go grab this film now. (There are many, many films in the queue right now, but we can’t release them very quickly, because of our bandwidth limitations. We’ll pump ’em out just as quickly as we can…)

Hehe – speaking of late notice… Jacob McCarthy writes to point out the 2003 Northwest Regional Festival and Tournament, sponsored by the International Video Gaming Federation. Online registration is closed… but On-Site registration will be available on Saturday morning. The event covers a bunch of games, but the Halo portion has a $50 entrance fee, and a first-place prize of $8000. Gameplay rules are rather bizarre (first to 30 kills? How are they going to judge that?), but hey, the money’s good. It’s a two-day event (Saturday, March 1 and Sunday, March 2), and ‘Come and Watch’ passes are available for purchase as well. This will take place in Bellevue, Washington – more details are available on IVGF’s website.

Ouch – sorry for the short notice on this one, but it was submitted as an add-on to a movie readme in our uploads directory; since Mythica was down for so long, it’s simply been sitting in the ‘to be dealt with’ pile. MCheif-117 is holding an 8-hour Halo tournament in Vero Beach, FL, this Saturday night, March 1. It starts at midnight. Entrance fee is $10/head ($40/team), first place is guaranteed at least $100. Check out the details at the 7th Column Chapter of the Florida Halo Community.

Rams, the head honcho over at Battleground: Halo, writes to point out that BGH is opening their own Fan Fiction section. They’re willing to provide a home for ALL fiction, as long as it’s legible. This is great news for fiction writers – you can have your work shown on more than one site, if you choose… and if you find our new Fiction guidelines too strict for you, BGH is happy to help you out. Write more! (For more information, drop them a note.)

Heh – the PS2 is defined by its processor, the Xbox by Halo. At least according to THIS comic… (thanks, Cybrfrk)

Woohoo! A venerable name in the Halo community, Haloplayers, has woken up! New site design, the beginnings of a content flesh-out, and the promise of the return of the Squad Centre, a place for Halo clans to gather. Check ’em out!

The Fan Fiction section of this site has been closed to new submissions for two weeks. Several options for overhauling the submissions procedure have been considered – most were discarded due to time constraints. The new rules are about as simple as I can make them. The length requirement has been increased slightly. The types of submissions we will accept have been restricted to three. Basic common sense has become a requirement in the submission process. A brightly colored box has been placed at the top of the Fiction section – if you miss it, you’re blind. The new guidelines have been posted in a much more concise manner. If you submit a story that does not conform to these guidelines, we will simply throw it away. We will not contact you to tell you we did this. Subsequent inquiries will be directed to the Guidelines page. Several frequent submitters have suggested that we institute a screening process by which new fiction submissions are vetted by community members before being submitted to the archive – we haven’t implemented this yet, but it’s not off the table. If the quality level remains where it was when we closed down, we WILL set up a screening panel. As of now, the Fiction section is open for submissions… hopefully, the new rules will help, rather than hinder, the overall productivity of the site.

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!