Three new Art tidbits – a nice satire piece, a boot logo for Win2K, and a cute exercise pic. Check ’em all out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

In the last couple of days, we’ve gotten a couple of banner submissions, from Andrew Austin and Fuzzy – you can find both of them in our Banners section.

poena.dare is putting together an interview of Brannon Boren, a consultant at Microsoft who’s been intricately involved in the creation of the ‘Halo Bible’, the collection of information about the Halo universe that all Halo content creators (official ones – book authors, folks writing the stories for the games) use to keep their facts straight. If you have anything you’d like to ask Brannon, send your question along to p.d – he’ll add it to the list. (No promises on answers, of course – Brannon isn’t going to violate any secrets he’s been entrusted with… but it can’t hurt to ask!) Update: the window for questions is now closed. Thanks to all who contributed!

Here’s the first of several Hacking movies we have for your perusal. This is another one from Dozi, the guy who made the first one – again, sound is pretty rough. (Much rougher than the first one, as a matter of fact. There’s a static rumble throughout the entire movie.) You’re watching it for the action, however, not the sound. 🙂 Things shown in this film: bumping a jackal, some hilarious high jumps, bumping marines, grunts, and hunters, and more fun jumps. It’s 2:23 long, and 9.3 megs big, in QuickTime format. You can grab it at Mythica.org. (Some of the ones in the queue contain many more tricks – if you’re limiting yourself, this isn’t the best one to grab.) Update: MereCatFish writes to point out that blam.forerunners.org has mirrored this. (He also points out that the main site has been updated.) We love mirrors!

To all the folks asking questions about modding your xbox, and hacking Halo: while we here at HBO think the results are pretty cool, this is a Halo site, not an Xbox modding site. We do not provide any information on how to mod your Xbox or how to hack Halo, nor will we in the future. There are plenty of places to get this sort of information, if you’re interested – if you can’t find them without our help, you probably shouldn’t be looking. (I’m adding this information to our FAQ, as well.)

Famine to feast. Within a day of the release of the Halo mod information, we’ve received 4 NEW hack-related movies (and there’s still one non-hack related film in the queue). There’s well over half an hour of unreleased footage at this point… we’ll start releasing some of it in the morning, but please, please, please – don’t send any more right now. 🙂 Look for an update in about 8 hours. (It’ll be doled out a movie at a time, every couple of days – we simply don’t have the bandwidth for anything else.)

Today’s Fan Fiction:

• Two Betrayals, parts 1/2, by Raiyden
• Random, by Bloodcider
• Fallen Angel, part 6, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• The Battle For Sigma Octanus, part 1, by moniter101
• ONI Black Operations, part 1, by Jaywhit10
• Survival Grounds parts 1-2, by mattˆ
• Wrong or Right, part 2, by Harley
• Project Shadow Spartan, part 1, by Shadow Spartan

If you find yourself locked out of the section – blame your friends or yourself, not me. I don’t have time to clean up after you guys. (Don’t bother sending me excuses…)

poena.dare, latest miscreant to be assimilated by b.org, has written a very, very nice editorial over at Bungie Sightings, on the subject of Halo hacking, and what it means to the community. Definitely worth a read.

This came in a few days ago – I managed to miss it. 🙁 Sparks writes that a new website, Sector.7, has come online. It’s not fully fleshed out yet, but there’s more content all the time. They plan to move to a purchased domain (and away from the banners/popups) as soon as they get more visitors. Take a look!

I know, it’s been building up for a few days. Sorry about that. There are 10 (count ’em, 10) new desktops in the Wallpaper section today – check ’em out. Fan Fiction coming sometime later, I hope.

For those folks who couldn’t get the DivX-encoded .avi or the QuickTime version of the HaloHackinFun movie to work, Cybrfrk has re-encoded in WMP 9 format. It’s quite a bit smaller, too – 9.5 mb. You can grab it at his site, or snag a copy from Mythica. Anyone else wanting to mirror this, we’re thrilled – drop us a line with a link and we’ll add you to the mirror list!

Almost forgot: Eclarap, of the French site Halo-Game, wrote this last night about the Halo mod app:

By the way, we were able to make it work on our PAL, but only by downloading a NTSC version : so it doesn’t normally work here – might be useful to warn all Europeans from HBO in your news.

Worth knowing, if you’re using a PAL box…

5 new entries in the Miscellaneous Art section for you today – some pretty fun stuff. Take a look!

DovBer (pronunciation – “the bear dove into the river”) Friedman dropped off a 2 sec. loop animation of a spinning 3d model he created of a potential halo2 logo/title. We reduced the size a tad – it’s still a full megabyte, but that’s better than 2… you’ll find it in our Miscellaneous section.

Apologies to all the people who noticed Halo on the tv show ‘The Dead Zone’ Sunday night – it’s been sort of busy here lately. (I’m pretty sure Dzejms was first.) Basically, one of the characters was playing the game – the comment made was ‘He’s trying to save the universe.’ Nice to see Halo getting prime time TV placement!

Matt Soell asks, is that a roll of nickels in my pocket, or am I just glad to see you? Wait… I think that might be a bit off. In any case, Bungie has a new contest running – go read all the details at Bungie.net. You’ve got three and a half weeks to come up with what’s in Matt’s pants…

lol – When I saw the headline from Bungie.net (‘Happy (Belated) Warthog Day!‘), I thought, in my Halo-saturated mind, that Bungie was paying tribute to the one-year anniversary of Randy Glass’ Warthog Jump. Silly me – I forgot there’s a world outside these walls! And every year on February 2, Punxsutawney Phil goes looking for his shadow… this year, in honor of the little ‘hog, Bungie has posted a warthog-related comic, starring some of our favorite Halo characters. Check it out!

Dozi, the guy who created the Hacked film, stopped back into our forum to answer a few questions about modding possibilities. It’s a really interesting read.

Okay, there are more mirrors coming soon, but here’s the starting lineup for the Hacking Halo video – visit the mirror page for all the links we have. As more mirrors come online, we’ll add them to the page. (If you’re interested in mirroring this file, PLEASE, let us know.) See yesterday’s news if this post makes you go ‘huh?’ – I’ve got some kids to take care of.

Desperate call for movie mirrors! Dozi has just uploaded a 20 mb film showing a few of the things you can do with a modded Xbox and the cheat hack mentioned this morning. The problem is… we don’t have the bandwidth to serve it up to all who want it! It’s going to take a bit of time to re-encode it anyway, but I thought I’d get a head-start on the bandwidth issue. If you think you can support a mirror link for this movie, please – send mail immediately. As soon as we have the best version we can get, we’ll get a copy out to you. Once the mirrors have uploaded the files, we’ll make them live. Again – mirror sites only right now. Thanks!