Thanks to Miguel Chavez, for the heads-up on the activities of Team HBO at the Halo Winter Season Regional Championship held this weekend. As he mentions in his post, King Games has put up a page devoted to the event – here’s a shot of Team HBO kicking some butt in round 1. (They’re the team on the left; the head in a white shirt is Miguel, and the four players, left to right, are ninja on fire, neo, konrad9 (I could have those two confused – hard to tell from behind 🙂 ), and KP.) And for a bit of humor, check out the screen names of Krypt, the blue team in the final game.

BIGwooly, of the Seventh Column chapter HALOID, writes to let us know about a bit of internal news that might be interesting to non-HALOID members. For the past year, they’ve been having a monthly lan party dubbed ‘FRAGFEST’. (You can see some of the gameplay in a movie released last spring.) At each fest, they award points to the players ranked first, second and third – and at the 1,000 point milestone, they induct the player as a HALOID Legend. FRAGFEST XII took place last weekend… and not one, but TWO players were inducted. Congrats to Mad Cow and BIGwooly for their Mad Halo Skillz!

It shouldn’t require forum members to remind me… but sometimes it does. The Story page was updated this weekend; check it out for new speculation and ideas!

Whoa. Didn’t think it would happen… but apparently, someone’s reverse-engineered enough of Halo to provide some cheats. Read this thread for details. (Understand that in order to play with this, you’ll need to do all sorts of things that will void your warranty, ensure that you’ll never use this Xbox for XBL, and so on.) Waiting for pics…

Recently, we mentioned an interview at the Australian Xbox.com. poena.dare pointed out that not only was this interview ALSO available on the US Xbox.com… but until recently, ANOTHER interview, with Bernie Freidin (a Bungie programmer), was ALSO available. For some reason, that one is now offline, but luckily, p.d saved a copy. We’ve reformatted it a bit (removing the javascript, the flash, and the worst, but by no means all, the bad html), and made it available in close to its original form, here at HBO. Check it out!

It’s been 3 days since I could process Fan Fiction, and the flood continues. I’m going to institute a new policy, for my own sanity: if you submit a piece, and yell about its not being posted before I manage to get it up, I’m tossing it out, and we won’t accept any more fiction from you. ALL content creators need to remember that you’re not paying ANYTHING to have your work displayed here for the world to see, and sometimes real life gets in the way of updating. I’m tired of being berated for not getting your artwork/fiction/movie posted within 30 minutes of when it hits our inbox. That said, here’s the current Fiction collection.

• Freelance, part 1 and part 2, and Flash Flood, by Bloodcider
• Sarges Platoon, part 4, by Bobby Lucas
• Halo Zero Part 4, by nicholas
• Under the sergeant’s cap, part 5, by Traumatised Marine
• Earth: A Halo Tale, part 3, by Nike
• Battletype MPAV, part 1/2, by el_halo_diablo
• ROUND-THINGIE, part 3, by Matt Anderson
• Halo Battle Cry, parts 1-4, by Daniel Johnson
• Rebirth – Tras’Lok/Weilan; Gallant Claw, by KnightmareWolf/Shadow/Archangel’s Blade/Spartan415
• Dark Halo: Chronicles of Fright, part 2, by Wado
• 5 Way War Part V and 6 Way War sneak preview, by Demosthenes

Go read ’em – I’m sure there’ll be another dozen by tomorrow. (Sometimes I wish fiction writers would actually take the time to PROOFREAD their work; it seems that some of you are so eager to get your fiction posted that you can’t take the few minutes it would take to run it through a spellchecker… it’s rather discouraging to kill an entire Sunday morning formatting pieces as rough as some of these are.)

Rob Farquhar points out his personal review of Halo – while containing a few minor mistakes (he mentions that Warthogs are the only vehicle available in multiplayer, for example), it’s a pretty thorough and well-written piece. I’d disagree (strongly) with his opinion that the repetitiveness of several levels really detracts from the overall quality (despite the fact that there are many circular rooms, AotCR is STILL one of my favorite levels), but again, that’s opinion, not fact, and all reviewers are entitled to their own. Take a look if you’d like to read an exhaustive overview of the game!

Early this morning, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry for a scheduled 9:16 EST landing, within four days of the 17th anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Challenger. With it were lost its crew of seven. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them.

That Weasel Television, a staunch bandwidth provider in the past for Halo movies, has put up a few of the most popular films released recently – all three Halo National Championship segments, both versions of Blair Halo Project, and In Too Deep. Swing on by and check ’em out!

A bunch of new desktops for you today, including one (from Germain Couët) that was submitted a couple of months ago, but got lost in the shuffle… and a pair of pretty cool ones from kL!p. There are 6 in all – check ’em out in our Wallpaper section! Update: Whoops, missed one. You can find M2’s poetic entry in the Wallpaper section, too.

Steve Hatch turns in a sketch of a Brute – you’ll find it in our Miscellaneous Art section.

A week ago, Bungie artist Shikai Wang was interviewed by the Australian official Xbox site – it’s got some nice background info on Bungie’s interviewing process, and a look at what was needed, artwise, to get Halo out the door. Check it out! (Thanks to Benjamin Swinbanks for the heads-up on this one.) We’ve added this (and yesterday’s Chris Carney interview) to the Interviews database.

Wow – this one’s cool. We got mail from Brandon Jones, Director of Media and HomeGrown Content at GameTrailers.com – they’ve put together a pretty cool Halo trailer. It’s available in both QuickTime 5 and WMP9 formats (23.1 and 17.9 mb, respectively), and covers most of the game in 2:40. There are spoilers in here… but overall, filmmaking quality is very high. Check this one out!

Heh – disappointed with the ‘NSync-related Halo sighting we posted a month ago, Brandon Thomas pointed out that Dave Grohl, guitarist for the Foo Fighters, puts Halo on the shortlist of hobbies (up there with skeet shooting and speeding in residential areas). That’s a pretty wide swath of the popular music spectrum playin’ Halo! Update: Jester reminds us that the latest Foo Fighters album (One By One) actually has a song called ‘Halo‘ on it.

Woohoo! New comic artwork from Lorraine Reyes-McLees, in honor of the Danger Boy interview! It’s Chris Carney day! (The caricatures are astoundingly good.)

Matt Soell has interviewed Chris “Danger Boy” Carney, an environment artist/designer at Bungie. Read it for some interesting insights on how this farmer wannabe gets his work done!

A couple of forum threads (here and here) and an email from Broony all point out that according to the Bungie webcam, the latest offering from the Bungie store will likely be hooded sweatshirts. Nice!

Yesterday, Destineer Studios, the Macintosh game publisher founded by Peter Tamte, bought MacSoft, another Mac game house, from Infogrames. (Tamte founded MacSoft 10 years ago.) The press release for this sale can be found on Infogrames’ site. What does this mean for you, the Halo fan? Not a huge amount… except that according to Inside Mac Games, “Destineer plans to begin marketing all of its future Macintosh products under the MacSoft brand immediately.” This means that Bold is no longer the arm of Destineer that will market Mac Halo – MacSoft is.

The Fan Fiction never seems to slow down.

• D-Day: Reflection, by Shadow Spartan
• Aftermath (pn) Part 2, by PalaNIN
• Halo Zero Part 3, by nicholas
• Stranded at Home Part 3 and Legend Hunting Part Three, by Dispraiser
• A New Beginning, by Bryce
• Earth: A Halo Tale: Part 1, Chapters 3 & 4, by Nike

You’re waiting for…?

Alien Nation? Check for yourself.