MiNiTeK14 dropped off a drawing of a Covenant Elite – we’ve added it to our Miscellaneous Art section.

A little earlier than usual, maybe, but the Bucs kicked some serious butt tonight, so what the heck. The new Screenshots posted at Bungie.net yesterday have been added to our Screenshots database – unreferenced shots and all.

Ferrex dropped in for a minute to pass along some tantalizing tidbits about the newest screenshot… and to update the community, in a roundabout way, on where the Halo engine is in lighting progress. Very, very nice to get new info…

Fan Fiction turned in in the last couple of days:

• Omega Red Chapter 4, by Kane172
• This Battle, by Nike
• Wings of Death Part 19, by el_halo_diablo
• Sarge’s Story: Daux, by Jamirus99/Traumatized Marine
• HALO: The Spartans, by S7N

This is the Series Finale of Wings of Death – and it’s a long one! Update: Oops, forgot one. Check out Locke’s Ring of the Forerunners, Chapter IV. Sorry about that!

He lives! *Ar-Isildur took time out of his busy schedule of bedrest and nasty treatments to pop into our forum with a quick update. He’s not out of the woods yet… but your emails and cards are definitely helping. Way to go, folks!

Thanks to Griffon, who points out that the latest OXM UK contains their 2002 Awards piece. Halo won 3 of them:

1. Game of the year award
2. Most Nail-Biting end sequence
3. Best reason to get surround sound

He sent in some digicam shots of the article, but 1) they were REALLY hard to read, and 2) we couldn’t put them up yet anyway. Nice job, Bungie!

At long last, the Halo50K tournament has firm dates for play – clear your calendar for April 26th and 27th, 2003. Fifty Grand on the line… don’t miss it! Thanks to Dolbex for the heads-up.

Nice work by BOLL – he discovered a couple of unreferenced screens on Bungie.net in the newest batch of Halo 2 uploads; one of them has been seen before (in the recent Halo 2 Photo Story), but the other is brand-spankin’ new. And a gorgeous shot it is!

A couple of weeks ago, a Halo easter egg that had been discovered back in March was finally documented on Bungie’s website – so we’ve taken this to mean that we can finally include it in our Easter Egg collection. (Originally, Joe Staten asked that we not document it with a screenshot, so that future egg hunters could find it on their own.) The full discovery process is documented in the egg entry. (Obviously, the entry is full of spoilers.)

Wonga. I sleep, Bungie works. The Tru7h and Reconciliation website has gotten some serious updating… there’s boatloads of Halo 2 content now. All of it, as far as I can tell, has been seen before… but it’s never been on the official site, and some of it is in better digital form than ever before. You’ll find a pair of new desktops (using some of the coolest artwork released in the past few months), some new screenshots (at least two of those are angles we haven’t seen before, in digital form), a page of concept art (again, available in magazine scans, but not officially in digital form before), and a whole bunch of new gallery shots (the weapons, especially, are great). Bungie’s newest Online Team member, SketchFactor, is responsible for the overhaul… nice work!

Mac Gamer has another Westlake update – Glenda Adams, Westlake’s president, says

the code they are getting is “light years different code-wise than anything that ever ran on the Mac.”

There’s not much past Wednesday’s MacCentral comments… but it sounds pretty exciting! (Thanks to Rossco for the heads-up.)

Devastator, a member of Team Caucasians, sent us this picture of his team celebrating their win at the Qualifiers of the Halo Winter Season. I’m pretty amazed that they gave out trophies like that for the qualifying rounds – there were 100 iGames centers hosting qualifiers, and three rounds played… that’s a LOT of trophies. Nonetheless, it’s a fun pic.

We’ve added a new subsection here at HBO – in the navbar, under ‘Press Coverage’, you’ll find Halo 2 Previews. It’s just a list of Halo 2 Previews posted on the net, with links to the original pages and the dates they were posted. Thanks to Proximity Zero for two that we didn’t have on our list.

Brian Hannan checked out the recently submitted weapons graphics extracted from the Halo manual, and decided that vector art should be available in vector format. He re-extracted the images, cleaned ’em up, and placed them all into a single EPS file. You can find this file (and a graphic showing what you can do with the artwork) on the Gun Schematics page.

In response to a slew of questions sent to us (and asked on our forum) about the Pillar of Art contest, we’ve added a Frequently Asked Questions section. Check it out, and don’t hesitate to send us mail if your question isn’t answered. We’ve also reduced the maximum size of paintings to 5′ x 6′ – still rather large, but not the enormous 10′ x 12′ we’d originally listed. Apologies if this confounds anyone’s plans.

A very cool concept sketch of the Master Chief – check our Miscellaneous Art section.

Three new desktops from fans today – check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

Fan Fiction in the last day or two:

• Legend Hunting, part 2 and Stranded at Home, part 2, by Dispraiser
• ROUND-THINGIE 2, by Matt Anderson
• Fallen Angel, part 5, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• Rebirth, part 1, by KnightmareWolf

Get to readin’…

D.J. Clich has created an electronica Halo-sample song called ‘Get Up (Halo Mix)’. It’s a 5.6 mb mp3, composed of outtakes clips from b.net set to a beat. Won’t appeal to everyone (I found it a bit repetitive myself), but it’s pretty well done. We’ve dropped it on our Mythica mirror – if there’s a problem downloading it, let us know, we’ll find mirror sites.

Yesterday, we mentioned a couple of posts by Dark Helmet, showing some cool vids of high-jumping on Halo. We got mail from a couple of people who couldn’t watch them, for whatever reason… so DH was kind enough to send along mpegs, which we converted to QuickTime movies. The High Jump vid (1.3 mb) and the Red Baron vid (850K) are now available here.