Almost forgot… there was another submission on our forum yesterday for the Halo 2 Cover Art collection – we’ve added lloyd’s entry to the database.

The screenshots that were posted along with Bungie’s recent addition to their Legendary Walkthrough (Keyes) have been added to our Screenshots database. This is especially timely, since bungie.net seems to be down this morning.

Clearing out the Fan Fiction:

• Stolen UNSC Technical Documents, by Neile Pederson
• A Fresh Start, part 3, by Simon James
• When Worlds Collide 2.5, Halo Songs, and Elite Interview, by Gasmask
• Force 81 Part IV, by NobleWard

There are still some artwork pieces undealt with… but most of them don’t make the cut under the new guidelines. 🙁 Guess I have to get the rules up pretty soon…

Early adopters of Apple’s new Safari browser have discovered that they can’t view spoiler-laden posts on this site, because Safari won’t save the cookie that allows access. Steve Rice, a kind reader, has sent in a fix. Check it out.

In early December, emildux posted some information about an effort to pick the top 50 chapters in the US (one per state). Today, he points out that this list has been overhauled… he’s keeping up on activity (the HBO Junkies lost our spot in Connecticut because we haven’t been doing anything), so if you’re looking for active chapters in your state, this is a great place to start. Check it out!

Yesterday, we mentioned that *Ar-Isildur, a stalwart member of the community, was in a bad way and could use your get-well wishes. Ciarán discovered a link to the Hospital’s web site, where you can send a get-well email to a patient. Ar’s full name is Brian Morden, and he’s in Room 8. (You might want to include ‘North’, as well.)

Whoa – blast from the past. Relevant to now, even.

About a month ago, Hedgemony, a forum regular (absent now for a few weeks), was in the middle of a project to catalog all the dialog in Halo. He wished out loud that he could ask Marty O’Donnell all sorts of questions about the sound in Halo… well, Marty’s a pretty good guy. Hedge wrote up the questions, Marty answered ’em. It wasn’t overnight, but then, it was the holiday season… In any case, the interview is now available for the public. I’ve been unable to reach Hedge to let him know about it, but I have no doubt he’ll be back online at some point to check it out for himself. If you have any interest in some of the background issues in the Halo aural scene, read this interview! (It’s far more of a ‘how does this work?’ interview than a background ‘who are you, and why do you work for Bungie?’ interview.)

Hmm… got mail from The Elite Spartan, he’s interested in setting up a Halo tournament in or around Fayetteville, AR. He needs to know how much interest there’d be for a summer tournament, though… if you’re interested, drop him a line.

Well, you can’t say they don’t have spirit. Heliocentric has started up a forum with one purpose in mind: to find a new easter egg in Halo before Halo 2 is released. While I can’t say I understand how they plan to accomplish this with a forum, I can’t fault them for their passion… go on by and visit if you want to help!

Every once in a while, a new trick pops up that potentially changes the way Halo gets played among friends. (One that sticks in my mind is the Sidewinder Sneak – it forever changed CTF games on Sidewinder, and opened huge vistas for tricksters looking to explore the single-player game.) Now there’s a new one… two players can share one powerup (overshield, invisibility, even a health pack). A week ago, *DeatH* mentioned that he had a trick to use one overshield for two people… he wasn’t taken too seriously. Today, however, guy who doesn’t post….too often tested this on many levels, in both single and multiplayer. He found it to be true, after all. (And he found it to apply to invisibility, including Infinite Invisibility, and health packs… the list goes on.) There’s a short film, showing the effect on Rat Race… where you can take this is up to your imagination.

Warbow’s Hide and Seek game, Round 3, is finally over. (It started on January 8.) Watch the short movie referenced in his announcement, and you’ll understand why it took so long to solve the last image… (He’s tired, it’ll be a while before round 4.) Congrats, c0ld vengeance – a clean sweep of all five images!

Tobias points out a new Swedish Halo site – Halo-Se. There’s nothing there yet (but forums)… but he wanted to help build a community.

Periodically, folks show up on our forum, or in other gaming forums, and claims to know someone who’s beta-testing Halo 2. Or they claim to be beta-testing it themselves. Dave Candland of Bungie made such a clear statement today explaining why these people couldn’t possibly be telling the truth that we’ve added his explanation to our FAQ. From now on, when you hear someone spouting off about Halo 2 beta-testing… just point them here. Update: Thanks to Matt Soell, we added a rumor-buster about the supposed ‘June 2003 release’ of Halo. (It ain’t happening.)

Not Halo-related… but it’s community-related, and pretty important. Check out SilverBrin’s post about forum regular *Ar-Isildur, and send along a card!

Fan Fiction backlog is now ALSO cleared out:

• Under the sergeant’s cap, part 2, by Traumatised Marine
• Fallen Angel, part 4, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• Covenant Theater, part 1, by Alex Ross
• Dark Halo, part 1, by Wado
• In the Beginning, by HaloFanMan
• When Worlds Collide 2, by Gasmask

Interesting range of timbres today…

Homelan Fed interviewed Randy Pitchford, of Gearbox Software, yesterday. For the most part, it’s a discussion of Counter-Strike… but there are a few positive Halo tidbits, as well:

HomeLAN – What can you tell us about the status and progress of Halo for the PC at this point?

Randy Pitchford – Halo is going great. We’ll be talking a lot about it soon. Playing Halo with a mouse and keyboard has been an awakening experience. The idea of playing Halo’s multiplayer modes over the internet is equally exciting. Working on Halo has been teaching us much and has been a perfect match for our strategy that builds towards Gearbox’s future.

Go check out the whole interview! (Thanks to Nick Danger for the heads-up.)

Pistol Poppers has put together a little movie called ‘Valet Parking‘ showing what not to do with your warthog. 3:41, 6.1 mb, wmv format. We’ve decided we don’t have the space for it, so if the link it’s on is unavailable, you’ll have to wait for the bandwidth restrictions to be lifted to grab it.

Eep – this should have gone up yesterday, I’m getting sloppy. Dispraiser writes that he’s created a site to host his fan fiction pieces – you can check out Dispraiser’s Fandom for stories, artwork, and rants. (The stories you can still get here, too, but the artwork is unique to that site.)

We’ve got six new desktops for you (some in multiple sizes), which finally clears out the artwork backlog. Go visit the Wallpaper section! It’s not posted yet, but in the next day or so, there’ll be a new Artwork Posting Guidelines page up to address the currently growing issue of flooding. There are lots and lots of you who are snagging a screenshot off of Bungie.net, slapping some text on it, and sending it in as a Wallpaper or Miscellaneous Art submission. In the past, we’ve been really lenient in our rules… but the collections are getting too big. We’re going to start turning away more artwork, in an effort to keep the overall quality of displayed pieces higher. Hopefully, the guidelines will help you decide if that cartoon you’ve made, with a thought balloon pasted onto a stock image of Cortana, is worth mailing in or not. (If you’d uploaded art in the last few days, and it hasn’t been posted yet, chances are it fell under the new rules… you’re welcome to send a followup message, but please don’t resend the piece. Thanks!)