Yet another Halo 2 Box Art entry… this one from Mr. Lolly Pop Man.

Gah – sometimes, the updates get away from you. While you’re all waiting for me to clear out the art queues, the fiction queues, the screenshot queue… go watch this movie. Figh7erbo1 is a short (1:39) piece set to Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boi… nice timing. 6 mb, in QT format, from chris_roc.

Roland Scarlett writes to say that Halo World (which we mentioned about a week ago) has been adding content at a rapid clip. Most sections are fleshed out now. There are a couple of games on the site – one is a variant of Bungie’s Extreme Closeups, and the other is called ‘Guess The Spot’, where you’re given a screenshot with a number of blanked-out areas, and you need to choose the correct one to answer the question. (No fair cheating by looking at the originals!) Watch for a few broken links in the top nav bar. (Barring some MAJOR changes, this will be the last post we make about this site with a progress update.)

c0ld vengeance’s Halo 2 Cover Art challenge ended a few days ago – he’s now posted his results. For the Front Cover Only section, he gave the award to Ninjas on Fire. For the Front and Back Cover section, Ed Murphy took home the honors. (Check the forum post for more details and justification.) In addition, we’ve added 6 MORE entries that have come in; this subsection of the site will remain as a permanent fixture, and all Halo 2 cover art sumbitted in the future will go here. (It’s unlikely that I’ll move the existing entries from the Miscellaneous Art section, because it would break too many existing links… but I might find a way around the problem some day.)

Attempting to BEGIN to clear out the Artwork backlog… first up, Miscellaneous Art. We’ve got a new Halo mini-game, a very nice exchange medium, and a misplaced Halo Box Art entry. You’ll find ’em all in the Miscellaneous Art section.

Okay, so if you’re stripping your field piece and washing the bits in denatured alcohol, and you fall asleep and your head lands in the cleaning bowl, and lightning hits what you disgorge as it comes flying out of your mouth and torques it, by some freaky cosmic coincidence, into human-looking words… this is what might result. (Be nice to Scav – he hasn’t been the same since the Yellow Banshee incident.)

After two disappointing attempts, Team Overkill makes the iGames Winter Season Regionals in the 3rd Qualifying round. Read the details on their website. Congrats, guys!

Ever wish you could get your hands on a set of those Spartan II dogtags that were being distributed in Japan? Well, thanks to Nekomusume, now you can. She’s got one extra set she’s auctioning off on eBay… starting bid is just under $36, and you’ve got almost a week to decide.

Athol Productions has put together a new gameplay movie for your viewing pleasure. 5:30 long, around 20 megs big, it’s gameplay on a number of levels… with a few oddities thrown in. Nice timing, and an interesting combination of musical styles. Folks offended by gay jokes probably shouldn’t download this. You can find it at Mythica.org (in both DivX-encoded .avi format, 19.2 mb, and Sorenson-encoded QuickTime format, 21.6 mb), and at Pez’s FTP server (both formats as well). Other mirrors are always welcome. Enjoy!

Barring a few pieces that were too short, and one that never fully uploaded, the Fan Fiction backlog from this week has been cleared.

• The Long Ride Home 12, by Joshua Barreto
• Starship Daybreak Part 1 (revised) and Part 2, by Domitri Giovanni
• A New Year’s Day, Chapter 7, by Guilty Spark
• Starjacked Part 3, by Dispraiser
• Force 81 Part III, by NobleWard
• Shadows of Archon II (part 34), by el_halo_diablo/Wado
• 5 Way War Part III, by Demosthenes
• Protecting What’s Yours. Part 1, by hornet34
• Liberation Part IX, by Hoju
• Sarges Platoon, Chapter 3, by Bobby Lucas
• The Empire (Episode-1), by Jon Michael Marlowe
• Through a UNSC soldiers eyes: Death, by Harley
• Under the sergeant’s cap (chapter 1), by Traumatised Marine

Get to reading! (Artwork/movies coming soon.) Update: Guilty Spark re-uploaded Chapter 8 of his New Year’s Day saga, so that’s up now, too.

Shame, shame. Two pretty neat pieces of Bungie-related trivia occurred recently… and we have to read about them from bungie.org’s newest staffer, poena.dare. Scoopin’ the old-timers! The important one is that Alex and Laura Seropian (and their new baby girl, Amelia Eve), were featured in Parent magazine recently. The second one is actually more embarrassing, from a scoop point-of-view… bungie.org turned 4 last Tuesday, and we forgot! Welcome aboard, p.d…. and remember, the next time you scoop an old-timer, we’re taking your thumbs.

There were a couple of late entries in the Halo 2 Cover Art Contest – this contest is now officially closed, so please don’t send us any more entries. You can see the two new versions on the contest page, though – Mr. Yun’s is in the top row, second from the left, and Doggone’s is the first double-sided entry. Don’t forget to vote!

Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation website has put up Chapter 9—Keyes—of its Legendary Walkthrough – spoiler goodness and 26 new screenshots! Go check it out… NOW! (The inclusion of shot 19 also means our Easter Egg page is going to be updated in the near future…)

A few days ago, we posted a note about a ‘Photo Story’ Microsoft had put together about Halo 2. Some of you could watch it, others couldn’t. Thanks to Stuntmutt and Djoey154, we now have pictures of all the slides… check ’em out in our Miscellaneous section.

A week ago, c0ld vengeance threw down a gauntlet: create a better cover for Halo 2 than, say, EB Games. We’ve received 9 entries for this competition; 7 show just the front cover, two show front and back. We’ve posted all 9 on a display page. c0ld vengeance will judge these and announce a winner soon. Update: There was one more entry – apparently, it had been sent to c0ld a couple of days ago, but it never made its way here. It’s been added now.

Whoa. Grunts that THINK they have guns… but don’t. Spec Ops Elite managed to capture some bizarre activity on the level Keyes… a long thread, including an MPEG movie and an explanation of how this was induced can be found on our forum. It’s unclear how much bandwidth Spec Ops Elite is allowed for that movie, so I made a quick conversion to QuickTime format – filesize is about a third of the original, but I DID make it too bright; sorry about that. Speculation on WHY you can make this happen is always welcome. (Just add it to the forum thread.)

After another hellish flying experience, I’m back and safely ensconced in the comfort of HBO Headquarters. There’s a boatload of stuff to get to… but it’s going to take a little while. In the meantime, Stosh has posted a new Blam comic – I think Stosh might have some… um, issues. But you should go read it anyway.

Okay, this is a long story. Bear with me. It all started when Dulaman87 sent us a note pointing out that the Random House entry for the next Halo novel (Halo: The Flood) now has a picture to go along with the cover. The thing is… that picture’s been around for a while. It first showed up as a cover for the Portuguese magazine, BGamer, sent to us by Razorback over a year ago. Three weeks after that, we put up scans from the January 2002 Official Xbox Magazine… and the same image (sort of) was included as a 2-page mural. (DT_Spike combined the two halves to make it easier to see.) What’s interesting about that image is that OXM seems to have airbrushed out the Master Chief in the foreground (though they left his leg shadows on the rock he was standing on). Two months later, we received a Miscellaneous Art entry from Draikin that seemed to show the same image as the original BGamer scan… and though we didn’t notice it at the time, it’s NOT the same image as the OXM mural. (Look at the right side of the images, for example; Draikin’s version has a pair of Jackals that are replaced by Grunts in the OXM version. There are other differences, as well.) Upon close consideration, it’s clear that this image (these images, rather) are composites… they pull in pieces from many, many released screenshots. This is not a standard thing for Bungie to do… but the picture has shown up in a huge variety of places, which suggests that there must be SOME official-type source for it. We have three questions:

• Who created the original image?
• What screenshots were used to composite the images (there will be at least two lists, since the images are different)
• Is this really the final cover for the Halo Novel, or was Random House simply putting up a picture to have one up?

Feel free to answer as many of these questions as you think you can in this forum thread. Thanks to Dulaman for instigating this investigation!

Two new mugs have appeared on the Bungie Store, and to celebrate the occasion, Matt Soell interviewed Marty O’Donnell about the event. All I can say is, Miguel… you’ve been slammed. We hereby relinquish the title of Master of the Art of the Cheap Shot.

Started almost 12 hours ago, but incomplete as of right now – check out Round 3 of Warbow’s Halo Hide and Seek. New rules this time out, so read that first post carefully. Good luck!