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!

Apologies to Fan Fiction writers – there’s no way I can format stories before I get home. Any submissions between Monday and Thursday won’t be posted before Friday. Please be patient!

David S. sent in a very nice HBO-themed banner for our Banners collection. Check it out!

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo… do the Hustle! (Thanks to Steener.)

Thanks to both Simon Hill, via email, and Brandon Tyler, on our forum, for the heads-up on Xbox.com’s newest Halo Picture Story. It’s not viewable on a mac, or on some PC configurations, it seems… but the audio works fine. If anyone can get screen captures, we’d be most appreciative…

Not sure how I missed this last night… but Dinky, from HaloJuggaloProductions, has not only posted the HNC final segment for download, he’s sent along a new URL for a flash-based Halo design, and would love feedback on it.

Some mirrors for you: DeaDSwiTcH has made the entire Halo National Championship set available – Round 1, Round 2, and Round 3. At some point, I’ll even add these to the Movies database…

Looking for a challenge? This sounds like fun.

Got a problem with Halo? Red Loser does…

A little sooner than I’d planned to post it – but as I said, I’m headed out. We’ve got the third and final chunk of the Halo National Championship, as televised by G4Tv, up and ready for download. 8:04 long, 31.7 mb big, in QT format. The final 8 play a 50-kill, no-shield slayer match on Blood Gulch… you gotta love that spawn point sniping! Once again, it’s available at Mythica.org (which has spit out a quarter of a terabyte worth of files for you guys in the last 6 days, I might add). Just in time, the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server comes back online, and we’ve tossed all three segments there, in the Halo Movies folder. (Shouldn’t be hard to find, since the section got completely wiped out in the recent outage – but Psyrixx is hoping to have a backup in place sometime today. If that happens, search for g4hnc files.) We’re thrilled to hear of other mirrors – but I won’t be able to post them for a while; I don’t get near a computer again for at least 12 hours. Enjoy!

Warbow posts Round 2 of his Hide and Seek contest – the rules are a bit different, so check ’em carefully. 5 images this time. Get to it!

It’s possible that more Fan Fiction will be submitted later today, but I’ll be on a plane. For right now, we’ve got Domitri Giovanni’s Starship Daybreak, part 1 for you. Domitri wants to make sure he should submit the rest of the parts, so be sure to comment!

A dark desktop from Professor Keo – check our Wallpaper section.

As much as I realize this might sour the Halo experience for some of you, I feel obligated to post it. David S. notes that the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine has an article on Justin Timberlake, of ‘NSync – apparently, he hurt himself, and he’s been sitting around the house a lot during recovery. Doing what? Yep, playing Halo. Hey! It’s still a cool game! No, come back! Wait…

A couple of days ago, we posted a wallpaper from Lexicus, which also acted as a teaser for the trophy for a then-upcoming fragfest. The contest is now over (won by Nate)… Lexicus has sent in an image of the trophy. Nice!