Pair of desktops for you today – Threshold/Earth, and Absolut Halo, rehashed. Check ’em both out in our Wallpaper section.

An AIM icon, a hide-n-seek game, some booze, a Christmas wish, and a new enemy… what more could you want from Halo? All these images can be found in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Desktop submissions are all composites of bungie.net artwork – and the similarity between the last two is entirely coincidental. (As far as I can tell, these two guys have never met each other.) Check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

Atom put together an audio tribute to Halo – the link lets you grab it off his server. If enough of you mail us and tell us that the Halo influence is obvious, I’ll add this to the Fan Music section of the Miscellaneous page… but for now, just get it from the source.

Fan Fiction submitted since Tuesday:

• The New Years Resolution on Halo and The Rescue, by Scott J.
• The Great Elite, by Cory
• Omega Red Chapter 3, by Kane172
• Ring Of The Forerunners Part I, by Locke
• HALO: A New War of Old Enemies, chapter 2, by Jeff Graham
• Halo: And its unsung heroes, by Pforboy124
• Shadows of Archon II, part 33, by Wado
• Halo Side Story, part 6, by Jordan Dotson

Artwork coming in a little bit…

Well, Christmas is nearly over… but it’s still so beautiful here (it’s been snowing since 5 am) that there’s no way I can clear out the backlog tonight. I’m headed back to the fire, to sip eggnog and enjoy family conversation… fanfiction and artwork will get put up in the morning. Peace to all!

HBO Headquarters, snapped outside the server center at roughly 8:40 pm local time (1:40 am UTC) – it’s showing no sign of stopping…

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S !

From the HBO crew and our families, to you and yours, we wish you the merriest of holiday seasons. Pax.

We’ll be back updating on Thursday, the 26th.

Poll update: The BBC Game of the Year poll has had another 1600 votes cast since yesterday, when we first mentioned it… and roughly half of those were cast for Halo. Dunno if that was you folks, or other people… but Halo’s catching up to GTA: Vice City (which suggests that the theory that a GTA fanboi might have been cheating early on is a sound one). If you haven’t voted, stop by!

Christmas Eve Day Fan Fiction:

• Taking Tritus Last Part, by Dispraiser
• Wings of Death Part 18, by el_halo_diablo
• Wandering Beasts, by Jahan

Go read ’em…

Bungie is now taking suggestions for new merchandise for the online store – grunt plushies, anyone? Go read about it at the Underground, and chime in! (Thanks to Ghôlsbane for the heads-up.)

Jonas stopped by our forum to say hi – and dropped off three super-cool desktops. Two of them involve a Covenant craft he created some time ago, the Vesper. The third is… something else. Check ’em out in our Wallpapers section.

stosh has added another comic to his ‘Blam!’ series – this one looks at recent media claims about the powers of Halo. You can tell it’s not real, because members of the Taliban don’t eat fried chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes… but it’s pretty funny anyway. 🙂

Dang… managed to format this, start posting it, and forget to finish, about 4 hours ago. The BBC has an article on the change in video gaming (‘it’s not just for breakfast any more’ – wait, that’s orange juice), and while Halo isn’t mentioned in the article itself, it is one of the 5 options for best game of 2002 in the poll included with the article. There doesn’t seem to be any way of seeing the results now… but go vote! (Thanks to Andrew Czereyski for the heads-up.) Update: Andrew Katz points out that you can see poll results… but they’re not very promising right now. Halo has 22.6% of 6200 votes… trailing Medal of Honour: Frontline and GTA: Vice City. Have YOU voted? Update 2: Deimos™, of Subnova, noticed that it’s a Mac/PC thing… if you vote from a PC, your vote is counted, and you’re shown the results. If you vote from a Macintosh, your vote is ignored, and you can’t see the results (without following the explicit URL above). I SMELL A FIX! Update 3: hehe – maybe I should actually do some testing first. Turns out it’s a browser issue, not a platform one. IE can vote – Mozilla (and its variants) cannot. Still fishy… Update 4: lol – should have kept my mouth shut. Works for all browsers, all platforms. Deimos™ suggests that a Vice City fanboi was cheating, and the BBC page maintainers went overboard on the lockdown at first. Seems quite possible. In any case, go vote, and only vote once.

Rory Hartley has put together a short (2:03, 7.2 mb) movie called Superman. The techniques aren’t new… but the presentation is pretty fun. (Check out the sequence that starts about 38 seconds in…) It’s not very big – so we’ve put a copy up at Mythica, and mirrored it on Pez’s FTP server. Take a look!

A little while ago, we mentioned Psyjnir.com would be going down for maintenance. It seems to still be down – there’s no word on why, but I’d guess you could check in at Tiridurin, the official Psyjnir.com fansite, for speculation pretty soon. (Or you could go to the source – the Hotline server seems to still be running…)

Your daily dose of Fan Fiction:

• Shadows of….My Ass, by el_halo_diablo
• A New Year’s Day, Chapter 5, by Guilty Spark
• Christmas on the Frontlines, by Dispraiser
• Halo 2: A New Hope, Part 5, by Sephiroth

Time for bed, I think…

agentJ64 and Darth Epy0n both wrote to let us know that agentJ64’s Covenant model for Jedi Knight II is finished. In a forum post, DE links to JediKnightII.Net for the download (14.5 mb). In an email, agentJ64 links to JediKnight2Files.com. Take your pick. There’s also an SDK (3.3 mb) for skinners available. Finally, here’s a preview of the model (1024×767, 124K). If you play Jedi Knight II… you HAVE to check this out!

Gamespot has put up the most comprehensive information about PC Halo to date. Highlights:

• Solo campaign won’t change
• Project is “40 percent done”
• Minimum graphics card to be supported – GeForce2 MX
• Multiplayer will have all new maps, up to 32 players per server
• Unlikely to see play between PC and Xbox
• Difficulties will be tweaked (read: increased) to compensate for mouse/keyboard

There’s tons of good info in here – go read it for yourself. Thanks to all the folks who let us know, either via email or on the forum, about this article (looks like Parias was first).

Spike writes that Project-Halo has moved, to its own URL. Just a forum at the moment… but it says new content coming in January.

Forum regular Red Loser (back after a short break) posted a wonderful reworking of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ on our forum. I was inspired to add a bit of artwork. Enjoy it in the spirit of the season!