3 bits of Fan Fiction for you today…

• No Dice, by Dirty Commie
• 5 Way War Part I, by Demosthenes
• A New Year’s Day, Chapter 6, by Guilty Spark

Gonna be out for most of the rest of the day. Please don’t get antsy if you submitted something. Thanks!

The Master Chief is… where? Check the Miscellaneous Art section.

Signs for our times? (Spoilers – lots of ’em.)

Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox, spoke recently at CPL’s Winter Event about Halo for PC. (We mentioned this several days ago, referencing the Gamespot article about it.) There was also a summary at The Adrenaline Vault – and Halo Orbit, the German fansite, has translated this into german. Go take a gander if the english version is giving you trouble!

The latest issue of the Guiness Book of World Records has given the title of ‘Most Advanced Game Console’ to the Xbox – and the picture they’ve chosen to use to illustrate the point is the Master Chief. Not too shabby! (This was posted at Bungie.net – but we received email about 4 hours earlier from md10md.)

Just a couple of Fan Fiction pieces for you this morning:

• Mendozas Diary: Unexpected Fatality, by el_halo_diablo
• The Encounter, part 2, by Harley

As much as we’d like to, we cannot accept fiction (or artwork, for that matter) with no Halo influences; we are, after all, a fansite devoted to a particular video game, and not a general host for anything you put together. Thanks!

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!