Hickadam has done it again. His earlier ‘A**hole’ video set all sorts of popularity records… because it was hilarious, and because the timing was simply spectacular. He’s released a holiday movie, to begin to get you in the spirit of the season (something tells me we’re going to be seeing quite a lot of this sort of thing), and once again he’s provided you with three minutes of reasons to love December. We currently have it listed at Mythica.org, Pez’s FTP server, and Psyjnir.com… but we’d love more mirrors for this. It’s available in both Windows Media and QuickTime versions – check out our Mirrors list!

Xavier De Coster discovered another version of the gorgeous mural first seen on the cover of the September 2002 Edge Magazine. It’s clearly created from the original artwork… which leads me to believe that out there, somewhere, that original artwork exists, in beautiful, hi-res, non-watermarked form. Oooh… in the meantime, go grab a copy of this one from GameWallpapers.com!

A couple of interesting images for you… Martino sketches the Master Chief, and Brian Josselyn finds another marketing test. (Hey, I’d buy ’em…) Find both images in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Whoknew has set up a unique site; halo2vote is designed to allow visitors to speculate (in a controlled fashion) about the storyline of Halo 2, and in so doing contribute to a Fan Fiction project to be compiled after two weeks of ‘voting’. Check it out.

A few days ago, we posted some icons from FunkDaddy, for OSX and WIndows XP. Turns out the Banshee icon for OSX was actually showing a Scorpion tank, and the Scorpion icon (which existed in the XP collection) was missing altogether. The OSX collection has been replaced (it’s now 847K, one K bigger), and a new preview (containing all 27 OSX icons, 1024×768, 95K) has been uploaded. The XP collection is unchanged.

Fan Fiction from the last couple of days:

• Force 81 Part I, by NobleWard
• The Hephaestus Equation VI, by Dirty Commie
• Omega Red Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, by Kane172
• A New Year’s Day, Chapter 4, by Guilty Spark

As Christmas grows nearer, the processing of these might slow a bit… apologies in advance. In the meantime, enjoy!

A quick note – thanks to customsex and vector40 for more mirrors for the Parking Attendant movie released yesterday. If you haven’t seen this – grab it now, it’s not too big and it’s really funny!

Mutti raided the dumpster behind Bungie’s offices, and found some discarded concept art showing an early attempt to get around the slow walking speed. You’ll find it in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Alex Sullivan wants to know what you’re made of – find his challenge in our Wallpaper section.

Addam Weirich, showing up out of nowhere, has submitted a hilarious one-minute-long film that all Halo fans should watch. It’s really, really funny. Extra points (lots of ’em) for using a soundtrack voiced by Pete Stacker, the voice of Captain Keyes (and Sargeant Stacker) in the game. It was originally submitted as a DivX-encoded .avi, but we know some of our visitors have trouble with that format. We’ve reencoded it as a QuickTime movie, in two sizes; all three versions (the original, and the two QT encodings) are available from the Parking Attendant Mirrors page. Unfortunately, Mythica.org is unavailable at the moment for hosting (the web server is running, mostly, but the ftp server is not, so I can’t upload files), so we’ve spread this out over a bunch of different mirrors. If the first link you try is too slow, try a different one. We’d be thrilled to add more links to this page – just let us know if you can mirror any of the versions. Luckily, it’s not very large – depending on the version you grab, it’s only 4 to 7 mb worth of downloading. Go get it!

Local problems (Sprint lost another New York router last night at 10 pm) and the need to get up early kept me from hearing the Marty O’Donnell interview at X-treme Gaming Radio last night… but you can hear the stream even now. According to Major Tom, Marty danced around the Halo 2 questions… but was pretty forthcoming on the Halo: CE info. Go listen!

Heh – the Penny Arcade boys played a bunch of Halo last night… and their attitudes are definitely changing. (Even Gabe – though he hastened to point out that even though he really had fun playing multiplayer, he still thinks the solo campaign is 3 times too long.) Thanks to Skeletor for the heads-up.

Wanna hear Marty O’Donnell wax poetic? Tune in to X-treme Gaming Radio tonight at 9:30 pm EST; he’ll be interviewed. Thanks to Matt Soell for the heads-up.

Rough weekend – missed some of the fan-submitted content. This Side Up dropped off a couple of banners – we’ve added ’em to our Banners section. (That, too, needs an overhaul. It never ends…)

Yesterday, we posted a Microsoft Word document containing the Legendary Walkthrough housed here on this site. (This, btw, made Asmodeus happy.) Moloch was kind enough to save yet ANOTHER version – this one in PDF format for those without access to Microsoft Word. It’s 553K, and it’s pretty much identical to the Word doc – so grab it only if you don’t have the other one. I’ve linked both on the Legendary Walkthrough page, for convenience. Enjoy!

Nukedude has re-encoded Brian Josselyn’s Halo Movie trailer in DivX5.01 format; it’s as big, screen-wise, as the original, but 10 megs smaller. (You’ll need DivX Doctor II to play this on a Mac.) You can download this from Nukedude’s server, but if demand is great enough (and I’m sure Nukedude will let us know 😉 ), we’ll mirror this one, too. (He’s also added a mirror for the original Halo 2 trailer, in WMP9 format… we’ve added it to the mirrors list.)

Astounding quantities of Fan Fiction from this weekend:

• The Forerunners, by Jamie Perrie
• Forgotten Soldiers part 2, by cloud
• HALO: Missing In Action, Prologue to chapter 3 and chapters 4 to 8, by Hikaru-119
• A New Year’s Day, Chapter 3, by Guilty Spark
• Taking Tritus Part One, by Dispraiser
• The Hephaestus Equation V, by Dirty Commie
• Wings of Death Part 16, by el_halo_diablo
• Shadows of Archon II, part 32, by Wado

It’s going to be time to reorganize the section pretty soon…

Theo Arjona dropped us a line to let us know about SprigganHalo, a website devoted to a series of tournaments based in the San Francisco area. The first one is on January 18, and they’ll continue on the third Saturday of each month for the rest of 2003. Details and rules can be found at the website.

Tarrsk, maintainer of the HBO XBL Gamertag list, asked that we point out that the lack of updates on that list is due to finals. He’ll be done with ’em in a week or so, and will begin updating then. Please be patient!

Family day, no updates… been out. Last night, though, we received a bunch of desktops… you’ll find ’em in our Wallpaper section. Enjoy!