A cornucopia of random art submissions for you today… bikeman and Kyle turn in Yellow Banshee-related pieces, Warbow shares a pretty funny postcard he received, and CYBRFRK passed along a pair of Master Chief sightings in major US cities. (Looks like this might be a rough winter for the MC…) You’ll find all the goodies in our Miscellaneous Art section.

A quick warning – if you’re working on a Seventh Column theme for the contest, today is the deadline; the winner walks away with a ‘hefty allowance at the Bungie Store’, and Evil Otto points out that new Halo goodies are coming soon.

Apologies for the downtime (both physical, and in terms of updates). Blame life. To start off with, here are a couple of desktops for you – the Wallpaper section gets bigger and bigger…

Heh – Inky, from Crocodile Bungie, has a dirty Halo disc. It still plays… but he gets some bizarre artifacts. Rather than gripe, though, he squeezed his lemons… and came up with Disco Halo, a 1:33, 9.4 mb film showing some bizarre texture problems. (The Glass MC at the end is AWESOME.) Aside from the flashbacks the music induced, this film is a lot of fun. We’ve mirrored this at mythica.org, just in case. Update: thanks to Pez, for allowing us to add one more mirror of this flick.

Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews points out that the The Junkyard’s Halo Strategy Archive could use more content. If you have any strategies or tips that you’d like to share (whether or not you’ve already submitted them to the Halo Tips database here at HBO), head on over and hit the submit button!

Top o’ the mornin’ Fan Fiction:

• After the Fall – Prologue, by Glenny
• To Fight for Life and Freedom, by Gasmask
• Through Your Enemies Eyes, part 1, by Jahan
• Stormbringers, part 4, by WildebeestNZ

What are you waiting for? Update: Eep, forgot one. Don’t forget A New Year’s Day, Chapter 2, by Guilty Spark!

In Germany, Microsoft has decided to sweeten their standard Xbox-plus-two-apps bundle with a free copy of Halo, for all bundles bought between December 11 and December 31. Nice! You can read about it at IGN Xbox. (Thanks to ragereset for the heads-up.)

Heh – Bungie’s showing off the newest additions to their merchandise line (hopefully to be available soon in the Bungie Store) – the webcam this afternoon is displaying a Grunt mug. (The black mug behind it is also relatively new – it’s the Seventh Column mug.) Thanks to Boss “Wart” Hogg, who first noticed it.

A pair of desktop images for you today; one is dedicated to us (unsolicited again – must be the holiday spirit), the other celebrates a more legendary beast. Check ’em both out in the Wallpaper section.

Our Miscellaneous Art collection grows by three items today; there’s a new Halo 2 cover mockup, a Halo-based holiday card, and a teaser for an upcoming Halo-based mod. Check ’em out!

Apologies to all the art submitters in the last few days – life here’s getting busy (holidays, and all), and stuff’s been piling up. Let’s see what I can get out right now. First up: another 4 banners touting the goodness of this very site, created by Tru7h. We’re honored! You’ll find ’em in the Banners section.

Three Fan Fiction pieces were added to the database earlier this evening, but I didn’t have time for the news post:

• The Fall of Lunar 4, by Dispraiser
• The Fall Of Reach (poem), by Spartan 117
• Wings of Death, part 15, by el_halo_diablo

Dispraiser’s story was first released a week ago, under the name ‘The Lunar 4 Chronicles’ – this is a completed version. It’s rather large, so be warned.

Glen Sanford has created a small program (unfinished at the moment) to rate yourself as a Halo player. Simply plug in the stats from the final screen of a multiplayer game, and it’ll rate your skill (from ‘Too bad to calculate’ to ‘Level 10 Spartan II’). Currently it only works for Slayer games… but at 28K for the download, what do you have to lose? (Requires Windows – not sure what flavors; I tried it on XP, and it worked fine.) Glen’s looking for feedback; he wants to know if it’s worth finishing.

So a few days ago, I got a message from Bizkit522, a regular over at the IGN Halo board, mentioning the similarities between a couple of Marty O’Donnell tunes. Hurry, from the Oni Soundtrack, kicks in right after Konoko’s uncle is killed, and and is a high-tension piece punctuated by quick violins. On a Pale Horse, from the Halo Soundtrack, plays in a couple of places on the Assault on the Control Room/Two Betrayals level(s), and kicks in when the action is about to heat up – it, too, is a high-tension piece punctuated by the same violins. In fact, if you listen, these are very similar pieces (although Hurry is a bit faster – in my opinion, the refinements for On a Pale Horse make it a better piece)… is this a tip ‘o the hat by Marty to an older game, or did he just run out of music to use? He’s given us permission to let you hear both pieces – you can decide for yourself. Feel free to post speculation on our forum.

• Hurry.mp3 (350K)
• On_A_Pale_Horse.mp3 (764K)

These were both ripped at a relatively low bitrate (80 Kbps) – you should really buy the soundtracks for the hi-res versions.

Although Jester and Psyrixx, two original members of the iGames Players Council, have recently stepped down because of differences with the iGames philosophy, the games go on. Round 2 takes place this Saturday, December 14. Get some details at Bungie.net.

The Halo community, once again proving how much it rocks, has provided you, the viewer, with a boatload of download links for the new trailer for Brian Josselyn’s Halo Movie. We’ve compiled them on the Halo Movie Trailer Mirrors page.

A holiday card… from poena.dare. Love it!

In the hours since we mentioned it, there’s been quite a bit of activity surrounding the Halo Movie trailer put up by Blackstar Productions. Nick has created a smaller, modem-friendly version (8.3 mb) which we’ve mirrored at mythica.org… and Brian himself has posted a smaller (21 mb) version at the home site. This one (as well as the original, 35 mb version) are now mirrored as well at Mythica.org – and we’re gladly accepting any other mirror offers. It’s a pretty impressive trailer – leaves you wanting the whole thing! (The small version was encoded with the MsMPEG4v2 codec, and requires WMP 9 to view. Jacke points out that there are downloadable codecs to allow this to be seen on Macs, but as far as I can tell, they’re OS9-exclusive; I couldn’t find a way to watch this in OSX.)

The entire weekend’s Fan Fiction in one fell swoop:

• Halo Christmas Carols, by Gasmask
• Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 7, by Gruntkiller
• Wilkins, part 2, by Phat Bob
• A New Year’s Day, part 1, by Guilty Spark
• A Fresh Start, part 1, by Simon James
• This is Suicide, part 5, by Neile Pederson
• In The Beginning (dn), part 1, by Dan Nadler
• Shadows of Archon II, part 31, by Wado

Lots of new writers…

gd managed to grab a pretty funny sound clip of the Sarge, on Silent Cartographer – read about it in this post, listen to the relevant piece here. I’ve never heard this in the regular game (gd got this off the one-level demo) – I wonder if it’s unique to the demo, or if it’s actually there to be found in the full version?