bikeman704 has finished up a Counter-Strike map that prominently features The Pillar of Autumn. Check out some screenshots, and download the map! (Comments should go in this forum thread.)

Last spring, Brian Josselyn created a spoof called ‘The Halo Boys Soundtrack‘ – and today, Revolver_Ocelot has submitted an updated soundtrack for it. (It’s the same soundtrack, with a new background track.) Just for fun… (It’s 628k, in .mp3 format.)

A composite from the French MOX Halo 2 cover, a vision of what we’re happy isn’t, and a use for the UNSC flag… all in our Miscellaneous Art section!

Two new (well, one new and one not-so-new) job openings at Bungie – the recently filled Game Producer slot is available again, and there’s a need for a 2D/3D artist. Check out the details at Bungie.net!

Tru7h and Reconciliation’s Music Outtakes section has been updated with a song which was left off the Soundtrack. (Read the news story for details.) Thanks to Exogenesis for the heads-up… usually I get mail when b.net gets updated, but the system is temporarily fuxored.

The writers are working overtime… Fan Fiction for the day:

• Facing Death, by Gasmask
• The Hephaestus Equation, part 2 and part 3, by Dirty Commie
• After Reach, part 1, by Foyez Khader
• Wings of Death, part 14, by el_halo_diablo
• This is Suicide, part 4, by Neile Pederson
• Grunt Interview, by Gasmask

Go read ’em before there’s more…

A veritable cornucopia of Miscellaneous Art, just a few days after Thanksgiving. Personally, I like the For Sale ad, though I must warn you about the spoilers…

Death and Patriotism… a pair of new desktops in our Wallpaper section!

Covenant has put together a Halo 2 map idea in 3D Studio Max; looks like it’d be fun to play! (I don’t see any good reason why this couldn’t be made for the PC version of Halo next summer…)

For folks who have trouble with Windows Media files (you know who you are), Bryan Bayley has kindly submitted a QuickTime version of the Hoedown video. (Any encoding problems can be blamed on me… I made it a bit smaller than its original 40 megs.) You’ll find the 14.3 mb file at mythica.org. Hopefully, it won’t take me weeks to get this into the Movie database… Update: Both versions of this movie are mirrored on Pez’s ftp server. Thanks, Pez!

For all the folks who’ve complained over the last year or so about how difficult it is to find information on the Halo Story site… it now has a basic search function. Works a lot like the search function on the main news page. (Funny, that.) Hopefully, it’ll ease your pain. Please don’t use it to abuse mnemesis and Finn… they’re twitchy enough as it is.

Tuesday’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• Lunar 4 Campaigns, by Dispraiser
• Halo: The Final Fight, part 3, by Daniel Luiken
• Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 6, by Gruntkiller
• Shadows of Archon II, part 30, by Wado
• Wilkins, part 1, by Phat Bob
• This is Suicide, part 3, by Neile Pederson

To warn you – Lunar 4 Campaigns is rather large.

ThetaDot sent in a rendering of the MC’s helmet. He never finished the rest of the body (or, indeed, the helmet), but what’s there is pretty nice! Check it out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned an effort to list the top 50 Seventh Column chapters (one per state) in the US. A couple of days ago, a story went up on Bungie.net that the effort had been finished… and now emildux has posted some more details to our forum. Beyond the top 50 chapters, there are all sorts of stats… see where you fit!

Bryan and Ross have created another gameplay movie – it’s in the vein of ‘Rocket Dance’, and it’s great. (These guys never heard of HBO before they finished the movie…) It’s 3:50 long, 10.6 mb big, and in .wmv format (yeah, yeah). You can find a copy on their own server, or a mirrored copy on mythica.org. If you guys find it as fun as I do, we’ll probably need more mirrors. (I wouldn’t mind a hi-res QuickTime version, either, but that’s just me…) Watch this, and see why you can STILL make a gameplay movie based in Blood Gulch and not have it be the same old thing!

Hefty update for the Halo Story page this evening… and more exciting, it will soon be sporting a search function! For now, check out the latest speculation on all things Halo, and add your own two bits!

As you may or may not have noticed, the news search function (accessible at the top of this page) is now a bit more flexible. Searches now default to exact matches – if you type ‘Fall of Reach’ into the box, you’re looking for that phrase. If you don’t want an exact match, you have the option of altering the search type right from here. As always, problem reports are appreciated.

pete_the_duck is working on an interesting project. Without promising anything, let me say that if all goes according to plan, you might see more of this sort of stuff soon…

It was a pretty quiet weekend, as far as Fan Fiction goes; we received a comedic entry from Gasmask (which should have gone up days ago), and two stories that didn’t meet our length requirements… guess everyone was recovering from the tryptophan in their turkey.

What if Halo 2 used Pelicans in multiplayer? And what if they had cannons? Eric Redmond speculates in our Miscellaneous Art section.