Dinky, from HaloJuggaloProductions, sends word of a small (1 mb) video clip showing a pretty nice midair rocket shot. (400% health probably helps; usually, when you get a grenade stuck to your leg, you’re dead, not just flying. 🙂 ) It’s 24 seconds long; the fun stuff starts about halfway through. WMV format.

Browsing the Battleground: Halo forums, I ran across a mention of a new Halo 2 preview at bluegamers.com. There’s nothing really new in it (most of the info seems to have come from the EGM preview last month), and there’s some interesting stuff that might be a little too strongly worded (EGM says ‘the team is toying with the idea’ of detonator mines, but the article suggests they’re in)… but hey, it’s a preview!

bikeman704 went back to his old Halo stuff (built for Half-Life) and whipped up another pair of images; check ’em out here. Pretty slick!

Game Girl Advance has posted an article called ‘Halo: Original Game, or Sequel?‘ While we strongly disagree with the conclusions drawn in the article (we – the staff of HBO, not just me), I’m quite pleased they were able to find the info they needed so easily. (The screenshot of Keyes was taken from a pre-release movie put out by Gamespot in October, 2001.) Check it out!

Whoa – someone got tired of waiting for Halo action figures! Check this little guy out. (Thanks to Physalis for the heads-up.)

According to Hedgemony, Halo is pushing Xbox sales in Australia STILL, more than a year after release. (Okay, it’s only been out for 8 months Down Under… but you know what I mean.) For more details and speculation, check his forum post!

The 2003 Game Developers Conference is coming up soon (March 4-8, just 4 months away), and there are already at least three Bungie talks scheduled:

• Marty O’Donnell will be part of a 6-person panel deciding Does Melody Matter?
• Jaime Griesemer, Tim Longo, and Randy Smith (of Ion Storm) will look at level design On All Levels
• Marty, Jaime, and Mat Noguchi will discuss Halo: Development Evolved

(There’s another session listed, but it seems to be a duplicate of the last one.) Sounds like there might be some good stuff to hear!

Recently, someone going by the name of ArakniZ has been dropping movies off in our Uploads directory. They’re in WMP9 format, so we can’t watch them. (There is no player for WMP9 for Macs, and none of the front-page HBO staffers has a PC.) Normally, we’d email this information… but ArakniZ hasn’t given us an email address. We cannot post what we cannot watch; anyone who wants a movie posted by us needs to put it in a format we can see. (And we’d really, really, REALLY like email addresses we can contact you at, so that we don’t have to waste valuable front-page real estate sending personal messages… you don’t want it posted, that’s fine, but we’d like to be able to contact you about your work.) I’ve added this information to the Movies page, as well. All that said, we DO have a new vid for you to watch; Calvin has dropped off a short piece analyzing what makes a movie worth watching. (Please don’t take it too seriously.) It’s in QuickTime format, is just under 2 minutes long, and weighs in at 6.4 mb. We’ve put a copy up at Mythica.org (which had another terabyte month for the Halo cause – thanks, Brian!).

MereCatFish drops off a desktop for our Wallpaper collection.

While we Americans filled our bellies, Finn, the Tireless Canadian, updated the Halo Story page. More stuffing than you can shake a fork at!

Friday’s Fan Fiction:

• Stormbringers, part 3, by WildebeestNZ
• The Ones He Left Behind: Prologue, by Fallen Heros
• Sarges Platoon, part 2, by Bobby Lucas
• Order of the Seraphim, part 5, by Jehkoh
• Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 5, by Gruntkiller
• Kelly-087: Prologue, by Tristan Wolfe

That clears out the most recent stuff…

Submitted artwork over the past couple of days… JangoMaster126 turns in a minimalist Halo 2 case, Mr. Lolly Pop Man composites a nice Halo montage (full of spoilers), and Andrew Katz takes another stab at the Spartan II logo described in the Fall of Reach. You can find all three images in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Whoa – long break for me. Felt good. 🙂 Back in the saddle, bit in my mouth… Miguel Chavez points out that the guys who were planning to build a Mjolnir Mark VI suit have given up. Bummer… but then, it was a rather ambitious project.

Heh – I had every intention of taking the whole day off… but I came down to check for email from a couple of guests, and I saw this Thanksgiving offering from Doggone. I couldn’t pass it up. Enjoy the day, everyone!

Just a couple of new Fan Fiction pieces for you this evening:

• The Collective, by Gasmask
• Halo 2: A New Hope, Part 4, by Sephiroth

And with that, I’ll wish you a Happy Turkey Day, and bid you adeiu for a bit…

Tuesday’s Fan Fiction offering:

• TOUCHDOWN, by John Tabat
• Halo: Standing Firm, part 2, by Xzilen
• Fafnir, part 11, by KnightmareWolf
• Shadows of Archon II, part 29, by Wado

Some of you may have noticed that there was some confusion with Fafnir chapters 9 and 10 – I managed to overwrite the comments for chapter 9 accidentally. The database has been cleared up, and all the chapters are configured properly again… but those comments are lost forever, apologies. This is the final chapter of the Fafnir series, and there are just 4 more left in the Shadows of Archon II series.

It’s a snowy morning here at HBO HQ (there are almost 10 inches on the ground, and it’s still coming down) – but the fan submissions continue. A pair of images for you in our Miscellaneous Art collection…

Curious about who won the AGP Tournament that took place last weekend? Wonder no longer – the full scoop can be found over at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. HP Darkman, the winner of the Halo National Championship, anchored the winning team… but check out all the details!

In a perfect world, new items we mention on our news page would be added to the various subsections of the site as we get them. In real life, though, I neglect to actually make those secondary additions until someone complains that they can’t find some relatively new item. The Miscellaneous section and the Movies section have both been brought up-to-date, with more than half-a-dozen new entries from the past couple of weeks. I’ll try and do better.

Last week, Bungie posted an article on the Tru7h and Reconciliation website called ‘Designing for Carnage‘, which looked at 3 multiplayer maps and how they were developed. We’ve added the 15 images (screenshots, 3D Studio Max views, and sketches) to our Screenshots database. For posterity, and all that.