iGames has posted the tournament rules for the Halo Winter Season; if you’re interested in competing in this national event (the first qualifiers are this weekend), check out this page! Thanks to Team Overkill for the heads-up.

Tuesday’s Fan Fiction:

• Liberation, part 8, by Hoju
• Indoctrination, by Havok

Have at ’em…

SilverBrin****, of The Psyjnir Complex, has created another piece of Halo fan music. In SB’s words:

Think Halo meets Oni… If the Master Chief and Konoko were out clubbing, you might hear this….then again mb not not :(.

It’s interesting. I have trouble hearing the Halo influences in places… but you should check it out for yourself! Just under 3 megs, in MP3 format. And yes, this means I’m gonna get off my butt and set up a Fan Music section to this site… Soonâ„¢.

Game Nation has interviewed Xbox Canada’s marketing manager, Ryan Mugford. There are some interesting numbers in there; Canada has the highest percentage of Xbox gamers in the world (30.1% of their home console market), the highest percentage of Halo purchasers, and a ridiculously high percentage of people with access to broadband (80% of Xbox owners have it). Now, except for the silliness about Halo coming to the Gameboy Advance (I must say, a large chunk of Mugford’s credibility went out the window when I read that portion of the interview), there’s some good info in there; don’t mind the uncertainty in the Halo 2 release dates, pay attention to the Xbox Live info (and the Canadian stats in general). Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi for the heads-up.

Hojjen drops off a big, bright desktop for our Wallpaper section. Take a look…

Bizarre pair of Miscellaneous Art submissions tonight. (For what it’s worth, the creator of the first one has nothing to do with me, and I probably wouldn’t have posted the second one if I hadn’t been so amused by goings-on on the forum this evening.)

Better late than never… today’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• He’s Baaaaaack! Chapter 1, by Killer_Fairy
• Outlaw, Chapter 4, by Chris Cassani
• The Hephaestus Equation I, by Dirty Commie

Apparently, the comments abuse is getting worse. A forum thread has been started to get votes from people interested (one way or the other) in the continued existence of the Comments section – be sure to chime in soon.

Weekend Fan Fiction:

• Halo 2: Return of Death,, part 4, by Lord Dagon
• ‘GET OUT!’, by Neile Pederson
• Justification, part 2, by Rixor

A word of advice to fan fic writers: If you decide to use a font that 95% of your readers do not have access to (like, say, Tengwar Sindarin), be sure to submit any text in that font in GRAPHIC format (take a screenshot, save as a gif). This is the first and last time I’m going to be downloading fonts to do this for writers; in the future, any text that comes in in a totally random font will be displayed in the default font (which will, I promise, make it look really stupid).

We received another movie from Jiberish Halo Productions. This one’s called ‘Fear and Wonder, and it’s a 3:21 long, 13.8 mb gameplay film. There are some great moments in this film (the dismount/mount at 0:40 is fantastic), but I’d like to make something clear… this movie (and more than a dozen like it that have been submitted by various people in the past couple of weeks) is the kind of movie that we wrote the Posting Guidelines for in the first place. It’s pretty cool to watch, it’s well made, for the most part… but it really doesn’t add anything original to the corpus of Halo movies. 🙁 I’m letting this one through, for a variety of reasons, but I want to make it clear that from this point on, movies like this will NOT be hosted by us (or more accurately, by those that supply our bandwidth) any more. Please don’t ask, because I hate saying no. Likely, I’ll just point you to this news post. [Movie sidenote: Someone uploaded a movie called ‘Red Star’s Halo Secrets’. There was a readme attached… but there was NO CONTACT INFORMATION in the readme. The movie is not watchable (either the upload failed midway, or it uses some strange codec I don’t have access to), but I have no way of contacting the creator to ask for another copy, or more information. If you’re reading this and you know who created this movie, please let us know.]

Pair of desktops for you today. (One was submitted probably as a logo enhancement… but it’s wallpaper-sized, so I’m putting it here.) Check our Wallpaper section.

We’ve added the three map views from Bungie’s recent Team Tournament Strategy Guide to our Screenshots database.

Griffon writes to point out that Halo Command Central (a site that has existed in many guises over the years) is live again, in its prettiest format yet, over at Forerunners.org. There’s not much content yet (Just a Weapons page and a Vehicles page, it seems)… but it’s open, and content will fill out quickly, he promises. Go check it out!

Light Fan Fiction offering today – one story; Revolution 2 Return of the Forerunner, part 2, by Gruntkiller. Go take a look!

Unreal Halo, and some mods on an early bit of concept art… all in our Miscellaneous Art collection.

A pretty dark image for you today in the Wallpaper section…

Team Overkill has created an Expression for AOL Instant Messenger based on this site. It’s being hosted by AIM Buddy Expressions, on this page… but there are no previews there, so we’ve put one up here. This work was done with the help of Nick.

Nick found a pretty cool-looking UT2k3 version of Hang ’em High… someone’s putting a lot of time into making it right. The thread (with a number of screens) can be found here. You’ll need to register to view the site, so here’s a link to one of the images, so you can get a better sense for what’s being shown (and a local copy, in case that one goes away).

In time for next week’s perliminary round of the iGames Halo Winter Season, Bungie has posted a Team Tournament Strategy Guide. Complete with very nice overhead shots of the three maps to be used in the qualifiers, this guide should help you and your team enter the fray with s7yle. Check it out!

StarWarsFanMan pointed out a snippet of dialog we missed on the second level of Halo (you only hear it if you don’t climb into the Warthog when Foe Hammer drops it off). We’ve added it to the Halo level transcript.

Two new Fan Fiction authors:

• The Story of Elite 117, by Linda Scanlon
• Perfection Parts 1-4, by Vincent Smith

Go check ’em out…