Warbow went dumpster diving outside the Bungie offices again. We won’t show you the mutilated Elmo dolls he found… but there was also this snippet of what appears to be a rejected Halo 2 trailer option. 2.5 mb, QT format. Crap, now we have to clean the carpets again…

A couple of days ago, we posted the beginnings of a novelization of the Halo story. We’ve got a new one today – strategyfreak, who had been working on the Halo Fan Fiction project, has turned in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of his effort to this end. The Fan Fiction section continues to grow…

A recent episode of G4 TV’s Filter program rated the Halo Soundtrack at #3 in the top 10 videogame soundtracks of all time. (Final Fantasy VII and GTA3 beat it out.) Personally, I think they misjudged… but hey, I’m biased. Check out the details at Bungie.net.

Thanks to the eagle eyes of Jerry, who noticed the cool new link at the top of the bungie.net main page (right corner). It contains quick links to all the useful info so far published on Halo 2 – press releases, links to the trailer, goodies like screens and desktops… keep it handy!

A couple of weeks ago, Frogblast posted a pretty interesting movie showing some truly bizarre behavior on 343 Guilty Spark. (Spoilers, for anyone who is still keeping track of this stuff.) Today, Warbow put this clip to music – and it’s a nice enough piece of work that we’ve upped it to mythica. (6.1 mb, QT5 format.) Check it out!

New desktop from The Elite Halo Gang – check our Wallpaper section.

Thursday’s Fan Fiction:

• Revolution, part 9, by Gruntkiller
• Chance Guards, by Loopframe
• Shadows of Archon II, part 15, by Wado

You know what to do…

Hamish Sinclair is on vacation, but a Bungie Community staple turns 7 today… the Marathon’s Story Page reaches mythical age-status. (Yeah, yeah, not really Halo news… but 7th birthdays for Bungie fansites don’t come around very often.) Visit the Story page forum and help blow out the candles!

Total Games is speculating that there will be a playable build of Halo 2 at X02 in Spain next week. The details are sketchy, but the idea is intriguing. (That a playable build exists, I have no doubt. That Total Games—or anyone else outside Microsoft—will see it any time soon is far less certain.) Thanks to Hedgemony for the heads-up.

You want to watch a cool movie? Watch this. (I read about it here.)

Jeff Lofland created an NBA-inspired Halo desktop – you’ll find it in our Wallpapers section.

Fan Fiction for the last day or so:

• Wings of Death, part 4, by el_halo_diablo
• The monitor’s contest, part 2, by Guy French
• HALO: Combat Evolved, part 1, by Cameron Eades
• Shadows of Archon II, part 14, by Wado
• Taker of Life, Giver of Death, part 10, by Ian Barnes
• HELLJUMPERS, part 9, by Havok
• Spartan Exposure: A Media Campaign, by David Beale

Eades’ work is an attempt to novelize the Halo story. He decided to send this in after hearing that the FFP had closed down.

Computer and Video Games has written up a Halo 2 preview. The information contained within it is a subset of what was seen in the Edge preview leaked last week – it’s unclear whether the author got the material for the story from the Edge scans, or from Bungie directly. However, since the Edge scans are no longer available (we’ll post them next month, but for now, they’re offline), this might be a good way to find out some information about the Halo 2 gameplay and storyline. Razorback pointed this out, after finding it at VoodooExtreme.

The Halo Story Page gets its first update from the newest member of the updating team… Finn, of Team 7hr33! Now, if you’ve submitted 437 items for consideration in the past 12 days, don’t expect that they’ll suddenly all be posted; they’re still human, and a lot of what you guys send in is actually already discussed in detail on the pages. However, it might just be that a few more of the interesting tidbits find their way into the public space… (mnemesis hasn’t gone anywhere, so mail for the site should still be addressed to halostory@bungie.org; that goes to everyone involved.)

Gah. Sometimes life just kicks you in the – oh, never mind. HBO was down for a couple of hours this evening, but not because it changed IP addresses. It died because of user error (with me as the user). We got it up and running again – but the IP change has to wait for morning. So there will still be an outage tomorrow, on top of this recent outage. Hopefully, it won’t be a long one. (The Time To Live on the dns records for this site were set to something ridiculously short this morning; in theory, that means that the downtime will be minimized. Some of you, of course, will be on networks that pay no attention to niceties like dns records, and HBO will be down for however long your service provider takes to update its files. Can’t be helped.) Once again, I’d remind all that the HBO forum is on another network entirely, and will NOT be going offline.

Thanks to Ghôlsbane, who pointed out an article at MacGamer, summarizing the day’s events at Apple expo 2002 in Paris. They spoke to Peter Tamte, head of Bold Games and Destineer Studios (the publishers behind the Mac version of Halo).

Peter told us that Halo is meeting every internal schedule and should be released simultaneously for the Mac and the PC in Summer 2003.

This is what he said a month ago, to Inside Mac Games… and 2 months ago, to our own Miguel Chavez. It’s nice when things go as planned!

Strykerwolf, once and for all, proves the veracity of the infamous ‘locked weapons’ story floating around the internet. See his proof here. (Originally posted to our forum.)

We’re a little ambiguous about posting info from the Edge scans leaked this weekend… but this picture was so cool, we decided we couldn’t hold it back. Warbow has taken the new Halo 2 ATV and stuck it out in the American west… wow. You can find it in our Miscellaneous Art section. Update: seems Warbow forgot the shadow on the first version. Grab it again if you downloaded it already – it’s better now. 🙂

Thanks to Oso, who pointed out a trailer from G4 for the upcoming broadcast of the Halo National Championship on G4TV – you can download it in MPEG format (3.8 mb, 36 seconds), or stream it to Windows Media Player. It’ll show you a few of the contestants, and a bit of the set it was all filmed on. The show airs Friday night, September 20, at 11 pm eastern time (8 pm pacific). There’s no word yet on whether the actual show will be available on the web at some point.

I’m getting sort of tired of this… but HBO’s colo host is changing our location, which means our IP address changes. Again. Which means that as of 4 pm EST today, this site will be inaccessible until your local DNS information catches up. Apologies. (The forum will continue to be accessible; it’s not moving.) Update: Obviously, we’re not offline yet. In fact, we don’t know when the move is going to happen. (This is unsettling, to say the least.) I suppose the best we can do is to say that when you can’t reach us, we’ve changed addresses. 🙂