The Master Chief without a helmet? Wow. The Miscellaneous Art section gets an impressive submission, thanks to Covenant. (It was all done in Photoshop.) Take a look!

Heh – the family edge wins out. A new video has been posted at Blackstar Productions – it’s called Work or Die, and is a highlight film of a lanfest held right here at HBO HQ a bit over a week ago. 40 megs, 640×480, 3:43 long… with a pretty funny soundtrack. (A few too many clips of me dying, but such is life. Or something.) If bandwidth gets tight over at BSP, we’ll find a mirror or two… but for now, check it out there (and enjoy the site’s new layout!). I learned about this from Rampancy.net.

Eep – we missed the opening of the Halo hub at Forerunners.org. There’s not much content on the main site yet (mostly stuff snagged off Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site), but there are two hosted Halo pages already; EvergreenHalo and Halo Elites. If you want to build a Halo site, check ’em out!

Yesterday, we mentioned a Windows screensaver created by a Halo fan that played QuickTime movies. PCDestroyer points out that something similar exists for MacOSX – the reviews are mixed, but it’s there if you want it. (24k, so it’s not even a painful download.)

Once again, the Movies database has been brought up-to-date… 17 movies released in the last month or so have been added. It’s a never-ending stream…

Last week, we mentioned a contest over at Psyjnir.com – guess the winner of the Halo National Tournament, win one of three Halo soundtracks. The contest ended a couple of days ago – but the announcement was made on the Psyjnir Complex 7th Column chapter, and was visible only to members of that chapter. This has been rectified – you can find the details on the main Psyjnir Complex website. Congrats to Forerunner01, masterchief1138, and Jerry H!

How many of us wouldn’t want to see this in Halo 2? (Thanks again to Warbow for the tweaking.)

Ciarán has created a Windows screensaver that uses the Halo 2 trailer (in QuickTime format) – or any other QuickTime movie – as its source. It’s been tested on Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows XP Home. It weighs in at 1.5 mb – you can find it here.

Monday morning Fan Fiction (it all came in yesterday, but yesterday was mostly an offline day):

• Shadows of Archon II, part 10, by Wado
• Revolution, part 6, by Gruntkiller
• Rogue Enemies, part 5 and part 6, by Spartan415
• The Lost Spartan, part 11, by Spartan415
• Banserki’s Journal, part 8, by Sarge
• Justification, part 1, by Rixor

These constitute the final chapters for Rogue Enemies and The Lost Spartans… and possibly for Banserki’s Journal, as well.

Khen Rigzin announced a new Halo vid he’s created – you can find a complete walkthrough of the video, as well as a download link, on this page. It’s 58 mb zipped, 5:22 long, in .mpg format.

T-Money dropped off a new desktop for your viewing pleasure – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.

Rixor did some digging, and turned up a bit more information about the next Halo novel – according to this page, the author will be William Dietz, and the title is listed as ‘Halo: The Flood’. Amazon lists 24 books by Mr. Dietz, including several Star Wars novels. Some of the listings offer excerpts, so you can get a sense for yourself of his writing style.

Heh – a trailer so yummy, it generates REVIEWS OF ITS OWN. Monsters At Play has written up a very nice account of this clip – worth a read. Check it out!

Adam Russin and Brian Rosenberg have created a film called ‘Oh Shit!’ I’m too tired to figure out if it meets our Movie Posting Guidelines – but I enjoyed it, so I’m posting it. So there. It’s only available in .wmv format, unfortunately – it’s 3:18 long, and 12.5 mb big. You can get it at Project Mjolnir, where it was posted first, or you can grab a copy from Mythica.org. Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll get cracking on the movies that need to be added to our Movie Database. (We have news of several other movies that have been made recently; it’s all been backburnered due to the obscenely high demand for the Halo 2 trailer, but we’re going to start letting you know about some of it in the near future.) In the meantime, go watch this film… it’s fun. 🙂

Recently, Uriel posted a note on our forum pointing out a listing for the next Halo novel at Amazon. I wrote up a news post about it – I remember writing that the March 2003 release date was just in time to whet appetites for the release of PC Halo. Somehow, that post vanished into the ether – never made the front page, isn’t on my computer any more. (It’s the gnomes, I tell you!) I might never have noticed its absence, though, if Deimosâ„¢ hadn’t pointed it out again this evening. Hopefully, this isn’t the only post gone AWOL… anyway, we now have a (tentative) release date for this book – it’s considerably later than the ‘Fall 2002‘ timeframe that had been suggested in February, but that’s how it goes, sometimes.

SpikeDaDragon points out Project-Halo, a new fansite. Not a lot of content yet… but he’s working on it. (Spike – and everyone else who sends mail to us thinking we’re Bungie Studios – we’re not Bungie Studios. We’re a fansite, run by fans. Bungie Studios can be found at bungie.net or bungie.com. It even says that at the bottom of all our pages.)

Dave Calotta has provided another home for Uriel’s ‘A Fall Too Far’ – check his Hotline server, AirDCServer. We’ve also uploaded a copy to Mythica.org, for those who have trouble with Hotline. (It seems there are many who don’t realize it’s a protocol not covered by any browser – you need a separate Hotline client to access the servers. Visit your favorite file archive and search for ‘Hotline client’.) 4.3 mb, 50 seconds, QT 5 format.

Joseph Staten popped into our forum to provide a couple of alternatives Bungie considered for the last pair of lines in the trailer. All in all, I think they chose the correct pair.

For years now, folks have been begging for Halo action figures. Apparently, progress is being made in the field… when we know more, we’ll pass it along.

In direct response to a fan request, I’ve scanned in last month’s article on what the Official Xbox Magazine staff wants to see in Halo 2. You’ll find it (including the now-infamous Tiger Tank) in our Press Scans section. (The October issue hit the stands yesterday, so we’re clean.)