Bungie’s Number One Fan Miguel ‘Freewill’ Chavez competed in the first round of the Halo National Tournament… and has written up his experiences, complete with pics. Check it out at Bungie Sightings! Correction: Miguel competed in a warm-up event, not the actual tournament. Silly me – the tournament doesn’t even start until next week!

Apologies for the lack up updates – I spent the day at a music festival with my family. Too much sun, too much driving, lots of great music… and what do I come back to? MORE great music! dogsounds (recently in the news for his cartooning skills) has dropped off our first Fan Music submission… and I’m pretty impressed! dogsounds says:

I had a few hours spare this weekend so I cobbled together some ‘fan music’ I guess you could call it, inspired by the SACRED GAME and Uncle Marty’s classic musical outpourings.

It was a bit rushed to be honest, so it’s not brilliant or anything, and I was having some troubles with my sampler (noting a swift twat about the front panel can’t fix, probably), but I hope everyone enjoys it. Maybe others will be inspired to write their own Halo fan music!

I based it on the scene in ‘The Fall Of Reach’ where Sam realizes that, because of damage to his armor, he can’t leave the doomed Covenant ship that is on a countdown to destruction, and so must stay behind and accept his fate.

It’s called ‘Costly Exfiltration (Sam Says Goodbye)’, but I’ve renamed the mp3 to be more internet friendly. Grab sam.says.goodbye.mp3 (3.5 mb) today, and be sure to post what you think!

Sunday morning Fan Fiction:

• The Marine, chapter 1, by Iceman
• Short Story, by Jamie
• The Return of the Archons, chapter 6 (final chapter), by Wado

What are you waiting for? Update: Add Shadow’s Rise to Honor, chapter 13 to the list…

Art for the day: bikeman704 has cobbled together a ‘screenshot’ of a wished-for Half-Life mod… minor spoilers here. You’ll find this in our Miscellaneous Art section.

The Movies Database has finally been brought up-to-date… movies from the past 2 weeks or so have been added. Hopefully, we’ll have more mirrors for some of the bigger ones soon…

The Halo theme package released yesterday has found a pair of new hosts – there’s a copy at Psyjnir.com’s Hotline server (Halo ->Desktops/Wallpaper), and a copy at Pez Mohr’s ftp server. In addition, Pez has re-zipped the collection, so that the file structure is better after unzipping. (We’ll replace the original version with his as soon as possible – it’s currently being downloaded by too many people to simply yank. 🙂 )

Continuing with the theme of camo-colored vehicles, Blackstar has retextured the Scorpion to work better in a snow environment… check out his Winter Camo Tank in the Miscellaneous Art section.

St. Joan, an old-time Bungie fan, has submitted a pretty comprehensive Halo theme for Windows-based machines. It’s rather large (9 megs), because it contains 5 separate themes, each with “multiple resolution wallpaper, original icons, cursors, and MP3 layer sound files.” The quality is quite high – so if you’re in the market for a Halo theme, and you’re running Windows, give it a whirl. (It was submitted as a self-extracting zip file that actually required some rearranging once I got it installed… so I’ve re-zipped it so as to include the (separate) readme. There’s a full readme IN the package… but getting to the package might be tricky; better to have the text in front of you. The downside – you’ll need to unzip it twice. 🙁 ) We’ve hosted it here, at HBO – but if anyone wanted to mirror this, just let us know!

Lazy days of summer – today’s Fan Fiction offering is again one story – Titan – Chapter 2, by Jaywhit10. Give it a shot!

More random art submissions:

• Jon’s Rifle, by Checkov
• a Forerunner Concept piece, by StarWarsFanMan

In our Miscellaneous Art section, as usual…

Thanks to Pez Mohr, who’s added another mirror for the 120 mb version of the Matrix movie. All current mirrors can be found on the Matrix Mirrors page… and we’ll be adding this movie (and Dan Chosich’s Reminisance) to the Movie Database soon.

New material at Bungie.net… the big one is the Halo Tournament Strategy Guide, written by Yeroen. Lots of goodness here. However, don’t overlook the ubercool desktop (scroll to the very bottom) showing the Legendary Skull you get when you complete a level on Legendary difficulty – in hi-res goodness.

dogsounds sent in another Halo funny – we’ve added it to our Miscellaneous Art section. To put it simply – this guy rocks. (Go visit the website, for more comic goodness… non-Halo-related, but good stuff.)

Fan Fiction submissions are once again light – just one… but it’s a good’un. Vector40 submits ‘The Old Man and the Warrior‘. Check it out.

The Matrix movie went live this morning without the usual Psyjnir.com hotline link – apparently, Psyrixx is out of town. It wasn’t clear exactly where… but I think the Psyjnir Webmaster’s Mom is involved (and there was something about email porn links… it’s all rather fuzzy). Anyway, the Webmaster was kind enough to give me permission to put several files up at the Psyjnir Hotline server; If you navigate to Halo -> Movies, you’ll find all three resolutions of the Matrix movie, and Dan Chosich’s ‘Reminisance’ (an 86 mb WMV file). Hot dang! (We’re still happily accepting mirror offers for any of these files.)

Whoa. Not too often that Marty O’Donnell is proven wrong in print – but eric has pulled it off. A couple of days ago, he stated that his favorite quote from the Halo dialog archives was ‘What kind of a**wipe are you?’ (a line from one of the underground Engineers on the level Halo). Marty corrected him, stating that they’d never have put a line like that into Halo… but eric persisted. Upon reconsideration, Marty retracted his denial – and Jay Weinland provided an explanation of how the unthinkable could have happened. Bottom line – if you think you’re right, you just might be.

In our Movies database, there are over 100 films listed. Almost 70 of them are fan-created… but only a handful of those truly stand out as groundbreakers; BungieLove, Warthog Jump, A**hole, a few others. Well, welcome the next entrant to that elite class: The Matrix (Halo Remix). Bill Paetzke has meticulously recreated the opening scene from the movie ‘The Matrix’… and he’s done it with s7yle. There are three versions:

• a HUGE 120 mb version shows you the action at 720×480 – but at present there are only a pair of mirrors for it. (There will hopefully be a few more showing up today – but as of right now, this is it.)
• A midrange, 42 mb version; it’s 360×240, but pretty high quality. The only source for this is Bill’s server at the moment.
• A budget, 20 mb version, also 360×240. This is quite watchable… and at the moment has several mirrors (with more coming). For those not sitting on a very large pipe, this is the recommended version.

All of these (and any new mirrors people want to tell us about) can be found on the Matrix Mirror page. And if that wasn’t enough for one day’s movie quota… Dan Chosich has announced that his sixth Halo vid, Reminisance, is up for grabs for today only. It’s in .WMV format, and it’s 86 megs large… and I hope that as soon as the bandwidth crunch caused by The Matrix dies down, we can put a copy up at mythica.org (because it’s a masterpiece of editing). Feast or famine, folks!

Thursday’s Miscellaneous Art:

• Checkov’s Elite Drawing – a sketch
• Infectus, by BOLL – a Half-Life model of a Halo character (minor spoilers here)

You’ll find this stuff in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Fan Fiction today consists of one installment – Rise To Honor, part 12, by Shadow. Take a look!

The Tricks queue continues to shrink. It’s not gone yet (by ANY means)… but it’s six tricks lighter. You’ll find these six (ranging from simple stunts to pretty cool explorations) in our Gameplay Tricks section. Another few days of this, and they’ll ALL be processed. (Until the next one comes in…)