Justin drops off another desktop image for our Wallpaper section – this time, the focus is the Warthog. Take a look…

Due Q4 2002: The McLees Expansion Pack! Congrats, Lorraine and Rob… and thanks to Lorraine for the added info about Bungie’s inner machinations! (There was some speculation about how many teams are working at Bungie – Lorraine clarified that there are currently 2. Phoenix is obviously one… and the Halo team is probably the other (working on Halo 2?).)

lol – Why You Should Never Believe Game Sellers, Part 77: Greg noticed that GamePlay is willing to sell you Halo 2 right now, as a pre-order. The funny part?

Please note that as this title was just officially announced at this years E3, the pricing has not been set and as such the price here is higher than expexcted.

For those who put their scorecards down for a bathroom break, Halo 2 was not officially announced anywhere—E3 or elsewhere. It’s a good bet that it’ll get made—Bungie would be foolish to pass up on the chance to make a sequel for the fastest million-seller in next-gen console history—but it sure as heck don’t exist, “officially”, yet. Just something to keep in mind, the next time you’re talking to a salesperson in Babbages…

Heh – Halo shows up in today’s Real LIfe Comics – go ahead, tell me this has never happened to you. Thanks to Uriel for the heads-up.

Roger Wilco, unwilling to wait for Halo tools to be released, has added another few designs to his ‘Halo Vehicles’ page – the ‘Warbow’, the ‘Lobster’, and my personal favorite, the ‘GNERD’… check ’em out. (Don’t forget to follow the little movie icons at the beginning of each entry – they lead to short quicktime flicks showing a full 360° view…)

Hmm. Taylor Helsper wants to know how long it takes to beat Halo – so he’s set up a basic site (‘Halo Times‘) to compile this data. Simply mail him your time to finish a level (and the difficulty you played on), and he’ll build a list of the best times. In his words – please be truthful.

Paul has created a small Halo game involving Mario-like rules; it’s PC-only, but we’ve had it tested, and it’s virus-free; at 600k, what do you have to lose? Grab it today!

Sunday afternoon Fan Fiction:

• Ascendant Part V, by Archangel’s Blade
• A Second Last Chance, chapter 3, by Torch99

Read ’em if you’ve already given your dad a Father’s Day card…

Matt Ager writes to let us know that The Halo Library is now online. More content coming soon…

Another one from Djoey154 – this time, it’s sound from the movie ‘Starship Troopers’, set to Halo video footage (primarily cutscene material, but some live action, too). Very nice job. It’s nearly 4 minutes long, in QT5 format, and weighs in at 12 megs. You’ll find it at Mythica.org, though we’d love to get some mirror sites for it…

Happy Father’s Day, to all you fathers out there! (If you’re not a father, let your own dad know…) There are a boatload of movies in our inbox – there’s no way we can release them all at once. (Part of that is a bandwidth issue; the other part is that it’s Father’s day, and there just isn’t time to process it all.) We’ll start you off with Dave Driggs‘ Fragfest footage – a 1:38 romp through Blood Gulch, with some fun commentary. (He also made a nice little ‘trophy’ for the evening – check out the details!) More when we get the chance!

It’s always good to get behind-the-scenes commentary from developers; you can learn some cool stuff listening to them, when they’re willing to talk. 8 members of the Halo dev team talked last fall – they made 4 interviews for the ‘Making Of Halo’ DVD. Two of those 4 have since been released on the web – in streaming .wmv format. (Fans have converted that to various other things for the first one—the O’Donnell/Staten interview that went up at Microsoft’s Halo site in September—but the end result was less than satisfying, and in any case, there were still three that were unwatchable in anything but .wmv, if at all.) For those interested in what these 8 Bungie employees had to say about the making of Halo, we’ve converted the movies to QuickTime 5 format, and put all four on the web. (Currently, the only mirror sites are Mythica.org and the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server… but we’d be thrilled to add your name to this list.) Visit our Team Interviews Mirrors list, and grab the ones that sound interesting! (Thanks again to Brian Towne and Psyrixx for the bandwidth…)

Okay, this better not start a flood of cheesy compositing… but we’re putting this up because 1) it’s been a bit slow, newswise (mostly my fault – real life intrudes), and 2) Mourneblade was very polite. 🙂 Check our Miscellaneous Art section for some… miscellaneous art.

When you overload the Halo physics engine, sometimes you elicit bizarre behavior from the other characters…

Friday’s Fan Fiction offerings:

• A Second Last Chance, chapters 1 and 2, by Torch99
• The Lost Spartan, chapter 5, by Spartan415
• Rise To Honor, part 1, by Shadow
• The monitor’s contest, part 1, by Guy French
• Spartan 5 Project, by Tyler Sivertsen

Check ’em out!

A pair of desktops dropped in recently – Justin put together something using the new shots in Bungie’s Captions section of Tru7h and Reconciliation, and HAZMOTO chose some other Bungie shots. You’ll find both images in our Wallpaper section.

Thomas Bottrill writes to say that he’s putting together an interview with Randall Glass, of Warthog antics fame, and is accepting fan questions at interviews@goweb.deep-ice.com. Got a burning need to know? Write!

As many, many people have pointed out, we’re way behind in processing submissions to the Gameplay Tricks page and the One-Shots section. Well, there are still almost 2 dozen tricks in the queue… but the One-Shots queue is now empty. 17 new images are available for your perusal. Because of the horribly long lead time on some of these, the original submission dates have been added to the images themselves. (To see it, you have to actually look at the picture. the ‘Submitted’ line on the main One-Shots page refers to the upload date.) Enjoy! (If you submitted an image, and it’s not in this batch, it’s probably because someone else already submitted something similar – look around for it. If you think we made a mistake, send us email – but please, DON’T resubmit the image (unless we ask you to). Thanks!)

XXL shirts, Halo soundtracks, and more stock of popular items… the Bungie Store has been upgraded! (Thanks to evenpar123 for the heads-up.)

Poll smash – Mac Gamer asks, “What would you like to see come to the Mac?” Halo is currently leading, with 7 of the 31 votes… see if you can keep it that way! (Thanks to Elbert Wall for the heads-up.)