Microsoft’s Japanese Xbox site has a new Halo trailer (Windows Media Player format, High Bandwidth only). Nothing new for seasoned Halo movie watchers but some nice gameplay nevertheless. Warning: it may contain a spoiler for those who haven’t played Halo. Pax.

Apologies for the slow news service – major connectivity problems yesterday has led to quite a bit of cleanup today – not much time for Halo. However, this is big news: According to this MacWorld.uk article, a UK company has announced a DirectX solution for the Macintosh – which should make the porting of games (potentially even Halo, though maybe the timing is off) to the Mac a whole lot easier. Thanks to Miguel Chavez for the heads-up on our forum. Woohoo!

Three new Halo reviews, thanks to Blues News – StonedGamers.com (who didn’t summarize, so we’ve left them out of the Reviews Database, though they loved it), Ausbox.net (they loved it), and Gamers Xtreme (they loved it). Running tally: 115 reviews (plus 2 unranked), average 94.9%.

Quick update on the eBayed Halo shirt mentioned yesterday: It’s up to $41 right now, and we’re still 2 and a half days from the end of the auction! PCDestroyer says, “Bungie must not want to make money hand over fist…” Heh. (These shirts will likely be half that price, or less, when the Bungie Store finally reopens.)

Today’s Fan Fiction installment consists of new chapters to existing series:

• Aftermath, part 5, by Alex Cross
• The Hell Of War, part 6, by Jaywhit10
• The Renegade Marines, part 12, by Shadow

That empties the ff queue… for probably about 15 minutes.

Rather an odd size for a desktop image… but that’s what he’s calling it. 🙂 Germain Couët has created another mural image – this time of a battlescene during the day, in the snow. You’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.

Team Overkill has created a pair of images based on the designs on the multiplayer flags in Halo – you can see the originals in this screenshot, and find TO’s representations in our Miscellaneous Art section.

This came in yesterday – but yesterday was insane. (Heck, the whole WEEK’s been insane…) Mark Mendenhall, the guy behind Hurricane Halo, put together a little warning video, called ‘If Halo Were Sponsored by Ford…’ It’s been crunched down to a puny 3.5 mb, so I’ve tossed it up into mythica.org’s nearly unlimited fountain of bandwidth – if anyone wants to mirror it, we’d be happy to announce it. Sure to bring a smile to your face… unless you own Ford stock. Update: Alan Wu sends word that he’s mirrored the film, along with a re-encoded version in .wmv format (1.7 mb), at Project MJOLNIR.

The current Fan Fiction crop:

• Ode of Ends, by Jehkoh
• Halo: Mercy, Chapter 1, by ssj9000chilango
• Operation False Prophets, Chapter Eight, by Ian Barnes
• Roughneck Two-Zero, Chapter Five, by Anthony Coronado

Go get ’em!

Ack! We received a pretty cool art submission this weekend, but time was so crazy, we forgot to add it! You can find ImmortalPain‘s elite in our Miscellaneous Art section.

The Marathon eBay page maintainer has noticed a Halo t-shirt for sale – someone got one at a lanfest, and never wore it. 3 days left in the auction – current price is $6.50. If you just can’t wait until the Store opens… get to bidding!

Thanks to Veebs, who has put up pdf versions of both the Marty O’Donnell talk (4.4 mb) and the Griesemer/Butcher talk (473 kb) for download. (Some of the notes for the Halo AI talk have been cut off… but mostly the entire thing is quite readable.) Appleicious has done the same – the O’Donnell talk is 11.3 mb, the Griesemer/Butcher talk is 5 mb. (I haven’t been able to download these two yet.)

The information included in the GDC proceedings was so intriguing that we’re making it available in a more accessible format – the PowerPoint presentations have been converted to straight HTML. The Jaime Griesemer/Chris Butcher talk on Halo’s AI is available now – Marty O’Donnell’s talk will be available tomorrow. The notes make for FASCINATING reading.

The Game Developers Conference proceedings are now posted – you can find them on this page. There are two talks of interest to Halo fans – Jaime Griesemer and Chris Butcher talked about Halo’s AI (PowerPoint format, 14.2 mb), and Marty O’Donnell talked about Halo’s music (in PowerPoint format, 3 mb, or MS Word format, 44K). A wealth of information in both talks! Worth some serious discussion on our forum… (Thanks to Jaime Griesemer for the heads-up.)

Ouch. Three german Halo sites are now offline:

• Halo Forum
• HaloXperience
• AreaHalo

We’ve adjusted our Links page accordingly. Thanks to Martin Spitzenberg for the heads-up.

Interesting find by Vector40 – Apparently, a site called ‘fanfiction.net’ has a growing collection (28, as of right now) of Halo Fan Fiction pieces… with very little overlap (one article, at first glance) with our collection. I wonder if that means the submission rate will slow down here? Not anytime soon, I’d guess – here’s the latest batch:

• Effusion Chapter 4, by Tursas
• The Renegade Marines Part XI, by Shadow
• Aftermath Part 4, by Alex Cross
• Legacy of Cillian and Journals of Diego, by Jehkoh

Read ’em through… don’t worry, there’ll be more! Nasty Notice: DOH! Careless me, I didn’t even pay attention to the fact that one of the stories I uploaded this morning was, in fact, a complete plagiarization (is that a word? It was a total ripoff) of another story found right here – Tyler Sivertsen’s ‘Through the Eyes of a Marine’ was a word-for-word transcription of Jaywhit10’s ‘The Hell of War Through the Eyes of a Marine‘. I’ve pulled the offending story, and I apologize to Jaywhit10 for not catching this sooner. Plagiarism sucks.

Pfhoenix has created a Halo sound scheme for Windows – you can read about it here. (The individual files are all in .wav format, so Mac users can easily hear what’s available.) Take a look!

First Storm Singer, now Trey Ikon… you gotta love this stuff. These will be added to the Miscellaneous Art section as soon as the artists believe they’re ready.

Things to do when you’re bored….

Quick note, on this most hectic of all weekends: Narcogen, of Rampancy.net, points out that Blackstar Productions is now hosting its own movies (‘Halo: The Movie’ and the Halo Movie Teaser). Check ’em out for more details! (We’ve added these to the ‘Halo: The Movie’ mirrors list – we still need to compile a mirrors list for the teaser – and have removed the R.net mirrors. The updated Movies page, containing all movies released in the past several months, should be online sometime this weekend… hopefully.)