A couple of days ago, This Side Up mentioned on our forum that he’d begun work on some Halo multiplayer map designs. He’s turned them over to us, and we’ve put them up for you to look at – there’s no guarantee anyone can ever make them… but it’s an intriguing start.

Goodness, almost forgot… the Halo Story page got a couple of updates recently! (mnemesis did a bang-up job covering the recent rash of Halo theories which flooded our forum…) Check it out, and add your own!

Miscellaneous, yes. Art? Dunno.

A surprising number of gameplay tricks remain in the queue (some simply because they’re complicated enough that documentation is taking longer than expected)… but there are 4 new ones (5, if you count xbill’s Elite Speech trick posted earlier today) in the Tricks section. Take a look!

Threebrain.com has a Halo-related cartoon today – if you’re reading this after the 12th, jump back to April 12, 2002. I’ve felt like that… Thanks to Lawrence Peterson for the heads-up.

Heh – just got word from Joe Broni that the beans on elite ‘speech’ were spilled by Chris Butcher during the talk he gave at the Game Developers Conference last month – a week before Jester noticed the backwards speech. Hard to know WHO to give credit to! 🙂

Two new Halo reviews have popped up – Battle-Fields Network, in the UK, liked it except for lack of bots and the repetitive nature of some of the architecture, and DVD Plaza, in Australia, who had pretty much the same complaints. We’ve added the Battle-Fields review to our Reviews Database… but due to the lack of an overall numeric score for the DVD Plaza review, we can’t do the same there. (Blame me for building an inflexible database.)

Your daily Fan Fiction collection:

• The Hell of War, Part 5, by Jaywhit10
• Well Enough Alone, Part 4, by Ryan
• Shadow and Iroquois, by Jehkoh
• The Saga Continues, Chapter 3, by Edward Parker

What are you waiting for?

TeamXbox has put up an article covering the shindig thrown this week by Microsoft to celebrate the passing of the million-copies-sold milestone for Halo. (Wow, that was too long.) Nice pics, and it sounds like it was a good time! Fan-submitted movies, like Randy Glass’ Warthog Jump, were shown to the appreciative crowd… congrats, guys, for blowing away the devs!

StormSinger is working on a new model for… well, for something. Halo-related, it seems. Maybe. Anyway, it’s pretty interesting, and the thread it spawned is a great read.

Whoa. Major update at Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site. New Screenshots (12 of ’em, not a mediocre one in the bunch – but beware spoilers in at least one), and new Concept Art (early Hunters and guns). Thanks to Tarrsk for the speedy heads-up!

Yesterday, xbill dropped a bombshell on our forum – he pointed out (with proof) where the Elite voices in Halo came from. Recently, his host pulled the page – apparently, free hosts don’t like it when you’re too popular… so we’ve done what we don’t usually do, and jumped a trick to the front of the queue. His EliteSpeak trick has been posted in the Gameplay Tricks section – don’t worry, all the waiting tricks are still there, we didn’t lose ’em. Gettin’ there…

Jay Weinland stepped into the discussion about Elite speech on our forum with a pretty interesting description of how the whole process came about. Give it a read!

Just a quick heads-up… The Psyjnir Complex is back online. (No new content – yet… but the name resolves again, and the Hotline server is accessible again.)

Wow. That’s all I have to say. Update: Credit where credit is due: Jester asked this, then this, a couple of weeks ago. Thanks, Psyrixx.

That Weasel has put up mirrors of Hurricane Halo in two different formats (soon to be 3): the original, plus a re-encoded .wmv file (for Windows Media Player 8, weighing in at 11.6 mb) have been added. (A half-size QT5 version is apparently coming.) You can find the links on That Weasel Television’s mirror page. (We’ve added the links, gratefully, to our mirror list.) Update: Goodness, it’s .wmv night. Alan Wu has also re-encoded Hurricane Halo into .wmv format (this one is compatible with v7, and weighs in at 10.9 mb), and has added this to his Project MJOLNIR site. (He’s also put up both versions of the Rocket Dance movie.) We’ve updated all relevant mirror lists. Update 2: Mr. Zarquon has also mirrored Hurricane Halo, as well as the large versions of ‘Halo: The Movie‘ and the Rocket Dance movie. Woohoo!

There’s a huge backlog of tricks (again) – but rather than simply making them LATER, I’m gonna put up the two I formatted today, and get to some more tomorrow. Check out the Gameplay Tricks page for the latest – some interesting views from INSIDE various Pelicans… and some amazing jump work. More on the way!

xbox.com has posted a small interview with Max Hoberman, our friendly neighbourhood Online Guy. Here’s a quote:

S: What were some of the greatest challenges to overcome during production?

MH: Two things come to mind. First, switching from the PC to the Xbox necessitated a huge change in the direction we were going with Halo. Traditionally we implement the multiplayer game first, then single player. When we started developing on the Xbox we changed our primary focus to single player. Fortunately the team did a great job, and the multiplayer implementation didn’t suffer too much. Second, getting the interface right just the controls, but the way information is delivered to the player. If we do the job well, you’ll barely notice the user interface at all if we blow it, it’s something everyone complains about.

Go here for the full interview. Pax.

The daily dose of Fan Fiction:

• Goin’ To War!, by Slith
• Combat Revolved, Chapter 2, by eL diAbLo
• Project: Rebirth, by John Parker
• The Saga Continues: Halo 2 Chapter 2, by Edward Parker
• The Long Ride Home part 2, by Joshua Barreto

If this ever slows up, I can get back to formatting Gameplay Tricks…

Dolbex took some artwork from the Truth and Reconciliation website, played with it a bit, and turned out this nice desktop for our Wallpaper collection. Take a look…