Pacey Dre writes to let us know that HQ Halo isn’t down for good… just offline until the bandwidth excession has passed. (He’s guessing 2 or 3 days.)

Bonk has put up a very nice little QuickTime VR movie (200k) of the top of Silent Cartographer… makes me want to build a house up there. (I wonder how much that island land is going for…?)

Updates can be hard on family days… but here are three new Fan Fiction items for you – the first part of Banserki’s Journal (A View From the Grunt), Chapter 5 of The Tides of War, and Chapter 1 of Effusion. Go to it!

Major updates at Bungie’s websites: Truth and Reconciliation’s Legendary Walkthrough has gotten a second chapter (with some GORGEOUS screenshots, thanks to Mordia), and the Seventh Column has a monster interview with bungie.org’s own Miguel Chavez, Bungie’s Number One Fan. Check ’em out!

It hasn’t been without roadblocks, but the Maw 700 has finally come to a successful conclusion. Contest 2, in which participants needed to get from one end of the Maw Run to the other with Maximum Style, closed 27 hours ago – but instead of a few screenshots (and a well-defined goal, as Contest 1 had with its time target), the judges had to get hold of 4 separate 15-megabyte files (a feat in itself), rate them on content and composition, and come to a consensus on the conclusions – something that took a bit longer than we’d anticipated. Then, we had to make sure the files were hosted, so that visitors could download and view them for themselves – major thanks go out to Brian Towne, of mythica.org, and Vector40, of The Repertory, for handling this part. All our ducks are finally lined up now, though, so stop by the Maw 700 Contest 2 page for all the details!

Weekly Review has posted his HBO Weekly Review – and with the exception of the quotes of mine that he took (embarrassingly) out of context, it’s a fantastic summary of the week. (It’s getting rather long, though – I thought summaries were supposed to be EASY to read? Maybe there’s just so much goodness that happens on our forum that there wasn’t anything he could have left out… well, he could have left out those Wu quotes, that’s for sure.) Go read it – it’ll save you time. (There were 1334 posts added in the past week – think of what he’s saving you!)

The 2002 Game Developers Conference ends tomorrow (when Bungie’s Jaime Griesemer and Chris Butcher will be giving a presentation on Halo’s AI, and Marty O’Donnell will be talking about Halo’s audio production), but last night, the Game Developers Choice Awards were given out, and Halo won one of the three categories for which it was nominated. Congratulations to Marty O’Donnell and the sound team for winning the Excellence in Audio award, beating out Undying, MGS2, Frequency, and Rogue Squadron II. (Grand Theft Auto III took Game of the Year, and Black and White took the Excellence in Programming award, rounding out the other two categories for which Halo was nominated.) Thanks to Pallor for the heads-up.

Lophan passed along an interesting URL from the New York Times website (free registration required) – ‘Grinding Terror or Grand Adventure – Choose Your War‘. It compares Operation: Flashpoint to Halo, using these two games as representatives of opposing genres of war simulators:

But if Flashpoint gives players the kind of ground-level view of war offered in films like “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Steel Helmet,” Halo is more reminiscent of movies made during World War II, which depicted war as a noble adventure fought by fearless, tough-as-nails soldiers.

The author concludes that Halo probably won’t do a good job preparing soldiers to fight:

In spite of the tedious stretches, Halo is an exciting game and makes war look like so much fun that you might want to run out and enlist. But war is not like that. When Marine recruits whose only experience of war is playing games like Halo sit down to play the military version of Operation Flashpoint, they may be in for a surprise.

I suppose, if the goal of Halo was to make players ready to fight in the real world, I’d understand the point of this article…

Charles Clifford points out an article on Gamespy that explains the Gamer’s Logik confusion yesterday – the product they were talking about was Mech Assault, a new third-person combat game from Microsoft due out in November. It’s not based on the Halo engine, and it doesn’t seem to have a story-based concept behind it:

Gitelman [project leader for the game] excitedly adds, “This game is about shooting shit and blowing it up.”

While we here at HBO have absolutely nothing against those goals… we’re hoping Phoenix goes a bit deeper.

Whoa – a new fad has started. Bezerk Fury follows the lead of Jonathon Cairns, and creates another Starcraft map – this time of Sidewinder. (It’s 40k.) The question is… can anyone do the SOLO levels? 🙂

And the doors are officially… Closed. The Second Contest of the Maw 700 is now over, but for the judging… we’ll be poring over the entries this evening, and will announce the winner either later tonight or tomorrow. We have a total of three entries (we probably would have had four, had it not been for Frogblast’s injury), and I can tell you already, I like ’em all. 🙂

fAt1, of MPZ Halo, has put up his review of Halo – he was… rather enthusiastic. The review itself says that you shouldn’t expect a numerical score… but I pushed him; he gave it a 10.5/10. We’ve added it to the Reviews database. (Expect a rather large set of additions to the database sometime soon.)

Halo action figures in the future? Matt Soell dropped by to point out that while the most recent attempt in this field failed, Doug Zartman (formerly known as the Voice of Bob, currently a MS employee) is working on finding another partner for this endeavor. Woohoo – plush Grunt dolls you can feed to your dog!

Ran across another Halo review – Xen Gamers gave it an A, a few weeks ago. We’ve added it to the Reviews database.

Nico D., of Game-presse.de, sends word that Warthog jumping was so much fun, he had to make his own Warthog Jump tribute movie. It’s in .wmv format, 4:30 long, and weighs in at 7.4 mb. Take a look!

Goodness. Alan Wu sent in a map, created by friend Jonathon Cairns, of Blood Gulch in Starcraft format. If you play Starcraft, snag this! (There are a few easter eggs, so hunt around.) It’s 80k, zipped.

Black_Jackal sends in Chapter 1 of his ‘After Halo‘ story – you’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section.

Before this gets out of hand… Korps sent in this link to a page at Gamer’s Logik, purporting to contain information about the upcoming Bungie game code-named Phoenix. Now, I don’t claim to be completely ‘in the know’, but I did get the chance to walk through the Phoenix development room back in January of this year… and if the information on that page is accurate, Bungie threw out EVERYTHING they were working on just 2 months ago. (For those of you who have trouble with indirect statements: what I saw 2 months ago bore ZERO resemblance to the product described in the page above.) Take this at face value – I’m not a Bungie employee, and I don’t have the inside scoop. Update: Seems Gamer’s Logik has confused Phoenix, a Bungie game in development, with a mech title that FASA Studios (another Microsoft-owned gaming house) is working on. More info on that title will be coming soon… but rest assured, it ain’t Phoenix. (It doesn’t even use the Halo engine.) Thanks to Jon Kimmich, Halo’s Product Planner, for the info.

Speaking of plots… the Halo Story Page got a MASSIVE update recently – the inbox has been cleared, for the first time in a long time. Mnemesis has retreated to his isolation tank to regenerate the brain cells lost in this endeavor – please read his work, so as to make the effort not in vain. (You might even learn something about the Halo story…)

The Halo plot hole defined by this quote from Truth and Reconciliation:

While the Covenant had us locked up in here, I overheard the guards talking about this ring world. They call it… “Halo.”

has been discussed extensively on our forum. (Why could Keyes understand what the guards were saying when the super-duper translator in our own suit can’t even do that?) However, Master Chief IV used this line to ask an even better question – why, if Keyes is just now learning what the Covenant call this ring, does the screen behind him on the bridge of the Pillar of Autumn ALSO call it ‘Halo’? (Yes, it’s just a game. Bungie makes few enough mistakes like this, though, that it’s worth pointing them out when they DO happen.)