Gh?lsbane found a couple of shots of a Star Wars ‘Shadow Droid’ that looks somewhat like a Banshee – check out these views:

• concept view (42k)
• schematic (92k)

Even the names of the weapons are familiar…

Ryan sends in the Part II: Arrival of Well Enough Alone, a pre-Halo saga involving the characters you know and love from the game. Check it out in our Fan Fiction section.

Two new (and very cool) bits of artwork came in recently – bikeman704 sent in a screenshot of a Halo Pelican, built in Worldcraft… and StormSinger sent along a slick rendering of the sniper rifle ammo. Check ’em both out in our Miscellaneous Art section! (More news coming soon – been afk for the last 18 hours or so…)

Movie Mania: two new warthog jumpin’ movies for you. First up is another offering from Dan Chosich, creator of the Halo Montage vid. This one is also in .wmv format, and weighs in at 11.6 mb. It’s called ‘Blood Gulch Scenes’… and it’s 4 and a half minutes of, well, carnage from Blood Gulch. 🙂 You can grab it at The Repertory or Mythica.org. The second movie was uploaded by Destr0yer, and quality is a little lacking. (It was compressed originally with the Indeo5 codec – I switched over to Sorenson3, which reduced the filesize by a factor of 4, but couldn’t do anything about the ORIGINAL quality.) This one can be grabbed at The Repertory. (It’s 2:23 long, and weighs in at 8.7 mb, in QT5 format.)

Three new Fan Fiction entries – Halo 2: The Forerunner Chronicle Part VI, from Velker, Halo: Protect the Homestead Chapters 2/3, from Steven Crowley, and The Renegade Marines Part VIII – The Return to Memories, by Shadow. Woohoo!

Thanks to craZy, who (in answer to my plea for pictures), sent in a few screenshots of the Halo maps for Starcraft that have been coming in recently. Now you can see images and grab the maps in one convenient location!

Heh – gotta love this:

Those who still think we’re lying about PC/Mac Halo should get out your condiments/seasonings of choice, buy some nice china and silverware, and do whatever else you do when you’re getting ready to eat your words.

Don’t believe Matt, though – he just works for Bungie. Everybody knows that Bungie has no real say over whether PC/Mac Halo ever gets published – that’s a Microsoft-only decision. (For the sarcasm-impaired, that last line was rather full of it – in more senses than one.)

Apologies for the delay – some of these have been in the queue for a week – but the Gameplay Tricks page now has 5 new entries – some pretty incredible stuff in there! Check it out. Update: Total new tricks for the day has been bumped to 6 – I’d forgotten one! Ouch.

Took a LONG time (one of these pictures is a week and a half old), but the One-Shots page finally gets an update (and an upgrade). 6 new pics… and some new searching and sorting features to go along with them. Check it out!

The Halo-to-Starcraft conversions continue – Alan Wu sends along Arrival, based on the first part of the Halo mission. (All we need now are in-game screenshots, for those of us without Starcraft…)

Cesar Berardini, of Team Xbox, has put up a review of the X VGA Box (an Xbox-to-VGA solution). If you’ve been dying to play Halo on your computer screen… check this out.

Having trouble dealing with huge quantities of Flood on the higher difficulty settings? protexts suggests trying ‘Bait, Retreat, Attack’ in this forum post. (Yes, once there’s a Gameplay Tips section, this’ll go there.)

PCDestroyer has come up with some League Play rules/guidelines that might be useful if you’re organizing large groups for Halo. It’s available as a 56k Word document, and covers everything from game types to schedules. Check it out!

Mirror, mirror, on the net… halo-game.com (in France) and That Weasel Television (in the US) have both stepped up to provide Hogball mirrors – and That Weasel also created a much smaller version, for those on slower connections – screensize is 160×120, but filesize is only 6 megs. Grab ’em while they’re hot! Update: Two more mirrors: Mr. Zarquon and The Repertory both house this puppy now.

Play Ball!… Hogball, that is. javacool and benjammin’ have created a new multiplayer gametype… and the 20 mb, 3 and a half minute movie they created to show it off is simply hilarious. Check it out! (Sympathy goes out to banjammin’… who seemed to die a LOT.) The website link contains both the movie and a FAQ about how to play. (Movie mirrors, of course, are always welcome.)

Dug up another 17 Halo reviews around the net, and have added them to the Reviews database. Total is now 107 – the average score still hovers around 95%.

Draikin sends in a nice desktop image based on the OXM mural in the January issue (with a few additions…). Check it out in our Wallpaper section.

Whoa.

Thanks to Nick Rolfe, who sent along this link from the European Leisure Software Publishers Association – for the week ending 16th March 2002, Halo was second in total software sales of ALL games, in ALL formats; this is astounding, given that it was released 2 days before the week ended. Not too shabby!

Mr. Zarquon points out that his Halo Movie Mirror page has been updated with much of the new Halo material out there – if you’re having trouble with some of these movies, spread the download weath!