Several days ago, one of the more impressive feats of mass displacement was demonstrated on our forum. It’s now found a home on our Tricks page – a tribute to the power of the plasma grenade (and some simply astounding timing). More to come tomorrow…

Hehe – Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site has been updated – the Gallery contains clips from 6 different foreign-language builds of Halo (well, 5 plus English, for comparison), as well as new Storyboards of the final scene. (The quality of the translations seems to vary pretty widely – or maybe it’s the voice acting; some seem very much in character, while others…) Check ’em out!

Velker submits the first part of his ‘Halo 2’ saga, picking up not too far after Halo leaves off. Spoilers, of course, abound – read this only if you’ve played the game. You’ll find it (and plenty of other fun stuff) in our Fan Fiction section.

Apologies for the delays in updating the Tricks page – there was some recoding necessary in order to allow multiple credit for specific tricks. That’s all finished, now, and the newest entry is up – it shows (with a series of films, from a collection of sources) a pretty interesting glitch in Halo, and maybe suggests some interesting ways to exploit this. Thanks to everyone’s patience… enjoy Frozen Stuff! (Spoiler warning should be unnecessary for this section, but I’ve screwed up recently, so…)

Apologies to those few of you waiting on Halo SETI Team stats this week – they were collected this morning, but the SETI@home team once again changed the page format, invalidating all the automatic processing scripts here. We’ll get ’em posted sometime, today, or maybe tomorrow; they’ll still be Monday morning’s stats, though.

Quick note – Rampancy.net, a long-time Bungie fansite, has not (as it might seem) died recently – they’re just having DNS troubles. The servers are fine, and can be reached directly via their IP addresses:

• Web: http://161.58.233.37/rampancy/drupal-cvs/
• Hotline: hotline://161.58.233.37

They’re doing their best to fix the problems – good luck to them! (This message is being crossposted to a number of relevant b.org pages, in the hopes of hitting all interested parties.)

Yesterday, the Eleet Ops Faction released an image which we added to our One-Shots section – within hours, folks wanted to know “how?” The team sent along a 7.1 mb MPEG showing how the descent happened… and Brian Towne, of mythica.org, has once again stepped into the breach and provided a home for this. (Of course, additional mirrors are always welcome.) This isn’t a must-download; there’s no sound, and the footage is really interesting only to those fanatics bent on exploring every inch of Halo’s surfaces… but for that subgroup of our readers, a heartfelt thanks to Brian is due!

In the latest edition of GameSpot’s GameSpotting, Senior Editor Amer Ajami ponders Halo and its refined nature. Check it out here. (Hey, he even links to our Warthog jump mirror – Cool!) Pax.

The cleanout of our backlogged submissions continues. 6 new shots have been added to the One-Shots page; everything from a smiling Jackal to a view from the top of… well, you’ll have to look for yourself. Check ’em all out right here! More stuff coming soon, hopefully.

Gholsbane has sent along a scan of a promotional insert for Edge Magazine, included in other magazines as a teaser. This one happens to contain Edge’s 10/10 Halo review from issue 104, 3 months back. We’ve added the insert to our Press Scans database – go see why Edge gave Halo a score shared by only 3 other games in over 100 issues! Warning: Page 4 contains a spoiler-class picture.

We don’t normally do this, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get to this person – if Casey, aka the Mad Valet, could drop us a line about the movie you uploaded a week or two ago, we’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

Two new desktop images for your perusing pleasure: ZMAN sends in a white-themed Halo image, and Germain Couët drops off another one of his very attractive Halo murals. (You’ll need a pretty massive monitor to appreciate this…) Check ’em out in our Wallpaper section!

Whew! 1600 forum posts and two extra-heavy titanium-alloy drillbits (needed to remove the lock from the command center here at HBO Central, since Count Zero wouldn’t open it voluntarily) later, I’m finally caught up with older material. We’ll start with the easy stuff; there are a couple of Halo websites to inform you of. Halo Norge is a general Norwegian Halo site (it’s pretty annoying to see scans I created myself with someone else’s imprint on them, but hey…), and iBonk.com is a very nicely done Halo Movies site, containing clips of everything from funny sequences to tutorial-type demos. (iBonk isn’t new, exactly – but we’ve neglected to bring it to our readers’ attentions before now.) These have been added to our Links list. Wallpaper update coming soon.

I’ve just received word that Louis Wu is back from his vacation. That means that all the content I’ve been too lazy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunable to post will go up pretty soon, probably as soon as Louis gets Security to break into the control room and remove me. Oh well, I was starting to miss that basement anyway…

The Hotline section of the beleagured Psyjnir Complex is back up, bringing with it all the Halo content mirrors hosted there. Thanks to Ar-Isildur for the good news.

The Halo content mirror at Mythica.org has returned, bringing with it new hosting for Warthog Jump, What Goes Up, HILTSPALTH, and Chaos on the Ring. Thanks for the bandwidth!

At last, at long last, Frogblast has found the elusive Halo Hippo! Matt has confirmed that the hippo theory posted here is the genuine item. Extremely lethal indeed…

A new Halo video has surfaced, named Chaos on the Ring, featuring “everything from warthog launching to synchronized grenade tossing”. It’s in WMV format, so I can’t check it out myself, but it’s got stuntmaster Randy Glass’s stamp of approval. Looks like we could use some more mirrors…

John discovers the Covenant taste for psychedelia in the next part of Ian Barnes‘ Operation: False Prophets, entitled If I had Pink Hallways, I’d Make Somebody Pay.