For those who didn’t notice it, the Halo Story page got a massive speculation infusion yesterday – mnemesis processed a goodly number (though nowhere near all) of the backlogged ravings – erm, ideas you people have been sending in. Check it out! While you’re there… you might notice that the Level Transcripts section is nearly complete – great thanks to Ape Man and Åstro for sending in 3 of the last 4 levels (the Maw should be coming soon)! Been a long time… but they’re there now!

Heh – forum regular Frogblast gets a mention at Bungie.net – the Soffish theme for 7th Column fansites has gone live ahead of schedule, because of him. (Remember – if the link leads you to a message about a database wipe, first hit reload to see the REAL message, then send Yeroen a note to fix this. 🙂 ) Thanks to brandontyler for the heads-up!

A great big shout-out to Vector40, who has created The Repertory (“because Bandwidth is Expensiveâ„¢”), a Halo movie site. Currently, it mirrors a few very popular films, as well as being the only source for the videos that go along with Doum and Pat’s AotCR trick (their server pulled the vids some time ago). We luv ya, Vec. 🙂 (Folks should realize that without kind souls like Vector40, and Brian Towne of Mythica.org, and B-Sharp of Omnicon, and many others… you might not be seeing much of the cool footage people are creating. Because bandwidth IS expensive… and nobody’s making money from this stuff.)

Velker turns in Part II of his Halo 2 tale… again, don’t read this if you haven’t played the game. You’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section (or you can read both parts together).

Three more cool feats for you – from two of the most productive teams around. Metafire (with able direction from Legolas) gets down to the bottom of the second Shaft on Silent Cartographer; Eleet Ops Faction rides a pelican to its final resting place, and Metafire (again) surfs a sentinel outside the crashed Pillar of Autumn. Check ’em out in our Gameplay Tricks section!

Slowly but surely… the Tricks backlog is clearing away. Two more go up for your perusal – Johnnycab & MuFF DaDDy investigate an interesting physics conundrum, and Metafire (aka Frogblast) checks out some energy beams. Take a look!

Scripts have been overhauled (again), and the latest stats for the Halo SETI Marines have been posted. The team continues to add new members… but the total number of CONTRIBUTING members stays roughly constant. Who’s slacking? (Not Int_21, that’s for sure…)

Another online enabler has come on the scene – the Xbox Connector is an alternative to the GameSpy Tunnel software or the XboxGateway software. Running on any Win32 platform, it requires no other software to operate. Initial reports suggest that with fast connections, 4-box games are quite playable – something not really true with the Tunnel. It’s still in beta – but give it a try and let us know what you find!

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!