Xcruiser turns in a Silent Cartographer-based wallpaper – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper collection. He’s willing to make other sizes, for those who want them.

Junkyard news: Vector40 writes to say that the Halo Weapons Guide has been updated with Strategy information for each of the weapons. It’s well-marked for spoiler info, so you don’t have to avoid the Weapons Guide if you’re avoiding spoilers. Additionally, Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews, the JY’s head honcho, writes to explain some of the slowness you might be experiencing there – it has nothing to do with an overloaded connection; it’s a runaway mySQL process (the database that handles all the back-end stuff). They’re working on it… but please be patient.

Major multiplayer tip for Sidewinder: This was discovered (apparently by accident) by Nemesis_007 – but I’ve made a film of it, to prove it actually works. 🙂 If you strafe sideways in a Ghost towards the grate where the invisibility and shield powerups are sitting, a well-timed dismount will actually get you pushed THROUGH the grate by the still-sliding vehicle. (Nemesis_007 says it works with the Warthog, as well, but it’s harder to time right.) Jump too early, you’ll get crushed like a bug. Jump too late, and you’ll exit the wrong side of the Ghost. Time it perfectly, though… and through you go. What’s more, the Ghost sits there, next to the grating… if you walk up to it (from the other side of the grate, mind you), you’ll get the ‘Press X to enter Ghost’ message, and pressing X will cause you to magically pass through the grate. CTF in Sidewinder just became a whole new ballgame. If you want to see this in action (and have QuickTime 5 installed on your computer), grab this short movie (750k), showing the pass-through in action (in both directions). Yowsers.

Ouch. Seems XboxGate ripped the Halo Legendary Ending (included on the last Official Xbox Magazine DVD) into RealPlayer format, and have posted it, in its entirety, on their site (5 mb). (Interestingly, the blurb with it says

“Do you think Halo is to hard in legendary? Do you still want to see the end movie? Well we made it possible.”

Yeah, sorta…) Remember, you won’t feel right about watching this unless you EARNED it… Update: Seems this scene (in its entirety, rather than just the critical difference filmed last month) has been available in .wmv format at Cybrfrk’n for a couple of weeks. It’s 10 megs, instead of five… but some people are allergic to RealMedia. Plus, it was recorded by the sitemaster, rather than ripped off a DVD. (If you check the front page of that site, you’ll notice a small .wmv showing a quick way to the top of Silent Cartographer, single-player, no explosives, as well.)

Merciless turned in a set of pics showing the progression of a jeep down below the Silent Cartographer level, to the map room itself. No, it’s not the first time it’s been done… but it’s the first time it’s been documented like this. (The images aren’t great, but you can tell what’s going on.) Check it out in our Gameplay Tricks section!

The Screenshots database has been updated with the 25 new shots that go along with the Legendary walkthrough of PoA – there are spoilers in here… but some of these shots are just amazing.

Whoa. No7orious has written a Legendary Walkthrough for the first level of the game, Pillar of Autumn… and Bungie liked it enough that they put it up at their Tru7h and Reconciliation site (along with 25 screenshots illustrating some of the finer points). Very nice! Check it out if you’re having your… um, head handed to you on a platter when trying to play through this level on Legendary. (And as Yeroen says in this news item, maybe this will start a trend!) Thanks to Acrappa, of Rampancy.net, for pointing this puppy out.

At long last, our Press Scans section comes online. Here you’ll find 40 print magazine articles, collected from a variety of countries over the past two and a half years. Larger articles are available for convenient one-shot downloads, or can be read page by page online. (Smaller articles are not bundled up.) Quality, in general, is pretty good, though a few are hard to read – use this resource as a way to see what’s been said about Halo in the past! (Translations of foreign-language articles, where available, are included.) You’ll find some treasures in here, as well – for example, the January 2002 article from the Official Xbox Magazine contains a full walkthrough of Halo… Feedback on useability is always welcomed – if there’s a feature you’d like to see implemented, drop us a note!

Jesper Nielsen, of the Danish Xbox site X-Byte, let us know of a review of Halo there. They liked it – 9/10, which Jesper says is very good – this site is pretty discerning. (We thank him also for the quote translation – there aren’t a lot of good Danish translators out there on the net…) We’ve added this to our Reviews database.

mnemesis went on a posting spree yesterday – the Halo Story page is a veritable hotbed of speculation. Check out the latest news… and add your OWN thoughts!

Call me lazy – or call it late. Noah “migraineboy” Brimhall said it just fine, though, so I’m just gonna quote him.

In the March 2002 issue of Wired magazine there is an interesting article on AI in games called “Wild Things” and in the article there are several mentions of Halo, including a great quote from Chris Butcher.

“One of the things that makes Halo’s AI interesting is the sense that the AI doesn’t cheat. It doesn’t regard you, the player, as anything special, nor does know special things about where you are,” explains Halo AI engineer Chris Butcher. “The NPCs all have their own unique knowledge model, which means that any given character in the world doesn’t know where the player is. All they know is where they last saw him.”

The article gives Halo a lot of credit for its very good AI and has a screen shot from the game also.

My copy hasn’t arrived yet – Guess I’ll be looking at this tomorrow. On the upside, I got a significant distance towards finishing the Press Scans section today – one more day of grunt work ought to do it… then it’s off to Gameplay Tips. (Yes, I know, Miscellaneous Resources is still empty, too… geez.)

MaxThndr‘s Chapter 4 of Halo II: The Ardan Landings has been submitted – it’s Part 3, due to the fact that I combined chapters 2 and 3 into a single part, but don’t be confused – you can always read the series en toto. The Fan Fiction section is nothing if not flexible!

You lose, you gain… Brian Towne had to bow out of the Warthog Jump mirroring – after well over 10,000 downloads (more than 200 gigs), the demand was still so high that it was saturating his (rather large) pipe. (He hasn’t removed any of the OTHER movies he’s mirroring – if you need any of them, they’re still there.) Jumping in to fill the gap is Bravehamster =PN=, a longtime community member – we’ve added bravehamster.com to the mirror list. Thanks, Brian, for all your help… and thanks, Mike, for jumping aboard the mirror train! Update: Vector40 tentatively throws his hat (and The Junkyard‘s pipe) into the ring – another mirror added. The entire mirror list thanks you, Vec. Another update: Firfin, of Halo Game (a French Halo site), has added the hi-res version, as well. Thanks, Firfin!

Another first – Getting completely OFF the map on the level Halo. Folks have gotten to the tops of the mountains in the Reunion Tour section (and even ALMOST to the top in the Flawless Cowboy section, though the jeep loses power before you peak, and drops back down)… but nobody’s documented getting OFF the map (into totally untextured areas) until now. Check out the pics in our Gameplay Tricks section.

Cal has turned in another series of pics – this time, he’s put 4 ghosts and two warthogs upstairs in a Sidewinder base. Pretty pictures (though less useful in multiplay than, say, filling a Blood Gulch base – there’s no flag to block up here) – and some interesting physics glitches when a jeep gets stuck in the ladder well. Check it out in our Gameplay Tricks section.

We’ve gotten requests a number of times for pointers to the symbols used in the difficulty screens at the start of Halo (most recently, this morning). We’d put this page up back in October… but the images are somewhat small. To make life easier for those attempting to use these symbols in clan websites or the like, we’ve extracted them from the difficulty screens, and combined them for easy access. You can find them here.

It’s Cortana Day at Tru7h and Reconciliation! Bungie has put up new storyboards (for a major Cortana scene), Cortana voice outtakes, and an interview with Jen Taylor, the voice of Cortana! (The interview will show you a glimpse of Matt Soell’s odder side… but it will also give you some good info on Jen, the Cinematics team (well, okay, that wasn’t so good), and an upcoming movie Jen stars in.) Check it out.

The Warthog jump movie got a mention (thanks, Tarrsk) on Penny Arcade, among other places… my guess is, demand is not going to die down any time soon. (And download numbers are rather high, according to a couple of mirror hosters…) With all that in mind, we want to thank Dukeman330 for adding another mirror, for both hi and lo-res versions of the vid. All the mirrors that we know of can be found on our mirror list – hopefully, if you haven’t gotten this yet, you can find it from one of these sites.

Rather than reword it badly, I’m just gonna shamelessly suck text from the AIAS site:

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) today announced the finalists for the 5th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. Halo: Combat Evolved for the Xbox, developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft, and ICO for the Playstation 2 (PS2), developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and published by Sony Computer Entertainment America, lead the field with finalist nods in 8 categories each, including nominations for Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year and Console Action/Adventure Game of the Year.

The 8 categories that Halo is a finalist in are: Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year, Console Action/Adventure Game of the Year, Innovation in Console Gaming, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering, Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering, and Outstanding Achievement in Game Design. (Interestingly enough, Halo wasn’t a finalist in any Sound or Story categories…) Looks like even the academics like this game! (Thanks to Gothmog for the heads-up.)

MaxThndr turns in Chapters II and III of Halo II: The Ardan Landings – again, spoiler warnings for those who haven’t played Halo yet. Check ’em out in the Fan Fiction section (or read the whole series at once).