Heh – Aaron Suhr made a short movie showing a pretty nifty way of killing a Banshee. I’ve never had that sort of luck…

Hibiki points out that the Counter-Strike skin that Strykerwolf has been working on is now finished, and posted at Polycount. Go check it out – if you play C-S, you MUST get this skin!

Kaworu Nagisa submits a gorgeous pair of images for use as wallpaper – they’re actually a bit small for my desktop, but they’re both really nicely done. Check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

Some of you might remember a site called ‘The Online Universe‘ – it disappeared from the Halo scene last summer sometime. It’s back, renamed as The Gaming Universe, and there’s a new Halo Question of the Week – stop by and make your opinion known.

Matt Soell put a note up at the Tru7h and Reconciliation site to let everyone know that the Robert McLees interview is still going – it hasn’t been forgotten. Should be posted sometime next week… at which point they’ll be taking questions for ANOTHER Bungie employee. If you have a special Bungie dude or dudette you’d like to hear from, message Matt. (This was posted last night, but we somehow missed it, even though we noticed the new Halo content.)

Whoa. Metafire managed to get into the second Pelican on Assault on the Control Room (the one that flies over the bridge) – and he took some pics. Oops – guess Bungie should have renumbered one of those…

dyoung92 submits Part 1 of his ‘Halo 2 Story’, which picks up where the game leaves off. (Don’t read this if you haven’t finished yet.) Check it out in our Fan Fiction section!

Aaron Suhr stops by our forum to point out that he’s upped his ‘ultimate vehicle collection’ by several – he’s added another 7 shades, and one more ghost (albeit a broken one). There’s a new movie which shows off the collection better. The time this guy has… we’ve updated his Gameplay Tricks page with the new info. (This info is also available on Aaron’s mac.com page.)

An old friend returns… and so does the MC, in Gasmask’s last segment of the Strange Tale saga. Check it out in our Fan Fiction section!

Doum and Pat, a pair of Halo fanatics from Quebec, have made a series of movies to show how to get down to the bottom off the first bridge of Assault on the Control Room – it requires some tricky timing in coop mode. The films were encoded with DivX 4 – I found that they were viewable on a Mac with the newest DivX decoder (the Windows decoder has never been a problem). Quality is somewhat low (it was filmed off a TV screen), but you can certainly see what you need to be doing. Movies are hosted on Doum’s server.

• Part 1 (2.83 MB) – how to get under the bridge
• Part 2 (2.06 MB) – how to get on the edge near the ground
• Part 3 (4.28 MB) – where to go down
• Part 4 (3.16 MB) – how to go down

Using this trick, you avoid triggering any baddies – you’ll be traveling through a totally unpopulated level. You’ll need to use the Banshee on the ground to head back up to the bridge, since the door at the bottom is locked. Nice job, guys!

The Gameplay Tricks are pouring in… and the collection was getting pretty hard to navigate. We’ve made it a bit neater, hopefully easier to find what you’re looking for… and we’ve added three new collections. (All are mirrors of the creators’ collections elsewhere… but we’re hoping this becomes the central repository for this sort of thing – it makes it much easier to compare techniques if you don’t have to hunt all over the net.) You might notice, as well, the link to the One-Shots page… this, hopefully, is coming soon. Thanks to Cal and Aaron Suhr for this evening’s submissions – go check ’em out!

Massive new content to Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site: two new Gallery sections (one of which was seen last week, in the Marcus Lehto article), the first cutscene, and some way-cool concept art. Check it out!

A sniper battles it out against unpleasant odds in carrim’s ‘I am Sniper‘, newly added to our Fan Fiction section. Take a look!

With the huge influx of new tricks footage and pictures comes a new breed of website – the Gameplay Tricks and Tips collections. Currently, there are two that we know of (well, three, but one’s not ready for prime time yet) – if you know of more, we’d love to hear about it! In the meantime, check our Links page for the existing collections.

Whoa! Aaron Suhr has put together the ‘ultimate vehicle collection’… check out ‘Master Chief’s Quality Used War Machines‘. 12 Ghosts, 2 Banshees, 1 Wraith, a Warthog, and a Scorpion… plus 13 Shades. (Don’t even ASK him how long it took.) Pics, plus a 5 meg flyover ‘test drive’, can be found on this page. This can be beaten… there are vehicles missing. Can YOU top it?

French site XboxManiac has posted a movie from a Xbox Diagnostic CD that is used to test hardware. At the beginning you see quite a bit of Halo footage. Check it out (Windows Media Player plugin/player required). Pax.

Vector40 bursts back on the Fan Fiction scene, with a different sort of story. ‘What Drives Us‘ is a tale of love and betrayal, courage and vengeance. It’s pretty good. Read it in our Fan Fiction section.

Halo Online has put up a point/counterpoint discussion of their favorite levels – up tonight, Silent Cartographer vs. Two Betrayals. You’ll have to stop by to see who wins…

Woohoo! mmemesis goes on a posting spree at the Halo Story page; more than enough to chew on, for now! In addition, Ape Man is back – seems he (or more precisely, his internet connection) was the victim of an overzealous backhoe operator… but he’s back up and running now, so we should see some new material soon. (Anyone jonesin’ for those Level transcripts yet?)

Dunno about the rest of you, but for me, the Reviews page was beginning to get unwieldy; too many entries to load smoothly. Accordingly, it’s been redesigned; it now shows 20 reviews at a time, and you can choose to see only the one you’re interested in. Now back to the Gameplay pages…