Gamespot has put up their Best and Worst of 2001 awards… and Halo did pretty well. Best Shooter, Best Xbox Game, Number 3 in the Top 10 Video Games of 2001 (beaten by Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Grand Theft Auto III), and nominated for Best Sound. (Strangely, it wasn’t even in the running for Best Story or Best Graphics.) You can vote for yourself in their Reader’s Choice Ballot. Thanks to Razorback for the heads-up.

Doesn’t usually happen quite this quickly… but Gasmask has submitted Part 2 of his Journals of the Doomed series (Part 1 was posted 12 hours ago). You’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section…

Thanks to David Allan, who pointed out that the UK magazine ‘Computer and Video Games’ reviewed Halo in their January 2002 issue. They gave it a 9/10, and had nice things to say about gameplay:

Awesome in both single and multiplayer, this pushes console shooters to an all-new high and even gives the finest the PC can offer a run for it’s money.

But even more interesting than that was a small interview with Halo Product Manager Steve Fowler.

CVG: But what of online play?

SF: We have all sorts of aspirations of getting Halo, of some sort, online – whether that means this current Halo, a Halo 2, or some sort of additional disk we send out.

This review (and its accompanying interview) is not yet on CVG’s web site. Still, the info is tantalizing…

Deimosâ„¢ points out what happens when you take a Banshee where it shouldn’t go… and flip it. Yes, that guy’s on the wrong side of the glass.

In what might be the last fan fiction of the year, Gasmask sends in the Journals of the Doomed, an account of the landing on the Halo. Check it out in our Fan Fiction section… and be sure to leave feedback!

Ouch – Penny Arcade has put up their Surly Aftermath to their Awards Ceremony for 2001… and Halo wins… well, go look. Thanks to Uriel for the heads-up.

VoodooExtreme picked their ‘official’ Game of the Year (as opposed to Apache’s top 10 of 2001), and while Halo got the nod for Best Console Game, the overall GotY went to PC title ‘Dark Age of Camelot’, mostly due to Halo’s weak Internet multiplayer showing. Thanks to Brizzle for the heads-up.

Heh – The Seattle Post-Intelligencer put up a shot of Ed Fries, as he

its in front of a photo of Munch, a character from Halo, one of the games made for the recently released Xbox.

Um… no. Thanks to Devin O’Reilly for the entertaining heads-up.

A couple of days ago, we added a desktop image ot our Wallpaper page from Alain Couët – but it seems it was really created by Germain Couët – we’ve fixed the error, and added his latest image, another mural. Check ’em BOTH out in our Wallpaper section!

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S !



(Okay, okay, so we stole it from Bungie – but hey, they’ve recycled it themselves!)

From the HBO crew and our families, to you and yours, we wish you the merriest of holiday seasons. Pax.

We’ll be back updating on Wednesday, the 26th.

Carl “B.O.E” Cline dropped off an animated, burning Halo logo for our Logos section – take a look.

Skeletor has transcribed all (?) of 343 Guilty Spark’s dialog on the Library level, and posted it (nicely organized) on our forum. Worth a read, for those who may have missed some of the tidbits while trying to simply stay alive… (Now where’s that Story site?)

Thanks to RedFoxTX, who points out that Gamespy has put up their Game of the Year Awards – Halo snagged Xbox Action/Adventure game… but was beaten out for overall Game of the Year by Madden NFL 2002. Ouch!

If it hadn’t been for some inconsistent level design, Halo probably would have been a strong contender for our overall “Game of the Year.”

Madden, of course, doesn’t ever have to FACE a charge of inconsistent level design – that gridiron just doesn’t change at all. 🙂

A beautiful Halo mural, from Germain Couët… check it out in our Wallpaper section.

Team Xbox put up some wallpaper that features our favorite lone marine, The Master Chief. You can get it here in three different resolutions. Pax.

Fresh from the rumor mill: Harry Al-Shakarchi, on a mission to translate this photo, with a caption that reads:

One of the “open” rooms. Small but still-present bugs in the PC version of Halo are currently being gotten rid of.

The original article is Mark Levin, who noticed the writeup at Blue’s News, and to Harry, who took it one step further. (From what I can tell, though, that picture was taken in July, during a tour of the Bungie facilities… it seems really unlikely to me that anyone at Bungie was working on the PC verison of Halo in July.) Update: maggi points out that the date in question (7.11.2001) is more likely November 7 than July 11 – my American bias is showing. Still… Bungie was saying as late as mid-December that work on the PC version hadn’t started yet… sorry for the confusion.

Andreas den Hertog writes to say that his site, HQ Halo, isn’t really dead – he’s having trouble uploading pages to his ftp server. He’s been updating the site faithfully… on his local drive. Every time he goes to upload, though, he gets disconnected. He’s hoping this problem will be fixed soon – but he wants to assure the Halo community that the site is NOT dead – in fact, it’s been completely overhauled.

genohunter dropped off a picture of Halo, between Threshold and Basis. Created with Photoshop 5.0, it’s called ‘Halo: Space Ring’. You’ll find it in our Miscellaneous Art section.

A couple of days ago, Skeletor discovered that if you shoot the arms off a flood-infected fighter (covenant or human), they’ll simply follow you around like puppies. (Ugly puppies… but harmless.) Well… he’s taken it one step further now – read about it here, then look at the pictures here. Merry Christmas.

Well, the GotY poll at VoodooExtreme is over, and Halo came in second – 432 votes behind Max Payne (out of a total of 12,769 votes). There’s a new one up, though – ‘What is your most wanted PC game of 2002?’ Halo is currently trailing Warcraft III and Duke Nukem Forever – can you fix that? Thanks to Gunship for the heads-up.