Nijhazer points out that The Gaming Intelligence Agency is soliciting hands-on opinions of Halo – the catch is they need to be in in the next 12 hours or so. If you’ve got something to say about Halo, mail it to agent@thegia.com soon!

Robert ‘Apache’ Howarth, of VoodooExtreme, has interviewed Matt Soell… and a good interview it is, too. Matt holds forth on subjects as diverse as nasty critics and console controllers – and speaks a little to some of the complaints we’ve heard voiced recently:

Looking back on Halo?s development, quite a few weapons didn?t make it into the Xbox build. What other features were either cut out or stripped down to stream line the game?

We always have a ton of ideas that don’t make it in for one reason or another. Vehicles, weapons, multiplayer game ideas, maps…for every element in Halo that was polished enough to ship in the final game, there are a dozen things that didn’t make the cut. We are lucky in that we have artists and programmers and designers with a surfeit of ideas.

Go read the rest of it!

The final three chapters have been added to IGN’s Halo Strategy Guide – the only thing missing (and it’s going to stay missing) is the extra ending you get for beating the game on Legendary. If you’re stuck, this is the place to go!

HBO’s own Count Zero just submitted a passel of pictures to the Launch Party Coverage section – a couple of dozen shots from the party itself, and another few from an independent Halo event at the University of Illinois. You’ll find them on the Launch Party Pictures Page. Now we know what Mordia looks like after being shorn…

Thanks to bloodbeard [iG3], for pointing out a new MacHall comic at Inside Mac Games… poor Matt! (And where’s his beard, anyway?)

And the reviews continue… XboxWeb has put up a SECOND review – the breakdown was slightly different, but the final result (9.8) was the same. WARNING: There are major spoilers in the accompanying screen captures. We’ve added the shots to our database… but there’s a spoiler warning on them.

Interesting… the Official Halo website at microsoft.com now has a warning page – you must state that you’re over 17 simply to read the content on the (flash) site. Seems that this might be a little overboard – there’s no violent content or swearwords on the site itself…

Some older reviews have turned up – thanks to the news archive at Blue’s News for these. Game Revolution looked at Halo a couple of weeks ago – they gave it an A. GamesFirst was not as impressed – Halo got 4 out of 5 stars (though the reviewer said it was a solid title – he was unhappy with the paucity of weapons, the lack of bots, and the lack of flexibility in gameplay). Game Nation liked it a lot, and gave it a 96/100. And finally, Gamesmania reprinted the review seen on the Electric Playground. All of these have been added to our Reviews page, and the new screens with the Gaming Nation review have been added to our Screenshots database.

Gamers Pulse has reviewed Halo – the review is very positive; the downsides were the darkness on some later levels and the lack of replay value in the single player game. (Obviously, the reviewer didn’t see the value in repeating at higher difficulty levels…) Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for noticing this. We’ve added it to our Reviews page.

Marcus Hellqvist sends us a new Halo desktop, with the ring acting as a negative strip. Check it out in our Wallpaper section.

Dink!… The Halo SETI Marines, neglected last week, have fallen another notch to 54th in the Battle of the Teams… and due to some sort of reset, the 3000+ units the team crunched since November 12 didn’t show up at all on the SETI servers. Ouch! See how YOUR crunching is going on the 14 day stats page.

For those who wanted to see a larger shot of the blue cyborg on the French magazine Joypad’s cover, Draikin has posted links to three higher-res versions (one of which is ridiculously hi-res). Perfect for extraction to make Wallpapers! Thanks, Draikin (and Bishop)!

Poking around at GameFAQs, I ran across a section of Halo Reader Reviews. They range from 4/10 (from someone who seems to have played a different game than I did) to 10/10. Some laughs in here.

Thanks to Erick Delgado, who pointed out a new Halo FAQ/Walkthrough (only the first two levels are up in the walkthrough so far) at CheatCC.com. It’s also available at GameFAQs. Some of the info is a little shaky… but it’s being worked on.

fAt1, of MPZ Halo, got a chance to play some Halo at the Xbox Xperience sneak preview tour in London, and has written up his impressions. Check ’em out!

Praetor has sent in a new desktop – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section. A lot going on there…

Omniscient, a frequent submitter to our Fan Fiction archive, has dropped off a piece of fan art – he says that “though the setting and the weapon in his hand are really not related to Halo at all, this art was never the less inspired by the game.” You’ll find it in our Miscellaneous Art section.

TeamXbox ran across another couple of reviews we missed today (too much Halo playing while trying to digest yesterday’s turkey… makes us lazy) – The Electric Playground loved the controls, whined about lack of bots and repetitive architecture, and gave it an 89, while XboxWeb loved it to death, and gave it a 9.8. Both of these have been added to our Reviews page (which, incidentally, has been added to the navbar – thanks, Nij).

Djoey.154 writes to point out that a French magazine called ‘Joypad’ has put Halo on the cover this month. They call Halo ‘the most beautiful FPS in the world’… Gotta love that blue marine.

The work on getting Halo to play online has been fast and furious over the past few days. We’ve watched it carefully, but have held off reporting much until solid progress was made… that time is now. A new program called Xbox Gateway has been written to route Xbox packets over the internet… people have successfully played 1-on-1 multiplayer games from two different places! The program is free, and will soon be open-source. It currently has limitations (more than two players introduces unacceptable lag (although one of our forum visitors reports an acceptable 4-player game), and each player must have a linux box available for use on the local network for routing packets)… but past that, the work’s been done for you. Visit XBoxGW.com and download the software, and instructions on how to use it… and you should be on your way! (Thanks to Freewill for keeping a beady eye on the entire process for us.)