Thanks to NeXuS, who noticed a Halo review at GamePro. There’s no date on it (nor any reference to a date in their news), so I’ve no idea when it was actually posted… we’ve dated it today on our Reviews page. It’s positive – a few minor gripes (the ‘Ewoks on helium’ sound of the grunts, for example, and the ‘fussy’ handling of the vehicles), but for them, it’s one of 2001’s best games. (There are also 15 new, albeit small, screenshots.)

Gamespy has started the fan voting on their Game of the Year 2001 Awards – you all know what to do in the Xbox category… thanks to Darkman for the heads-up.

FunXbox has posted its full review of Halo – and it’s simply overflowing with praise.

Imagine Half-Life, Tribes 2, and Goldeneye all mashed together, then multiply it by one thousand, and you still wouldn’t have a game as captivating, exciting, intense and fun as Halo.

(That’s how it STARTS.) Bottom line – they liked it. (We think.) Go read it for yourself. (We’ve added it to our Reviews page.)

Good lord. One day after launch, and IGN Xbox already has a complete Halo walkthrough posted. Sheesh. I read through the page covering the first mission (which I’d completed on my own), and it’s pretty nitty-gritty… if you’re looking for an easy way out, you’ll find it here. Don’t come looking for respect when you’re through, though… (You have to register with IGN to see this… unless you turn Javascript off.) Update: St. Killer noticed that the last 5 chapters of the walkthrough are not actually up yet… we’ll keep an eye on ’em.

Leave it to the Socket Error team to take first advantage of new shots… [SE]X-Com has made a new desktop image from Bungie’s Tru7h and Reconciliation site – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.

Core Magazine has put up their Xbox Launch Guide – Halo gets a mention:

A refined and full-featured FPS engine combines with controls almost as useful as the PC standard keyboard and mouse combo to make Halo a likely candidate to be Game of the Launch.

Thanks to R.net for the heads-up.

As about 8 million of you noticed, all the new Bungie sites went live last night. (Don’t ask me why MS is approving launches after 10 pm local time…) The 7th Column, the new gathering place for local fan clubs, is open and accepting new club applications. Truth and Reconciliation, Bungie’s new official Halo site (with exclusive screenshots, concept art, storyboards, and more) woke up some time this morning. And the overall Bungie.net site is live again, as well. (The Myth Vault still needs a bit of tweaking.) Spend a little time looking around…

Forum regular Vector40 has written a ‘pre-review’ of Halo for the Junkyard… it’s worth a read. He’s got a nice way of pointing out some of Halo’s strengths:

It’s difficult to appreciate fully until you see a car flipped ten feet into the air with a grenade explosion, or a weapon laying on the ground get shot and knocked askew, but the complex, interwoven physics engine allows a level of immersion that’s truly rare.

Check it out.

Rampancy.net has put up a forum devoted specifically to spoilers – if you’re looking for a place to ask questions, or want to get the skinny on some Halo level or other… this is your place. Nobody’s gonna jump on you for posting ’em there.

GameSpot UK has repackaged the preview GameSpot (US) published two weeks ago (UK spelling, a final paragraph acknowledging that it won’t be available in the UK for quite some time), and added a subset of the huge collection of screens Gamespot US put up last week. I suppose if you space it out…

Salon looks at the Xbox launch… and sniffs its nose. It sees the entire console as uninspired, with Halo and Oddworld as the only standout games, but doesn’t think they’re enough:

In the console space, where the potential audience is in the tens of millions, the field is dominated by instantly identifiable, engaging personalities, intrinsically linked to their parent console. Nintendo has Mario; Sega, at the peak of its console dominance, had Sonic the Hedgehog. And for its own billion-dollar system, Microsoft leads off with … a guy in a boxy outfit with a title for a name, his humanity masked off by a faceplate of tinted glass.

Come to think of it, for a Microsoft product, this is the perfect figurehead. It’s also branding suicide.

We respectfully disagree. You can read the article for yourself… thanks to septimus for the heads-up.

Thanks to fate, who noticed new Halo coverage (and media) in a FiringSquad article on the Xbox launch. (Halo’s section is 2 pages long, starting on page 4.) Included is a passel of screens (20-someodd, mostly stuff you’ve seen before, but with occasional interesting variations) and a 20 MB DivX-encoded AVI (no spoilers). This isn’t their official Halo review – they said that’s coming. They have more framerate issues than any other coverage I’ve read. Take a look!

Markus Tacker noticed this image on the webcam last night… either Matt has decided that answering the ‘is it REALLY coming to the PC?’ question has gotten to be too much, and is contemplating a particularly messy suicide, or he’s preparing mentally for a voice role in the hush-hush Phoenix project. Or maybe he just likes to play with long sharp objects. Whatever the tru7h turns out to be, one thing’s for sure… this post blows any chance I had of bonus Bungie goodies. Update: mnemesis sends in a couple of webcam shots from the same general timeframe – the first shows Matt and Mordia dueling… and the second (the last of the three, chronologically) shows… well, shows a disturbing event in progress. Let’s hope it ended peacefully!

TeamXbox is giving away 10 Halo Game Guides, from Prima Games – head on over to register to win one. WARNING – the sample tips in the article contain spoilers.

Our forum is starting to see stories of folks and their first Xbox experiences with Halo in their own living room. Nij and The Shrike seem to be the first forum-ites to report back… and the news is good.

Over at Xbox.com, Jacqui Kramer writes about hardcore gaming from a female perspective… and she loved Halo:

Here we have everything a grrl could want: Beautiful, sweeping landscapes with the perfect tinge of weather. Why, Jane Austen could be writing about this place: “Forsooth, it is winter, and I am here to turn the sweet white snow crimson with alien blood.” (Or whatever color alien blood is these days.)

The article’s a funny read – check it out. (Thanks to Allenthar for the heads-up.)

vladinn@msn.com lets us know that another Halo domain, halogame.com, is up for auction – starting bid is $500. Given that haloserver.com failed to sell for $61 last week, this seems rather steep… but hey – who are we to judge?

Lophan points out a fun read – GamesFirst put up an article called ‘Notes Scribbled in the Dark While Playing HALO‘. That’s exactly what it is… some of ’em are great.

Okay, this is silly. The Warthog should be able to climb this hill, but all it does is spin out. Oooh, pretty dirt clods.

Okay, that wasn’t the best one, but I didn’t want to ruin the ending for you.

You want a piece of this? No7orious turns in a sketch he did in class in honor of (in his words) “Happy Halo’s Eve!” Check it out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

People in the UK (and the rest of Europe, actually) should be glad to know that the UK website for the Official Xbox Magazine is now up at http://www.officialxboxmagazine.co.uk/, featuring Halo on the cover of its first issue. Pax.