The Halo Launch Party is here! Bungie.net has the details… Saturday, November 10 at the Hotel Monaco, in Chicago, for those who HAVE TO KNOW NOW… the rest of you, head over to bungie.net and read Matt’s little parable. (And get even more details, like what you might win if you show up…) It’s 5 days before the Xbox is gonna be released, for Pete’s sake!

Michael Maddux sends us a tasty desktop for our Wallpaper collection, in three flavors. Check it out!

Ask, and ye shall receive. In an unprecedented fifth Matt Soell-generated news post, we bring you… the cover of Halo: The Fall of Reach, available from Random House later this month. Blam!

Took much longer than they wanted… but Matt has announced that the venue for the Halo launch party has finally been secured. It’s in Chicago… on a weekend. More than that, and you’ll need to tune in to www.bungie.net over the next few hours.

A Halo movie? Matt says they’ve been approached, and though no deals have been struck yet, the possibility is there…

Shocker of the week – the rumors are true. Halo’s ESRB rating has been raised from Teen to Mature; apparently, ESRB changed their minds. (Maybe in the wake of the September 11 tragedy?) In any case, Matt Soell explains a bit in this post to our forum. Apologies to all who were counting on the Teen rating to be able to buy the game!

Thanks to Razorback, who pointed out a Halo preview in Portuguese, at GameOver. Babelfish did a pretty nasty job with this… but it seems to be relatively accurate. If you speak Portuguese, go take a look!

Looks like we missed a new Halo preview at XboxWeb – showed up this weekend. Nothing mindboggling, but it sums up game features pretty nicely. Take a look!

Psyrixx wrote to let us know that the Psyjnir Complex is back online, sort of. The links aren’t working yet… but you can check out the basic page design. Be warned – IE 5+, Opera 5+, or NS 6+ REQUIRED. Take a look, and be sure to let him know if you’ve got suggestions!

The Pillar of Autumn desktops continue to pour in. Michael Maddux sends us a gorgeously hi-tech version in three resolutions. Grab it from our Wallpaper section.

Eric ‘Siva’ Salzman adds another entry to his ‘Curves’ collection – and this one has been left mostly open, so that someone could add a “stats” sidbar about the Pillar of Autumn to the image. (If you’re interested, contact Eric and he’ll get you a layered Photoshop file to work with.) The recent Wallpaper additions have been gorgeous! (Nothing like fantastic screens to start with…)

fAt1 drops us a note to let us know that 1) MPZ Halo is back, with a brand-new makeover, and 2) MPZ as a whole is now open to the web – no login required. Check ’em out!

Interesting tidbit – as of now, the Xbox Halo app is not capable of using downloaded levels. This means that (unless Bungie supplies a patch that allows this) even IF the PC version ships with a level editor, the Xbox version won’t be able to take advantage of any created mods. (It also means that Bungie wasn’t considering releasing Xbox-version-compatible mods anytime soon.)

Hmm… this one’s a bit odd… Sikora sends in a new ‘combination’ image for our Miscellaneous Art section. Take a look…

The artwork continues to pour in. This morning, we received another desktop using the Pillar of Autumn shot (in 6 resolutions!), and a 3ds max-rendered marine helmet (made into a cool Halo desktop) – you’ll find both in our Wallpaper section. Keep ’em coming!

Blam!… The Halo SETI Marines climb a notch to number 52 in the Battle of the Teams. Int_21 pours on the steam, as 243 units crunched bring in la Crunch Honneur AND the Frogblast Award for this week’s top performer. How are YOU doing? Check the 7 day stats to see!

The final (?) Weekly Halo Update, capping a full year of updates, has been added to the Halo Update Database. A fine tradition… we’ll be sorry to see it end. Word of the week – ‘Chucky‘. Known only as The Bear in weekly updates since June 29, he’s finally Chucky again… we missed you, Chuck. The two new screenshots have been added to the Screenshots section, as well – filesizes are a bit different than the versions available at Haloplayers, because we recompressed them from the originals – they’re a bit cleaner than before. (We’re not taking anything away from HP – they did a fine job. We were just willing to spend a bit more time. 🙂 99% of our visitors won’t be able to tell the difference.)

New screenshots, especially ones this cinematic, inspire new desktops. We got two today – check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

I didn’t think this was anything that folks didn’t know, so I didn’t report it – but I want the mail to stop now. Various people in various forums posted information about the Marathon symbol on the side of the Pillar of Autumn in the latest screenshot – Harry Al-Shakarchi was one of the first to make a nice graphic for it. The first public comment came within 10 minutes of the shot first hitting the web, and discussions have been raging for two days about it. Please – no more mail, telling us you’ve found it, okay?

Joseph E. Haake sends in an interesting modification of the Pillar of Autumn screenshot released last week. We’ve added it to the Miscellaneous Art section, though in retrospect, it would probably make a great desktop image…