Not sure exactly what Dolby 5.1 means to you? Get the low-down straight from the source – Marty O’Donnell takes a minute out of his crushing schedule to give you a few examples.

Real-time Dolby 5.1: live it – love it.

You tell it, Marty!

Thanks to KillGore =PN=, who pointed out the Halo Box Art scanned in over at VoodooExtreme. Nice!

Schmiddtchen sends along a tiny screenshot he scanned out of a German TV magazine, ‘TV14’. It appeared in an article comparing the Xbox to the PS2 – the caption reads ‘Furious shooting action in Sci-fi style’. Coverage outside of computer mags commences…

Last Friday’s Halo Update (one of the last) has been added to the Halo Update Database – The search term of the week is ‘Adrian‘ – check what Mr. Perez has been up to this past month!

Dink!… The Halo SETI Marines fall ANOTHER notch, to 53, in the Battle of the Teams… what’s going on here? No wonder the Covenant ran over our colonies like they weren’t there! Check the 7-day stats to see who’s crunchin’, and who’s not.

Day off…been traveling all day, there should be some news later this evening. Apologies for the slow Sunday!

This week’s Halo Update can be found at Battleground: Halo… it’s almost the last one, so go savor it. Difficulty tweaks, AI improvements, and eye candy… what more could you want?

More info from Matt, totally different subject – while nothing has been decided yet, Matt lets readers of the R.net forum know that he’s off to Chicago next week to (among other things) scope out a particular site for suitability for the Halo Launch Party… in his words:

Expect an announcement one way or another next week.

I’m still holding out for New York…

OzHalo.com has a new poll up: “What do you think of the X-box’s supposed Internet capabilities?” Make your voice heard!

Not really NEW news, but it’s official confirmation: Matt Soell reminds us that you won’t be able to pilot the dropships, and you won’t be able to circumnavigate the entire Halo in ANY craft. Ah, well…

Hamish Sinclair, of the Marathon’s Story page, took Thursday’s information about an upcoming Halo novel and put it together with a number of disparate info tidbits, and came up with an interesting conclusion about what Doug Zartman has been working on recently. You can’t stop those little grey cells! Hop on over to the Story page and read the update for August 31!

And the Wallpaper explosion continues. Tonight brings you two new images from the team at Socket Error, a clan site. You’ll find them in our Wallpaper section.

Temjin caught an article over at IGN Xbox which trumpets the arrival of online capability for the Xbox. Is it too late for games like Halo? Probably, since the game’s release date is now just over 2 months away; adding major new features at this stage would be pretty reckless… but until you hear it from Bungie themselves, nothing’s for sure!

Filling a void that we didn’t even notice until we saw this artwork, Nathan Giem submits the first (but maybe not the last) parody of the famous Mastercard ‘Priceless’ ad campaign. You can find it in our Miscellaneous Art section. (Please – this one is very well done, but if we get a bunch of shoddy copies, we may start rejecting some.)

The recent remarkable Wallpaper production trend continues – today we got another from Mike Price, called ‘From Concept to Reality’, and another from Siva, enhancing his Curves collection. Check ’em out in our Wallpaper section!

Two more desktops for you today – another from Siva, who started this latest trend and continues to send in attractive images, and one from FunkyJ, who… um, is sending in original artwork. Sort of. Check ’em both out in the Wallpaper section.

Sometimes, you just luck out. Adam Daniel took it upon himself to learn a bit more about the Halo Guide he discovered earlier – and he came up with more than even he realized. First, he called Prima Games, and learned these facts:

Expected in stores November 11th
Software platform: Xbox
Media rating: Teen
Media grade: AA
ISBN: 0761537449
144 pages

(Neither Adam nor the Prima representative he spoke with have any idea what that ‘Media grade’ means.) Then he followed up this call with a search of Random House’s website… and discovered that it’s a paperback. (Not really suprising, given the content.) What he seems to have missed, but which jumped out at me when I hit that search link, was the OTHER Halo-related title at Random House: ‘Halo: The Fall of Reach‘, to be available in both eBook and Del Rey paperback format by October 2001. A full-length Halo Fan Fiction, published by Random House, out before the game is? WOW! Kudos to Adam for uncovering all this – both the details of the Strategy Guide, and the existence of the novel!

A day for impressionists… we received two new desktops today – one from Uriel, editor at Halo Network, and the other from [SE]X-Com, editor at Socket Error – both take an artsy approach to image modification. You’ll find both in our Wallpaper section.

Yesterday, Siva created an original wallpaper in an attempt to inspire folks to move away from modified Bungie creations. Well, Mike Price took him up on it – and our first new submission is a modified Siva creation. Check it out in our Wallpaper section.

Adam Daniel noticed that Bestprices.com has a listing for a ‘Halo Guide‘, by Prima Publishing. There’s almost no info at Bestprices, and none at all at Prima… anyone feel like digging?