Thanks to Raino Priha, who sent in a brooding desktop for our Wallpapers page. Check it out!

Eep – sleep, the enemy of the site updater. Matt Soell sent in his weekly Halo update… but we were slacking. Here, then, is the latest and greatest – or make use of our new Halo Update Database! There’s some good stuff in there today – the jeep has a new gun, there are now sleeping alien models, the programmers play an R-rated version of ‘horse’ (what IS that word, anyway?)… go check it out!

Not DIRECTLY Halo-related, but relevant, nonetheless: seems Culture Shock, a website devoted to the works of Iain M. Banks, has moved – the new URL is http://www.schmeul.com/. Thanks, Chuckg (on the R.net forum).

Thanks to Spike, who sent in another desktop image for our Wallpaper page. Check it out!

–=MAC=– writes to say that Halo Command is online. Warning: DO NOT look at this site on a mac. (IE continually reloads the page, and NS and iCab spew out raw html.) On a PC, though, it looks okay – still needs fleshing out, but it’s getting there.

Battleground: Halo is hiring – they need a video person. If you’ve got the skills, and the interest, stop by their Jobs page. (Thanks, Mike Patton, for the heads-up.)

About 3 months ago, Matt Soell started a weekly update tradition – on Friday evenings, he’d post a concise (or rambling, depending on how much drinking was involved) catalogue of halo-related items to a random fansite. There was a lot of interesting info that entered the Halo knowledgebase this way… but it wasn’t always easy to find. Well, we’ve lightened the effort needed – all of the weekly updates so far (and future ones, to be added a few days after their release) have been compiled into a searchable database for you to peruse. Read them in their entirety, scan for particular categories, or simply search for a specific term – it’s your choice. Hope this helps fuel some good Halo speculation on our forum!

A couple of days ago, we noted that Wade Clisby had won the Wallpaper competition at Halo HQ. Today, we received permission to add some of his artwork to our Wallpaper collection… take a look!

Ben Evan Lewis writes to say that a Halo-themed comic has been posted at Shmuck the Kneerubber. Well, yeah, sorta…

No Halo Superbowl commercials? Lophan (who, for some bizarre reason, posted this on R.net instead of telling us), says that he’s seen a list of major advertisers for Sunday’s game… and Microsoft wasn’t among them. Ah, well… guess we’ll have to wait until Gamestock after all. (Or was that E3?)

Interesting info from Maddog=RN= on our forum – surprised Wirehead didn’t follow up on it. (He’s like that, though.) Maddog says he’s a tester for MS in Ireland… and hasn’t seen any Xbox material at all yet. This may mean nothing – if there aren’t any region-specific features of the Xbox, there’s no need to use Irish beta-testers over US ones – but you never know. How far behind the US release will the European Xbox release be, finally (Q1 2002, as planned, or later?), and will this affect the PC/Mac releases? (We said no a month ago… but there is a real possibility that the PC and Mac versions could be finished about the time of the European Xbox rollout… how will MS handle this?)

Cortana in German? Huh. Ryan Wilcox submits an interesting picture to our Miscellaneous Art section… now if only I spoke Latin…

The German update: Seems Massa and the crew at Halo Network.de respond quickly to problems – the viewing problems I mentioned yesterday have been fixed, and the site is quite nice to look at. (I still can’t read it very well – it’s in German, after all – but it’s nice to look at.) And thanks to them, I now know of a new German Halo site – halogamers.de (also nice to look at), and of a German Wallpaper competition at Halo Orbit. If you speak German, check these sites out!

As noted on the Marathon’s Story page”Halo: A Case Study” is no longer listed as a presentation at this year’s Game Developers Conference. Jason Jones & John Howard of Bungie Studios were originally scheduled to give thistalk under the Game Design category. See our earlier news item on this.

We hope you like to re-read. IGN Xbox have posted a Halo article which traces the development of Halo. Actually it’s a collection of old Halo previews dating from 1999. The screenshots are really old too. Here’s a piece of the intro:

The whole development cycle has been more akin to Gone With the Wind than your average game, thanks to “less is more” philosophy that Bungie has taken about revealing information on the game, not to mention the changes the company has been through. So let’s begin at the beginning — E3 1999.

Pille writes to say that HaloNetwork.de, a German Halo site, has been completely overhauled, and several sections have quite a bit of info (screenshots are explained, graphical features are outlined, etc). I wasn’t able to make the site work on Mac NS or IE, but it looks great on IE on Win98.

There’s been some speculation about our sister site, phoenix.bungie.org, on our forum today. Bachus did some image analysis… and the results may surprise you.

Thanks to Jerry Nummi, who sent in a new piece of artwork for our Miscellaneous Art page. Looks like it could be a nice web front end! Check it out. Pax.

For those who missed this the first time (or the second, or the third, or…) Matt Soell, Community Guy, has gone on record yet again on the issue of the PC version being cancelled:

It’s a load of bollocks. There WILL be a Mac/PC Halo.

(Read the rest of the post for further elucidation.) As we said… if it didn’t come from Bungie, you don’t know it.

Blam!… The Halo SETI Marines climb their way back up to 48th in the Battle of the Teams, despite lower yields from the latest SETI client. DarthFlounder pushes up the output even more, taking la Crunch Honneur yet again… but Iden, a newcomer to the team, blasts out 104 units, putting him in second place for the week (and with the 202 positions he leapfrogged, the holder of the Frogblast Award). And we couldn’t have done it without Andrew Moll, an the 505 units he brought in this week. You can read all the gory details on the 7 day stats page.