We got this in the mail from info@halo-net.com:

 I must be quick as they're after me. 
I found this data left at the location. 
I hope you can make use of it...  

796F757220616374696F6E73206172652066 
6F6F6C6973682E207768617420796F752068 
61766520646F6E652077696C6C2063617573 
6520737566666572696E6720756E746F2074 
68652067616C6178792E206265207761726E 
656420796F75722069646C656E6573732069 
7320796F7572207765616B6E657373  

Delta signin' out... 

For the lazy among you, that hex code translates to

your actions are foolish. what you have done will cause suffering unto the galaxy. be warned your idleness is your weakness.

The Halo-Net page says ‘reopening March 1st’…

More fan fiction from our forum. NevinNiven posted ‘The Sacrifice’ this morning, and told us we could put it in the Fan Fiction section. Choose your reading location!

Final round of voting! The VoodooExtreme poll “Who’s the best game development company?” is in its final round! Currently, Blizzard is in the lead, with Looking Glass second… and Bungie 6th! (Of course, there are only 200 votes so far. Get over there, and make sure they take it!

Dink!… Dink!… As of last Thursday (the last time the team stats were compiled), the Halo SETI Marines had fallen two notches in the Battle of the Teams. Ouch! Darthflounder continues to do his part, with almost 200 units this week… are YOU doing YOUR part to find the Covenant? See who’s slacking on the 7 day stats page!

Thanks to Anonymous Coward, who wrote a short bit of fan fiction and posted it to our forum. (It’s been added to the Fan Fiction section, as well.)

Shmuck the Kneerubber has another Halo-related comic up… this one really IS about Halo. 🙂 Check it out!

What’s in a name? A lot according to the Financial Times. Seems a small Florida-based company called XBOX Technologies insists it has first claim on the Xbox brand and says it is prepared to go to court to protect its trademark. Mr van Leeuwen chief executive of Xbox Technologies is reported to have said:

“There’s no way that we can co-exist… We can’t afford to have our business confused with games for kids. Either we find a business solution or we get into a legal battle.”

The full Financial Times article can be found here. Thanks to MSXBox for the heads up.

Minor details… but sometimes minor details are important. (Remember van der Rohe…) We’ve added the latest Halo update to our Halo Updates database… remember it when you need to remember that tidbit in the back of your mind! (Need to know the names of all the Pauls working at Bungie? It’s in there!)

Thanks to |CaRnyL|, who alerts us to a poll that needs smashing… VoodooExtreme is asking, Who is the best gaming development company?” You know what needs to be done…

Paul Frankenstein brings to our attention a Gamasutra article entitled “Dogma 2001: A challenge to Game Designers“. In the spirit of a 1995 ‘vow of chastity’ proposed by a pair of filmmakers unhappy with the use of technology to cover content flaws, a game designer has suggested a set of 10 rules game designers should adhere to to ‘purify’ their art. Halo, of course, breaks almost all of them… and this site wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. 🙂 Interesting read, nonetheless.

Thanks to Jenkz, who sent word that Haloplayers is back up, and on a faster pipe than before. If you get a ‘Forbidden’ message, the new address hasn’t propagated to your nameserver… give it some more time. Welcome back, guys!

Eldar-Colonel writes to say that Halo HQ has gotten some new forums. Check ’em out!

Matt’s weekly Halo Update went to Battleground Halo this week… and it’s full of progress reports. A dev kit upgrade, controller issues, particle effects, cool new map editor features… and waves! We want to see waves (though we don’t want to be close to Joe Staten when we see them…) Go read the details over at BGH! (This update will be added to our searcheable database sometime on Monday.)

Ouch. Halo makes the “Worst Moments of 2000” according to the March 2001 issue of PC Gamer. Amongst mentions of 3dfx’s demise and Daikatana, they consider “It’s Xbox first for Halo” to be one of the worst gaming moments of the year. Not a list you really want to be on… thanks to Lophan for the heads-up.

From Lophan, maintainer of our sister site myth.bungie.org, comes this snippet from a Wall Street Journal article on Wednesday, entitled “How Microsoft Hopes to Win With Xbox”:

First, it’s taking out it’s checkbook. Since march 2000, when it announced plans to enter the multibillion-dollar video-game industry, Microsoft has bought two small game developers, Bungie Software Products Corp. and Digital Anvil Inc., for what some analysts estimate is more than $20 million.

Well, that’s a bit less than we thought the sum would have been… but it’s interesting to see this hit the mainstream press. We’d have thought the spin would have been the half-billion they’re spending on advertising…

The Junkyard is having a design competition – come up with the winning artwork, and your creation can grace their t-shirts! Stop by and take a look. (They do Halo news too, you know.)

Thanks to all the people who sent in notes about Haloplayers‘ moving woes – we just got a note from Jenkz, as well:

we’re in the process of getting the site backup as i speak, but as we dont have 100% control over the new machine its taking time. once we find the root mysql pass for the machine we should be up within a matter of minutes,should be tonight if we can beat it out of the tech admin (who was the guywho forwarded haloplayers.com to that site, not the forum as we’d asked)

Gotta love those tech admins… Good luck, guys, getting back up and running!

Huh? Stopping by Haloplayers made me wonder if I needed to change my dosages… It’s been replaced with a page called ‘Joyful Systems – online gardening for healthy systems and happy humans’ based in Santa Monica, CA. Uh oh… broken DNS or something more sinister?

Whew. Forum regular Razz has submitted 5 new desktop images to our Wallpaper page (a couple are based on existing wallpapers, others are variations on submissions he’s made previously), and a 2.1 MB movie, showing a 500-frame animation of a Halo-like landscape. (You’ll need the divx decoder to watch this.) Take a look! (Razz is also looking for a 3D model of the jeep, or other Halo vehicle. If you have something that he might use, in .3ds format, drop him a line!)

Wow. Microsoft demoed the Xbox at Michigan State University this evening, and we got not one, but two reports on what was said! There are some interesting tidbits in there… you should read both reports. And thanks to ironhorse and Fred Sharp for sending ’em in!