At the author’s request, we’ve removed all fan fiction written by $erial-ki!!A. We’re sorry to see them go!

Hmm. We know we’ve seen this somewhere before… but we can’t for the life of us remember where. Anyway, it’s news here, so we’ll post it. Amazon.com is selling Halo: Sybex’s Official Strategies and Secrets, listed as being published on January 22, 2001. (Yeah, right.) It’s written by Bart Farkas, who wrote both the Myth and Myth II Strategy Guides. It’s even listed as having 272 pages (which would suggest that it’s already mostly written). It’s obviously premature, but its mere existence is intriguing, no?

General DwK writes to tell us that the Terra Defense Force is back, and looking for new members. Check ’em out, and join up if you like what you see! Pax.

Looks like all that crypticity (yeah, we made that up) over at bungie.org was just a site redesign. (A pretty nice one, actually.) Now, if only we could figure out how many of those random links in the Habete Quidam section pointed to HBO… Pax.

Hmm… Joe asks (on our forum) “What’s up with bungie.org?” What’s up, indeed?

According to a news report over at PlanetXbox Microsoft is planningto put $500 million towards marketing the Xbox. The plan is to literally take over entireretail floor areas. For next year’s E3 Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center in MayMicrosoft have asked for at least twice as much floor space as Sony. According to Matt SoellBungie are likely to be at the E3 show (presumably in the MS section). Book your tickets now!

Lupus sends word that he’s got a new German Halo site up – Halo Headquarters. Check it out… quite a bit of work has been put into it!

Dink!… Dink!… The Halo SETI Marines lose two spots in their climb to the top (maybe more, the SETI server is a week behind compiling team stats). Didn’t help much that we lost braeden and his 788 units… All the damage can be seen on the 7 day stats page. Without better crunching, those Covenant will escape!

Thanks to Iden, who submitted Chapter 2 of his ongoing Firestarter Squad saga today. You’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section.

Another redesigned Halo site: Kaidu writes to tell us that Halo Tip has been overhauled – stop by and take a look! Pax.

Man, they’ve done it again. Battleground: Halo, the Halo site voted Most Likely to Overhaul Their Graphics, have once again overhauled their graphics… and this time, have joined the ranks of Sites That Are Nasty In Netscape 4.x. Minimum requirements to view the site: IE 4, Netscape 6 (yeah, it sucks, but it uses bigger fonts), and Flash 5. If you fulfill these requirements, check out the mailbag… there’s some funny stuff in there. Pax.

Okay, we couldn’t let this pass… it’s just too convoluted. 🙂 On Thursday, Matt Soell posted a short message to our forum confirming that Bungie wouldn’t have a booth at MacWorld SF this year. Rampancy.net picked up on this post yesterday, and included a front-page news post about it. Less than an hour later, MacLedge picked up on this news post, and wrote up their own news post. This, in turn, was picked up by Mac Halo, Inside Mac Games’ new affiliate Halo website… they didn’t follow it any farther back than MacLedge. Here’s where it gets fun. IMG picked up the story as well… from Mac Halo. They credit Mac Halo with the info (and mention nobody else). Their post was made roughly 24 hours after Matt’s original post, and had passed through 3 intermediate sites. Amazingly enough, with this game of Telephone News, the IMG piece is accurate with respect to what Matt wrote originally. Nice going, all! Next week we’ll try to add two more news sites to the chain, and see if the original message still stays clean.

Kudos to Finch, who pointed out (on our forum and by email) that Bungie has updated its Letters to the Webmaster section. Even Doug Zartman gets in on the act. (Sort of.) Bork Bork Bork. (And the winners to the poetry contest.)

Matt’s weekly Halo update (over at R.net this week) contains some juicy gameplay details:

The AI is already good enough to kill Jason and Chucky, no easy task.

Vehicles are almost done, buildings are huge… and soon you’ll be able to buy G.I. Joe in his ReachMobile? Check all the details for yourself.

Wow… and another one. Chris Cox has sent in a story told from the Covenant side… a refreshing change. (Nicely written, too.) As Chris said,

Later entries might be decyphered and uploaded in the future, assuming this doesn’t suck 🙂

We think there should be more… how about you folks? Check our Fan Fiction section for ‘The Warrior’.

Neil Grattan submits part 3 of his story, The Sniper, to our Fan Fiction section. It’s short, but it ain’t over yet…

Kudos to Dan Rudolph, who went to a Microsoft talk on the Xbox last night, and posted some highlights on our forum. Mostly hardware stuff… but this line popped out at me:

While the Xbox won’t ship with a keyboard, there may be one at some point.

Seems Brian Schmidtt (Audio and Media Director for the Xbox, and the man giving the talk) and Seamus Blackley (Manager of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group) – and J. Allard (General Manager for Xbox development), for that matter – have some disagreements about what may and may not ever appear. (The latter two gentlemen have said in no uncertain terms that the Xbox will NEVER have a keyboard.) We can always hope!

Jay Swartzfeger, maintainer of the new Mac Halo site, writes to let us know that they have a new survey up for you to vote on – ‘What platform will you purchase Halo for?’ (Given that this is a Mac-centric site, we’re not sure how scientific the poll is… but hey. 🙂 ) Swing by and vote for your favorite!

A warm welcome to David Candland, the newest member of Bungie’s online team – he’s officially “Interface Designer”, so he’ll likely be working on making bungie.net more friendly to everyone. That doesn’t have IMMEDIATE relevance to Halo fans… but when Halo DOES get to the point where bungie.net is important, what’s in place will help a lot. Good luck, David! (You can read his announcement on bungie.net right now.)

$erial-ki!!A was going to release the next chapter of his ongoing Halo saga next month, as a Christmas offering to the community… but his plans changed. Here, then, in our Fan Fiction section, is De-Iced and Decapitated (Chapter 8) – think of it as an early Christmas present.