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.

As seen on the Marathon’s Story page… the latest Inside Mac Games CD (volume 8 number 3 – IMG doesn’t seem to date their CDs, although file creation dates are all in August of this year) contains a tidbit on Peter Tamte’s publishing company. There’s been much speculation about who will be doing the Mac port of Halo, when the time comes… and in all interviews up to this point, Tamte (and others) has stopped short of saying that his company will be involved. However, the IMG article is quite clear:

Look for Halo for the Mac to be published through Tamte’s new company.

Does IMG know something others don’t? Or was this just jumping the gun? (Remember, this was written in August, even though it’s the most recent IMG CD available.) Curious…

Bungie to show at next year’s E3 Expo? According to Matt Soell in a forum post it’s very likely. Matt said:

At the absolute least we should show up at E3.

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo)

James MacGlashan sends in a new Halo Desktop for our Wallpaper page. Thanks, James!

Another gritty story from Musashi M., this time pre-Halo. SANE5, worth a read… in our Fan Fiction section.

Nice catch by Halo Center… looks like something’s up at Halo-Net (again). Hmm…

Seamus Blackley, that whacky engineer behind the Xbox, talked to Gamespot Australia about the Xbox recently… he’s really pushing the idea that this is a gaming machine ONLY. However, for folks who were afraid that they’d be limited to TV resolutions…

But yeah, television is one we’re not too fond of either, in terms of standards. So we output pretty much every video signal known to man.

That should cover your average gamer, eh? And in case you thought old Seamus didn’t have a sense of humor:

We actually toyed with the idea at the (US, X-Box unveiling) Game Developer’s Conference, when we announced X-Box on stage, to have a button in one of our demos that went through a Blue Screen. Just for fun, because it would cause everybody to have a heart attack. And then say “Oh, just joking!” and then go on with it.

Swing by and read the whole interview… the guy’s enthusiasm is infectious. (There’s a brief mention of ‘Gigabit Ethernet in the Xbox’ in the context of LAN play… but check this story out for a more interesting rumor.)

Matt be testing us in his latest forum post!

The “weapon ideas” comment was intentionally super-ultra-mega-vague, even for me. Think in terms of secondary abilities and that may help narrow it down a bit. 🙂

Help narrow it down a bit?!!! Who we gonna call?

Wow. Three new Halo stories in one day. Neil Grattan has submitted part 2 of his Sniper story… with part 3 coming soon. Go check it out in our Fan Fiction section!

SOKAR of Halo Empire writes to say that his site has had a big redesign, and now has a weapons section, with a vehicles section to come. German speakers, stop by and take a look!

Another Halo news site on the scene… Inside Mac Games has launched Mac Halo, an ‘IMG affiliate dedicated to delivering the latest news on Bungie’s upcoming award-winning game.’ Currently light on content, but they’re promising ‘interviews and much more’ in the near future. Stop by and take a look.

The Halo SETI Marines continue to crunch over 350 units a day, but the SETI server is overloaded enough that there’s no easy way to see how they’re doing, relative to other teams. Regardless, they continue to hunt that Covenant horde… with luck, it’ll turn up soon! DarthFlounder takes la Crunch Honneur again (surprise!), and Orion Legacy narrowly edges out Traxus2 for the Frogblast award. Details can be found on the 7 day stats page. (Apologies for the delay in processing today – last week’s pages mysteriously disappeared off the server, and needed to be recreated from raw files before today’s could be crunched.)