Who says they don’t listen to fans? Two subjects discussed recently on our forum have been new weapons, and limb-specific damage. In this week’s Halo update, Matt Soell mentions a new weapon that is

suspiciously similar to a suggestion made on this very forum in days past.

He also mentions ‘secret beasties’, and ‘limb-specific impact animations’. Oooh! Check out all the details for yourself… it’s a juicy one!

Again, not totally Halo-related, but PlanetSide has been generating quite a bit of buzz recently on some of the Halo sites… Kevin McCann gave another interview yesterday, this time to PC IGN, and in it he does a much better job of describing the gameplay that folks can expect from PlanetSide. Very intriguing… but the overall concept is different enough from Halo that these two might not even compete. Check it out!

Halo Tip Kaidu writes to let us know that another Halo site has come on the scene… Halo Tip, ‘Your portal to the planet Halo’. Pretty filled out for a new site… check ’em out!

As Mark Levin points out on our forum, even Blue’s News has gotten in on the “isn’t that Planetside screenshot a lot like Halo?” game. (This game was first played by Nights, on our forum, Tuesday.) Concentration, anyone? Pax.

Thanks to Neil Grattan, who submitted another piece of Halo fan fiction for our Fan Fiction page. Short and sweet…

Oops – in the crush of news recently, we managed to overlook one of the few real Halo-related newsbits… days 2 and 3 of the Halo MultiPlayer Zone Webmaster Interviews are up (and mirrored at Halo Command Central, for those of you who don’t want to log in to MPZ). Look for another question (and its answers) tomorrow.

Hmm… of borderline interest to most Halo fans, but what the heck, news is slow. The Marathon’s Story Page has a tidbit about finding a Marathon sound in the Halo E3 movie (specifically the rocket explosion). Go check out the Story page, and decide for yourself!

Thanks to Br’fin, who noticed an interview with Kevin McCann, producer and lead designer for Planetside, a Massively Multiplayer FPS coming next year, over at Daily Radar. (How many dangling participles can YOU spot in that sentence?) While the graphics don’t look anywhere near as good as Halo’s, the gameplay sounds an awful lot like what folks have been wishing for from Halo. Definitely worth a read.

Hmm. Griffon dropped us a line to let us know that the MPZ Webmaster Interviews are being mirrored at Halo Command Central. That’s good to know… and for those of you saying, “What Webmaster Interviews?” you didn’t miss anything, because the MPZ boys forgot to let us know they were up. 🙂 (The Halo MultiPlayer Zone site decided to ask a few questions of some of the folks running Halo sites. I guess they’ve gotten them online.) So: if you’re interested in reading these Q&A sessions, drop by MPZ or HCC to read questions 1 and 2. (Question 3 is coming tomorrow.)

As noted at Haloplayers, XBOX365 has put up a story in which ‘Inside Informant’ provides details of the finalized Xbox design. Now, take this as you will – read the comments below the story for some, um, alternative views… but one thing is clear to me – in the news post we put up last week, we seriously misinterpreted one of the features of the Xbox – the expansion port devoted to real-time speech has nothing to do with peer-to-peer communication; it will allow the Xbox to accept voice commands from the user. We’re back to square one in terms of net communication. Anyway, go read the whole story – true or not, it’s entertaining.

The Halo SETI Marines continue on their 350+ units/day pace, holding steady in 77th place on the Overall Teams list. (Not to worry, they’re still in the top 50 on the Club Teams list.) DarthFlounder continues his crunching streak, and Traxus2 vaults over 151 teammates to take the Frogblast award. Full details can be found on the 7 day stats page.

New clans on the horizon… [Hark]Age writes to say that House Harkonnen (a German Clan) is online now, and will be getting a site overhaul on January 1, 2001. And A.J. Hoelter writes to say that the Caffeine Drinkers Clan is live, although almost nothing works on macs, and very little works on PCs.

Kudos to Tomeone for sending us news about a Ringworld movie in the works.

Matt continues his 5-week run of Halo updates, this week at Rampancy.net. It’s not very long… but it’s tantalizing in its implications. Ah, don’t take my word for it… go read it for yourself!

A warm welcome to an old friend… Doug Zartman (well, we think it’s Doug) stopped by our forum today to badmouth George C. Scott. We tried to notify Scott, so he could defend himself… then remembered he was dead. Nice job, Doug!

[uhS]BloodyAngel sends word that the Unholy Slayers, a German CS clan, has added Halo to its list of games. Take a look!

Heh… kudos to Mhaddy, who noticed that Gamestop is already taking preorders for the Xbox. He snagged the info off of MSXbox.com… dunno who’s gonna sign up this early (especially at a $500 price point), but hey – stranger things have happened!

One up, one down… News from Halo forums around the net tonight. Rampancy.net had taken its forum down until they can find a nasty little bug… and Haloplayers has upgraded to the latest version of InfinityBoard, cleaning up some bugs. Check ’em out!

Philippe Rom@net writes to tell us that another French Halo site, The Halo Times, has come online. There’s not much there yet, but it’s got a nice, clean design. Take a look!

Interesting… there’s been some discussion recently about how the controls for Halo will work, and doubt has been expressed that decent teamplay can happen without a keyboard. Computer and Video Games have been able to play with a prototype of the Xbox controller, and one feature stands out pretty clearly:

Microsoft’s pad will have two expansion ports, one of which will be focused on real-time speech.

If you can talk to your teammates, who needs a keyboard?