Thanks to Diogo Barbosa, who mailed us two pieces of artwork: a modified Halo logo for our Logos page, and a new desktop for our Wallpaper page. Take a look!

Put a tiger in your Halo! Jesse Keenan sent us a modified Halo Marine, wearing camo stripes. Check him out on our Miscellaneous Art page.

Halo marine in early Oni movie? Some say yeah… some say nay. The Marathon’s Story page has a shortclip of a rare Oni movie seen briefly on the web in ’98. It shows what looks like a guy in aHalo marine helmet. It has been discussed before on the Oni forumsbut some Oni folk didn’t seem convinced. Well the HBO gang gathered round to watch the movieand we’re chanting “Halo marine helmet” “Halo marine helmet” “Halo marine helmet”. But then we’relike that.

Interesting tidbit… the Marathon’s Story page notes that a letter written to Macworld 4 years ago, condemning Macworld’s judgement that violence in video games decreases the games’ worth, was authored by a Matt Segur… a name shared by a current Bungie programmer working on Halo. Coincidence? Or was Matt simply standing up for a company he would one day work for?

Two more mirrors for the nVidia movie have popped up: Halo Center now has a copy, and so does HaloCenter.de (no relation to the American site). In fact… it doesn’t look like we’ve ever seen HaloCenter.de before, so we’ll take this opportunity to announce it. Looks like it’s a GameszPlanet affiliate.

Thanks to Olaf, who sent in a pair of high-quality desktops for our Wallpaper page. Take a look!

Sokar writes to say that the nVidia movie is available on the HaloEmpire server, which is probably a good choice for European visitors. That makes 4 locations we know of… the one above, Stomped, VoodooExtreme, and here at HBO.

Took a whole day to get these onto the server, but they were calculated on time, Monday. The Halo SETI Marines hold steady at number 43 in the Battle of the Teams, pulling farther ahead of Team Slashdot. A couple of Marines went AWOL this week… maybe we’re not pushing the team enough. 🙂 DarthFlounder takes La Crunch Honneur again, and lobo blasts into position to win the Frogblast Award. Full details can be found on the 7-day stats page.

First seen at HaloCenter: looks like Halo HQ is coming back online. Nothing there yet… but it’s nice to see it’s not dead permanently!

AAARGHHHH!! For two months, we’ve been working on getting Bungie to release the nVidia promo movie that was shown at the Bungie fanfest at MacWorld NY 2000 in July. It finally came through last night… in the middle of the first network outage of merit we’ve experienced. Ah, well… and so it goes.Anyway, this film is available from our Movies page. If you have trouble with our local copy (I’m putting very, very little faith in my telco these days), Stomped was given a copy, as well. Thanks, Bungie! And to the fans… enjoy! This one’s hilarious.

No internet browsing on Xbox!Gamecenter has posted aninterview with Seamus Blackley,manager of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group at Microsoft. Blackley explains in theinterview that there are no plans for internet browsing on Xbox. Here’s the quote:

GC: There’s no browser on this still, right?
S.B.: No! Nobody wants a browser on a game box. And I’m not trying to be down on Sega, but if you talk to parents whoare buying a lot of game consoles for their kids–oh my lord, they don’t want their kids to have a browser in theirbedrooms. Are you kidding?

The HBO Spin: The lack of internet browsing on Xbox will undoubtedly pose a problem forthe online Xbox-Halo fan community. To view fan pages like HBO it means having access toa PC.

Wow. That was the longest outage since we moved the servers here. Ouch. Anyway, we’re back up. (We think.) Sorry for the downtime! Look for more updates later today or early tomorrow.)

We want to apologize for the downtime today… an underground cable broke somewhere, and it took the Telco over 8 hours to find the problem. I’m still not 100% sure it’s solved… but we should be back up for good, soon.

Slow Halo day… so we’ll pass on some interesting Xbox tidbits. J Allard was interviewed over at GameSpot, and had some interesting things to say. Worth a read. (The bit on why they stuck with ‘Xbox’ is intriguing.) The Xbox specs have been finalized, and you can find them here, also at GameSpot. Sharky Extreme has a great article on nVidia’s contribution to the Xbox… if you want your jaw to drop, go read ITS specs. Now go out and enjoy your Friday night!

Budd Morris sends word that he’s starting up a new Halo clan, Halo Division. Currently, he’s not looking for standard recruits… he’s looking for staffers. If you’re insterested, stop by the site and read the job opening list.

Tempest in a Teapot, Part Deux: Okay, this has nothing to do with the other rumor discussed recently… but it sure is silly. Recently, Matt Soell went on an answering spree at Rampancy.net… and tossed out this comment, in response to a question about what operating system the bungie.net servers might move to:

We’ve spoken to a couple people here who’ve made snarfy comments about us not using an MS server for b.net and we’ve ignored them. The most important thing is the integrity of the product. If MS were to produce a server OS that ran faster and crashed less than any of the unix variants out there in a series of independent tests, we’d use it.

Inside Mac Games picked up the comment this morning, and by lunchtime, it was on Slashdot. There are now over 200 comments about that article there… many assuming the worst. Matt clarified the original comment at R.net, for those who missed the point the first time… we ALL need to remember that the rumors that fly sometimes are just that… rumors. Bottom line: bungie.net runs on linux servers now, and will continue to do so, despite the fact that they’re running at Microsoft. And Matt’s getting tired of being misinterpreted. 🙂

Thanks to Pr@iler, who sent along a desktop combining the Xbox logo and a modified Halo logo for our Wallpaper page. Pax.

Thanks to Nights, who, although particlurly tactful about it, uncovered another French Halo site, Clan Highlanders. Through this site, we’ve added a number of French sites to our Links page: Halo Zone (site of the Halo Mystics), Addiction Halo (very nicely laid out), C.I.R.C.E. (all Flash, very little substance), and Fragger’s Halo (who we’d left off previously because they used an awful lot of our content without asking – seems like a petty reason to ignore). Enjoy!

Thanks to Jon Kimmich, product planner for MS Games, who wrote to say that the reason Halo was left off the list of announced titles was because

This announcement was just to announce “3rd party” (ie. non-MS) publishers. All titles published by MS are “1st-party” titles, and we’ll make some announcements about them at a later date.

Thanks, Jon… we’re all breathing a sigh of relief here! 😉

Okay, so MS bought Bungie specifically so that Halo could be an Xbox title, right? And Halo’s been shown, in one form or another, for months. (It was demonstrably playable at E3, for example.) So Microsoft had a huge global press conference yesterday, at which they showed a bunch of titles, including Unreal Tournament, Max Payne, Tomb Raider Next Gen, and more (the full list can be found in this Computer and Video Games article)… where was Halo? (Thanks to TomeOne for the link to the list.)