Thanks to Aaron Sommer, who spotted an article about Cannibal Harry’s online woes at UK-based The Register. Definitely worth a read.

The Halo SETI Marines gain another 6 recruits this week, and remain firmly in 43rd position in the Battle of the Teams. DarthFlounder again outcrunches the competition, and Trux (a new recruit last week) leapfrogs over 48 team members to garner the Frogblast award. The most interesting movement, though, is the second-place cruncher this week… Chucky. Does the 35-50% increase in crunching (compared to the previous couple of months) mean the Halo dev team’s computers have been beefed up… or that they haven’t been used as much this week? All the gory details can be found on the 7 day stats page. Pax.

Seen at Battleground: Halo – Speedy3D has an article comparing Black and White, Team Fortress 2, and Halo, discussing how they redifine their respective genres, and dreaming about how sweet it would be to see these in time for Christmas. Aside from the wholly unrealistic estimate of release dates, it was a fine article, at first… but my eyes glazed over when I read this line:

The story that is running behind Halo is reminiscent of Quake 2.

To each his own, I suppose. Excuse me, I have some more Banks reading to do.

David, an Australian fan, sent us this note:

This is David from the Australian Music Group Seventh, one of our fans made up a video Music Clip using Halo footage. The song in the clip is “I’m Gonna Fly” we recorded the track ealier in the year with Halo in mind.

The song won the Australian Triple J Unearthed Contest, which groups such as Silver Chair, Savage Garden have won and so on… The track I’m Gonna Fly is free for download from our site as well. If you get time check it out, its pretty cool…

The clip is in RealMedia format, and weighs in at a bit over 20 megs, zipped. The video is an edited version of the E3 movie, and fits surprisingly well with the music. We’re hesitant to point out 20 meg download links any more, after what happened to Cannibal Harry, so be careful. If you want to check out the band, their website is here.

StarHawk sends word that IntelGamer has a new Halo preview up. It’s nice to see new people excited about Halo, even if some of the info is out of date or just plain wrong. (All the pictures in the article use the old-style, outdated screenshots, Larry Niven is named in connection with the storyline, and IntelGamer suggests that there are rumors “that Microsoft is withholding release of HALO until the X-Box of released”, among other tidbits.) The fact is, though, that not many games could generate a new preview like this in the current drought that is Halo PR.

Thanks to Elmo, who submitted the first of what should be 8 chapters for a new piece of Halo fan fiction.

I really want to get some feedback from fans. I’ve taken a few creative liberties with the story before they arrive on the Halo but i want some feedback on how well this works.

Read it on our Fan Fiction page, then let Elmo know what you think!

Interesting. Seems the Xbox is going to have a VChip-like parental controls, according to Alex Kotowitz (Xbox’s Senior Director of Sales), as reported by Game Informer. Parents will be able to restrict what games are played on the Xbox, based on game rating. This gives everybody (parents, regulators, adult gamers) what they want… except the kids. Will it affect what console the kids ask for? Pax.

Battleground: Halo puts up another episode of “Retaliation”, a fan fiction in parts by Patrick Palmer. Pax.

Wow. Seems the nVidia movie has caused some major problems… R.net has a story that every Halo fan should read. Cannibal Harry, a Bungie fan with a big heart, now has a big (whopping big) ISP bill to go with it. From the outside, it sounds like Earthlink (his ISP) was either astoundingly ignorant of what was going on on its servers, or just plain greedy. In any case, you should read this thread on the R.net forum, and this explanation from Harry himself. And let us HOPE that this gets resolved in a reasonable manner… because it’s not only a problem for CH, it’s a problem for everyone who tries to do his part in a fan community.

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.