Just a heads-up… the entire HBO staff is either at MacWorld this week or on vacation (yeah, we know, bad timing), so updates will be less frequent than usual. We’ll do our best to get some info posted from the floor at MW, but no guarantees. Mail, too, is difficult; we ask you to be patient with us.

Czar Vegeta Renada writes to tell us about roleplay.halowar.com,a new website in which you must roleplay a player character to be allowed to stick around. Interesting concept… take a look!

Thanks to Todd Hansen, who noticed that the b.net servers came back online at about 2:15 Bungie Time. Oops! OLD Bungie Time, that is. (Central Time, for all you fuddyduddies that live in the real world.) Myth, anyone?

Bungie returns from the limbo of cross-country moves… bungie.com is back online (although bungie.net doesn’t seem to be yet), and Matt Soell checks in to let us know he’s alive and settled into Redmond, more or less. Oh, and Marty O’Donnell takes potshots at Seattle’s weather. Gettin’ back to normal!

Halo-Net, one of the early Halo sites, has decided to call it quits. Alan Stott, AKA Flashback, has put up a short page explaining his reasoning… we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. (Thanks to Yrro, of Halo Center, for the heads-up.)

|CARNYL| sends word of an interview with Lee Rossini, Brand Manager at Sierra Studios, over at Tribal War. Lee is in charge of all the marketing for Tribes 2. When he was asked,

“Okay. It’s time for a practical exercise in marketing. I’m a fan. You’re the marketing expert. Convince me why I should purchase Tribes2 over HALO.”

he answered with some information that might or might not get under your skin.

Well…for starters, each game has their own strengths..the Halo marketing person can point out things about Halo that we don’t have just as easily as I can do the same about Tribes 2. That being said, I think there are some very cool things about Tribes that should be mentioned when it comes to choosing it over any FPS action title. First, Tribes itself was truly an innovative title..it redefined team-based multiplayer action. Second, Tribes 2 will be even more revolutionary. Dynamix is putting together a game that is designed from the start to build community.and teamplay. With the in-game and out-of-game communications features, killer community building tools, and awesome teambased play, Tribes 2 will be the ultimate team-based action title. Third, we should have at least 50+ players in the game at once. Nobody is doing what these guys (at Dynamix) can do..yet.

You make the call… will Tribes 2 beat Halo for the “ultimate team-based action title” moniker?

The Halo SETI Marines, far from fading, continue to advance on that 46th position. At the current pace, it will take about 2 more weeks… but TidBITS WILL fall. Crunching continues apace, with almost half the team members submitting at least one unit this week. And watch that Banzif II… the winner of the Frogblast Award is on a roll to climb again! Check the 7-day stats for all the details.

Attacked by the Covenant! Almost all of bungie.org (including, obviously, this site) went offline on Sunday morning, 4 am UTC. Finally, almost 48 hours later, we’re back up and running. No, this had nothing to do with bungie.net or bungie.com going offline… those events happened because those servers are moving from Chicago to Redmond. And no, it had nothing to do with Microsoft shutting us down… it was a nasty nor’easter that killed two repeaters and a large chunk of underground cable. Our upstream provider seems to think all the problems are solved. We hope so. Apologies for the downtime.

This one’s for Marty. Xbox IGN have an interview with Chanel Summers (Xbox Audio Manager) about game music on the Xbox. Here’s a quote:

I see that music for Xbox is going to be amazing, and it’s going to really take off, because as I said audio for console games has not traditionally been great. You’ve got a lot of talented composers out there, but they’ve had to work within a small box with other consoles. And here, we’re giving them all the tools, technology and room so that they don’t have to make compromises, they can just concentrate on making great content. And that’s what they should be doing, and that’s why we say that the Xbox is a composer-driven platform.

Looks like Marty is in for a treat. 🙂

John Carmack (id Software) provides further details about his position on the Xbox Advisory Board in a Slashdot post. John ended with these comments:

In any case, talking with MS has no bearing on my development decisions. I’m still using OpenGL, and we are still planning simultaneous releases for linux and MacOS-X. If things work out well with X-Box, that may be added to the list.

Sounds good.

Peter Hogan has sent in a new wallpaper for our Wallpaper page. Check it out!

In honor of the PCZone scans, we’ve updated our Concept Art page to include all concept art released recently.

Our agent in Holland was finally able to get his hands on the PCZone Benelux July 2000 issue, which contains the first of a multi-part Halo preview. We’re still working on permission for the full scans (and a translation), but there were a few new bits of concept art in the spread, including some drawings of the monkey-like creature first seen in the bTV day 4 footage, and a very nice early sketch of the dropship, done by Marcus Lehto. (Yes, we asked about these.) You can find these on the Magazine Shots page of our screenshots section.

Woohoo! Thanks to Marty O’Donnell, who found the hidden link to part 3 of the CGO Preview buried in previous links. Sorry about the lack of music coverage, Marty… seems like that’s the end, too. Interestingly, this part acknowledges the MS buyout, which the first two parts didn’t. Definitely worth a read!

Kudos to Kuniklo, who noticed (on the R.net forum) that PlanetXbox has learned that John Carmack will be on the Xbox advisory board. Interesting news, since Id has not announced any plans for Xbox games…

Once again, kudos to edge, who noticed that Computer Games Online has part 2 of their Halo preview, “Bungie dreams of rings and things.” As before, the info is quite good, and has some new tidbits; Jason Jones talks about how they decided what would go into the E3 trailer:

“We were trying to capture the core elements of both the single-player and multiplayer games such as stealing weapons, assaulting bases, grand vistas, sneak attacks—all the things we expect players to do.”

There’s also a nifty concept drawing of a human boat… first we’ve seen! edge seems to be working towards the HBO field reporter position…

The move is underway! Both bungie.com and bungie.net are currently unreachable… this almost certainly means the machines are physically on their way to Redmond. Here’s hoping the move goes smoothly, and that everything’s back up and running soon! (Flashback noticed b.com down about 4 hours ago… so they started pretty early in the morning.)

FraxX writes to tell us about a German Halo site he’s involved in… Haloweb. Not sure how this missed going on our links page… we’ve seen it before. In any case, it’s there now! Check it out, if you speak German!

Killermac.com have posted a hilarious new lookMicrosoft/Bungie page. Yes this could be the new face of Bungie. Warning: for the humorlessly impaired this is a JOKE people… with possibly a bit of tru7h thrown in.

“…all of the Bungie team will be moving to Redmond and they will be assimilated.”Damn edge and his amazing X-ray eyes. Edge points us to aPlanetXbox news item about Bungie’s third game “Fantasy Siege” in this month’s Next-Generation magazine. While this isn’t exactly new news the quote is hilarious. Here it is:

For two years running Bungie has wowed the crowds with the astonishing Halo,and according to Ed Fries, “What is even more impressive is Fantasy Siege – atotally different type of game running on the same engine. The engine is a very important thing to us, and is a huge part of the deal.” It was too early to talk about a lot of specifics, but all of the Bungie team will be moving to Redmond and they will be assimilated.

Fantasy Siege looks set to become another Xbox title.