New Fan Fiction today from Tycho [OSC]. Short, but sweet… there is already feedback on our forum asking for more! Enjoy. Pax.

Rampancy.net has made note of another poll to smash… Gamertech is asking “What game are you most looking forward to?” (Gee, where have we heard that question before?) Currently, Halo holds a commanding lead, but only 60 people have voted. Do your part to keep Halo where it belongs!

Blam!… but they just don’t know it yet! The Halo SETI Marinestake down Team 3DNow! but the SETI team ranks server hasn’t recorded it yet. Team membership rises to over 400 marines! A big welcome to Shard (208 units), Josh S (192 units), Agent Cooper (111 units), Fred (17 units), and Psyjnir Complex (12 units)who enter the top 300. JackMech takes the Frogblast award for the third day in a row and Jjaro tech pumps up the volume. Check the 24 hour stats page for the gory details. The Halo team should reach 77777 units this weekend. Who’ll up that 77777th unit?

The logo on the right side of the new Halo pic scanned by R.net was mentioned by them last night… but the weird glyphs along the bottom were not. They look vaguely mesoamerican… can anyone place them? Does this suggest that Aztec or Mayan glyphs were created by non-earth-dwellers? Thanks to The Marathon’s Story page for noticing this. Pax.

Matt Soell once again clears up the “Halo is just Myth III repackaged” rumor, with some history of Armor, the codename of the game that Halo evolved from. Thanks, Matt!

Also from Massa: GameStar has released a large E3 report (I couldn’t find it on their web page, so it must be in the print edition) which fingers Halo as the best thing they saw at the show. Massa points out that Tribes2 wasn’t even in the top 10.

Haloplayers reports that someone from Barrysworld talked to Take2 yesterday, and was told that Halo won’t be out before 2001. Not a huge surprise, but Take2 should probably be in the loop here. As this news post was being put up, word came from Massa, at Halo Network… apparently, GameStar is also suggesting a date in early 2001.

Wow! Thanks to Allenthar, who points out that the recent advance of the Halo SETI Marines not only propelled them into the top 50 Club Teams… but into the top 100 Teams of any kind! Congrats, folks.

For A Few Units More. The Halo SETI Marinesneed an extra 200+ units to take out Team 3DNow! in the Battle of the Teams. They’re going down! 😉 Banzif and JackMech take the La Crunch and Frogblast awards. Find out more on the24 hour stats page.

Noctavis, over at R.net, has scanned in a beautiful shot of the E3 Banner, which showed up in the July 2000 issue of Incite Magazine. Look at the detail of that shot! Gotta go out and buy me one of those tomorrow.

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. who own a 19.9% equity interest in Bungie Software have announced a 60% growth in net sales for its fiscal second quarter ended April 30, 2000. For the three months, net sales were 70 million U.S. dollars, a 34 percent increase from 52million for the quarter ended April 30, 1999. Net income was 3.3 million, a 115 percent increase over 1.5 million for the same period a year ago. You did buy shares right? Take-Two will be distributing Halo and Oni in Europe. Rockstar Games who were recently acquired by Take-Two will be publishing Oni on PlayStation 2

Mentioned a couple of days ago at Battleground: Halo, but we slipped until Edgecrusher sent us mail: TiberiumSun.com has a poll up… “What caught your eye at E3?” Red Alert is still in first place (not surprising, given where the poll is), but Halo is a close second. See what you can do, okay? Pax.

The Halo SETI Marines dig in in their push to be top dog. A solid effort today… 463 units crunched, almost all accounted for. Welcome to SeanA, and congratulations to JackMech,who vaulted over 26 teammates to take the Frogblast award. Congratulations, too, to Banzif,who crushed the competition for La Crunch Honneur. How are YOU doing? Check the 24 hour stats!

Well-Rounded Entertainment has posted their E3 Awards, and Halo garnered a Runner-up award in the Action category. (The category was won by Alice.) In addition, they came in second (with 44% of the vote, compared to Deus Ex’s 46%) in the Reader’s Choice awards. Thanks to R.net, who noticed the awards.

Seen on the Story page… seems the report a few days ago of a bomb with a nickname of “Kortana” might not be true after all. The makers of the bomb in question have said that no nickname has been given to it either by them or by the USAF customer. Hmm… oh, well, it seemed too good to be true, anyway.

Serious modification, and weather… Vector, at Battleground: Halo, asked Doug Zartman anotherfew questions, and got a couple of useful answers about topics of high fan interest. Want to know the latest about game alteration, or environmental effects? Head on over and read Doug’s answers!

Blam!… another team bites the dust as the Halo SETI Marines climb to position 49. Woohoo! 48 coming soon… depending on when SETI decides to give back the units lost every day. (Over 200 units crunched today unaccounted for.) Check the 24 hour stats for details!

Thanks to Claude Errera for passing on this link to a Halo page at MeccaWorld. Nothing much new other than a small poll which asks “What do you think of Halo?” So far 22% think that “Halo bites, don’t even bother!” Time to rock the poll!

For those not up to downloading the large image files of yesterday’s PCXL scans, we’ve transcribed the text from both articles. “Tired of Playing WIth Yourself?” (from the May issue) focuses mainly on multiplayer, while “Mission: ‘The Angels Sing’” concentrates on solo play. There were two new screenshots, which can be found in our Screenshots archives (on the Magazine page).

Hugh Hancock points us to a post-E3 report with a different flavor than most… what impressed the folks at Machinima.com most about Halo was its potential for use as a movie-making tool. This has been a topic of interesting discussion on our forum, and others… here’s a group that wouldn’t normally be interested in Halo, finding the same excitement. While they may or may not have the details right, this comment piqued our curiosity:

…but the announcement of the show as far as I was concerned was that Bungie would be shipping the game with a fully-featured “demo editor”. An editor they used to create the gameplay movie shown at E3 itself, no less.

This is news to us… noone else at E3 has reported this fact (although Doug Zartman said in an October chat at World Without Borders that Bungie planned to release tools… but plans can change). In any case, the Machinima.com article is quite a good read… go check it out!