Can the Halo SETI Marinestake on the might of Brazil? Yes the country! They’re just under 1000 units ahead in the SETI rankings. Let’s get ’em! ;)A big welcome to TickleSpace#2 who joins the team with healthy 119 units. Check out who’s crunchin’ and who’s munchin’ on the 24 hours stats page.

Halo scoop! The May 29 issue of Newsweek arrived… and here’s the Halo review, in all its glory. Would you check out the tires on that baby? Just for the fun of it, here’s a bigger version of the actual screenshot. Newsweek Online has most of that issue on their website… the only thing they’re missing is the E3 article. 🙁 Pax.

Don’t think there’s enough good stuff going to the online sites (HBO among them)? Disgruntled because all the juicy bits seem to get to the gaming mags first, and trickle down to the fansites afterwards? Read this post to our forum, and rejoice.

The Halo SETI Marines gain another couple of members (Welcome to Dogcow goes Moof and Robbie!), and continue to close the distance to the next team in the Club Rankings. Jjaro Tech edges Banzif for La Crunch Honneur (but averaged almost 4 fewer units per day for the past two weeks). VADER_AU takes the Frogblast award for the day… but Wizard climbed 51 positions over the past two weeks! See all the results on the 24 hour and 14-day stats pages.

Oni Central has put up the backside of the E3 flyer we brought you yesterday. No really new screens… but a beautiful layout! Go feast your eyes!

Rampancy.net has scanned in the rest of the E3 Press kit. Before now, only the Halo-related pages have made it onto the net… but there is some pretty fun Bungie history stuff in there, as well. Go check it out!

Thanks to Vector, who sent in a pair of wallpapers for our Wallpaper page. Vector works at Battleground: Halo.

Kudos to The Maz, who took a digital snap of a page of the latest Newsweek in which Halo was mentioned. The lips are “buzz factor” (out of a possible 5), and the drops of blood are “gore factor” (also out of 5). Listed for Dreamcast… interesting. 🙂 (We’ll work on getting a better pic, too.)

Looks like we’re waiting until July for the E3 trailer. In a post on our forum, Matt Soell said that

The trailer will first appear on the cover CD of a major PC gaming magazine. It will be their August issue, which hits the streets mid-July.

It will be available for download shortly after that, at a size of (probably) about 100 MB. The DVD version? Yeah, if they can find a duplicator… Thanks for the info, Matt!

The Halo SETI Marines get another large infusion of WUs today, this time from thulcandra, who brought in 609 units. The fight for the next position in the Club Rankings is going to be tough, though… Jjaro Tech takes La Crunch Honneur again, and Moomjean takes the Frogblast award, climbing 8 notches. Are you doing your part? Check the 24 hour stats to see!

Halo scoop! Thanks to a generous benefactor at Bungie and a well respected Bungie fan (we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!) we bring you Bungie’s E3 Halo flyer! Pretty outstanding. Check out that Marine’s face. No mistaking that Marathon logo.

Small Halo snippet in Jim’s E3 Post-Op at Daily Raider. Halo is the game other developers are now trying to beat! Mark Rein (Unreal 2) was reported to have said:

But Rein simply hinted at the amazing things around the corner (vehicles, super-high poly character models), and we were desperate for any niblet on Unreal 2 for the PC or Xbox. He claimed that the next big thing coming from them was going to put Halo to shame.

Halo is the yardstick to beat other games with! 😉

Thanks to Allenthar, who has submitted a new wallpaper for our Wallpaper page, and a new banner for our Banners page. Tired of that old stuff? Grab some new stuff!

Kudos to HiddenTalon, who found yet another E3 wrapup at Outpost D-34. Here’s the Halo article. They got a couple of things wrong (they described the test machines at e3 as “PIII’s with GE Force 2’s”, while in reality they had TNT2 Ultra’s in them), but the “Tribes on crack” comment is probably right on. 🙂

Couple of Halo sightings around the net, courtesy of Rampancy.net… first, All Games Network has a couple of Halo-related films (although none of them seem to be viewable on a mac, and only the First Impressions of Halo seem to be viewable on a Win98 box with the free version of RealPlayer installed), and Playboy had a small e3 section in which they describe Halo as having “the best-looking graphics ever seen in a PC game.” I think you should all hit Noc up for the source of that tip…

Halo Network continues to scan in the E3 press kit… today’s installment contains pages 14 and 15. These two contain frequently asked questions… nice to see official Bungie answers to some of these, even though we’ve gotten unofficial answers along the line. Check it out! (Thanks to the Marathon’s Story page for the heads-up.)

Blam!… The Halo SETI Marines bump another team in the Club Rankings. Top 50, here they come! Today’s climb is thanks to Ashley Frost, who brought 1632 units with her when she joined. Welcome,Ashley! 139 other marines added units today… were you one of them? Check the 24 hour stats to find out!

Thanks to HiddenTalon on our forumfor pointing us to an another E3 wrap-up piece this time at Heat. Here’s what they had to say:

Halo – the graphics and physics engine of this game have already created quite a stir. Bungie still needs to get a full demo for users to truly appreciate it’s qualities. We’ll have more on this in the coming months – count on it!

Short and sweet.

The theories page has seen a couple of new additions; Mostafa Sadraii posts a discussion of some observations he’s made from the various films released to date, and Rony Sanchezspeculates on the Jjaro logo and its relevance to Halo. (Note: Many of the ideas presented here were first brought up on the Marathon’s Story page (check What’s New for February 8 and 9 of this year), and were summarized on this page.)Thanks, guys!

Seen at Marathon’s Story: Gamasutra has an interesting article, originally presented at the 2000Game Developer’s Conference, on ways to use cinematic techniques, developed over the past 75years, in games that need cinematic sequences in order to drive the storyline. It’s an interesting read, all by itself, and relevant here because Halo has positioned itself (or its fans have positioned it) as a game with a rich, complex backstory, and will most likely require some cinematic sequences to further the solo play. (And the E3 trailer has made it clear that Halo is quite capable of producing such sequences.) Go take a look!