Old news but still good news!

The Egg Page grows
Three months ago, it was discovered that a piece of music written for the Bungie game Myth could be heard from a difficult-to-get-to spot at the end of Assault on the Control Room. Recently, it was learned that the same piece of music could be found in another, also-difficult-to-get-to spot at the start of the same level. We've added this information (including video documentation) to the Easter Eggs page. Interestingly enough, that particular piece of music, in sheet form, showed up on the Bungie webcam almost a year ago - does this mean we can date the inclusion of this particular pair of eggs? (Louis Wu 17:21:54 UTC)

What programmers write when nobody looks
Heh - the digging has started. Someone hacked around with their Halo disc, and found some interesting strings buried deep in the code - check 'em out. Evidence that cheats ONCE existed, at least... and some pretty funny (if colorful) error language. Definitely PG-rated for strong language. Thanks to Ray Rose for the heads-up on our forum! (Louis Wu 15:46:10 UTC)

Mirrors for the Montage Video up
Ask and ye shall receive. Three kind bandwidth mavens have proffered up connections for the newest Halo vid - we can call it the Montage Video. You can grab it at:

More when we hear about 'em! (Remember, this puppy's 20 megs large, 320x240 in .wmv format, and just under 4 minutes long.) Be sure to option-click or right-click the http links - otherwise, you might get a load of junk on the screen. (Louis Wu 05:29:47 UTC)

XGamer Halo review up at Games Radar UK
A new magazine called Xgamer went onsale in the UK last month, and the first issue contained a 12-page Halo spread. (We'll be posting scans, courtesy of Ghôlsbane, later this week, when issue 2 hits the stands.) In the meantime, though, Games Radar UK has put up a chunk of the text of the spread - most of the actual review part is there. You can read the review now (they gave it a 9/10), and check out the added details later, when the scans go up. (We've added this one to our Reviews database, and put the 11 screens into our Screenshots database.) Thanks to Ghôlsbane for the heads-up on the online review, as well! (Louis Wu 18:54:07 UTC)

Psyjnir Complex isn't dead yet
Psyrixx dropped us a note to let us know that they're working hard on bringing the Psyjnir Complex back online. In the meantime, he's redrawing the comic series he started before the server melted - with more detail than the first time. Check back every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a new comic - until the site's online, they're not going to be archived, so if you miss 'em, you miss 'em. (Louis Wu 06:34:25 UTC)

Fanfest action, webcam-style
Freewill has put up a video comprised of over 1500 webcam snapshots taken over a 14 hour period... it's 6 megs, and shows (mostly) the projection screen we used for the first 12 hours or so. However, there are people shots, as well... if you've got a fast connection, give it a look! (Louis Wu 13:49:30 UTC)

A new challenge
Regarding the new images posted at Tru7h and Reconciliation yesterday - Dave Candland has thrown down the gauntlet, with respect to this picture:

Regarding scrn_084.jpg, you're going to have to scrutinize very closely to find this one. The hippo was all over the place. This image can only be found in one location. I'll be surprised if this is discovered by Easter.

Will it be you that finds it? Where will you look? The race is on! (Louis Wu 18:38:23 UTC)

Truth and Recon updated - cool stuff
Games Magazine afficionados will recognize the latest batch of Screenshots at Bungie's Tru7h and Reconciliation site as a fun game of Eyeballs - can you figure them all out? (Don't play this game if you haven't played Halo...) Additionally, a new section (inspired in part by an HBO fan request) has opened - Desktops. Getchyer official Bungie wallpaper here! Thanks to mnemesis for the heads-up. (Louis Wu 21:50:25 UTC)

Halo icons galore

More icons for everyone! Liquidex has redone his as a WIndows icon file - you can grab it here. For those among you for which .ico files are very hard to use (you can count me in that group), the .gif version at the start of this post is the same image. Also, Djoey.154 created a whole series of .ico files (which I've also converted to something a bit more web-friendly) - you can see all of them here. (Louis Wu 00:29:52 UTC)

26 light years and no time to sleep
Another look at a post-Halo possibility, from drexx - Earth: Combat Evolved picks up where Halo leaves off, and the action starts right up. You'll find it in our Fan Fiction section. (Louis Wu 02:09:29 UTC)

Start your engines...
Think you're a l33t Warthog driver? Can you do donuts on the back of a Pelican, while your gunner takes out the swarming Banshees? Do you love nothing more than the smell of engine grease on your armor? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, your Sarge wants you! (Your psychiatrist probably wants you, too, but that's no concern of ours.) Grab your grease gun and head on over to the Maw 700, an honest-to-goodness bungie.org contest! Submissions are accepted beginning now, soldier. (Louis Wu 00:00:00 UTC)

New Halo Links (and catching up)
Whew! 1600 forum posts and two extra-heavy titanium-alloy drillbits (needed to remove the lock from the command center here at HBO Central, since Count Zero wouldn't open it voluntarily) later, I'm finally caught up with older material. We'll start with the easy stuff; there are a couple of Halo websites to inform you of. Halo Norge is a general Norwegian Halo site (it's pretty annoying to see scans I created myself with someone else's imprint on them, but hey...), and iBonk.com is a very nicely done Halo Movies site, containing clips of everything from funny sequences to tutorial-type demos. (iBonk isn't new, exactly - but we've neglected to bring it to our readers' attentions before now.) These have been added to our Links list. Wallpaper update coming soon. (Louis Wu 21:57:17 UTC)

Time, now, to break for the door
I've just received word that Louis Wu is back from his vacation. That means that all the content I've been too lazy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunable to post will go up pretty soon, probably as soon as Louis gets Security to break into the control room and remove me. Oh well, I was starting to miss that basement anyway... (Count Zero 03:26:21 UTC)

Tweeter LANfest described
Lophan has posted a Halo @ Tweeter Day postmortem on our forum, detailing the goings-on this past weekend of the Philly Halo Anonymous chapter of the Seventh Column... if you weren't there, you missed up to 15 players fragging each other on huge bigscreen HDTVs for over 6 hours. (Freewill, another attendee, posted a couple of pics recently.) Wow... a 2 hour, 6x6 CTF game... ouch. Go read it! (Louis Wu 03:00:47 UTC)

Warthog Jump goes WMV
Cybrfrk writes to say that he's put the Warthog Jump movie up on his site in .WMV format (with permission) - sound quality is pretty low, but for folks having trouble with QuickTime, this might be the way to go - plus, it's only 8.5 mb. (He's also started his filmed cutscene collection - the Maw final cutscene (non-legendary), as well as the final credits, are now up.) We've added the Warthog Jump link to our mirror list. (Louis Wu 00:51:10 UTC)

Mac Hall and the Xbox
Not fully Halo news... but it's pretty funny: This week's Mac Hall comic at Inside Mac Games focuses on the inline safety release built into each Xbox controller from Microsoft. (Interestingly enough, the Mac Hall general response to this feature characterizes them strongly as PC (as opposed to console) gamers - almost every console gamer I've talked to about this thinks it's brilliant, and that every controller should contain this feature. Hell, I thought it was silly... until the first time I backed away from the screen, trying to avoid that charging Hunter, and accidentally knocked my chair over backwards; that inline release saved a lot of equipment that day (as well as my game; instant pause until I reconnected, giving me time to regain my equilibrium.) It's a good thing, I think... but that doesn't mean it's not fodder for the Mac Hall Funny Machine. :) Plus, it gives 'em a chance to take a shot at the size of the Xbox...) Thanks to Vector40 for the heads-up. (Louis Wu 16:03:12 UTC)

Legendary Walkthrough of PoA posted
Whoa. No7orious has written a Legendary Walkthrough for the first level of the game, Pillar of Autumn... and Bungie liked it enough that they put it up at their Tru7h and Reconciliation site (along with 25 screenshots illustrating some of the finer points). Very nice! Check it out if you're having your... um, head handed to you on a platter when trying to play through this level on Legendary. (And as Yeroen says in this news item, maybe this will start a trend!) Thanks to Acrappa, of Rampancy.net, for pointing this puppy out. (Louis Wu 01:12:56 UTC)

Halo in Wired
Call me lazy - or call it late. Noah "migraineboy" Brimhall said it just fine, though, so I'm just gonna quote him.

In the March 2002 issue of Wired magazine there is an interesting article on AI in games called "Wild Things" and in the article there are several mentions of Halo, including a great quote from Chris Butcher.

"One of the things that makes Halo's AI interesting is the sense that the AI doesn't cheat. It doesn't regard you, the player, as anything special, nor does know special things about where you are," explains Halo AI engineer Chris Butcher. "The NPCs all have their own unique knowledge model, which means that any given character in the world doesn't know where the player is. All they know is where they last saw him."

The article gives Halo a lot of credit for its very good AI and has a screen shot from the game also.

My copy hasn't arrived yet - Guess I'll be looking at this tomorrow. On the upside, I got a significant distance towards finishing the Press Scans section today - one more day of grunt work ought to do it... then it's off to Gameplay Tips. (Yes, I know, Miscellaneous Resources is still empty, too... geez.) (Louis Wu 04:30:39 UTC)

Difficulty symbols, bigger
We've gotten requests a number of times for pointers to the symbols used in the difficulty screens at the start of Halo (most recently, this morning). We'd put this page up back in October... but the images are somewhat small. To make life easier for those attempting to use these symbols in clan websites or the like, we've extracted them from the difficulty screens, and combined them for easy access. You can find them here. (Louis Wu 13:25:22 UTC)

Warthog on the bridge!
Heh - very cool. Deimos™, of Subnova, has managed to get the Warthog back to the very start of the level Halo - follow this link, then head to the bottom of his 'Halo fun page' for a pic. (We'll be adding this to the One-Shots page in the near future.) (Louis Wu 14:49:15 UTC)

Beating the scripts
Hmm... this is interesting. If you've ever headed back to the start of Silent Cartographer after activating the Cartographer (that is, rather than getting into the dropship that would end the level), you'll find that all the Marines you'd left near the start were dead. (Presumably, they were slaughtered by random Covs you managed to miss along the way.) Apparently, though, this is a scripted outcome, one you have no control over; Chez Wiz reports that

That's sort of disappointing... don't you wish you could save the poor buggers? I wonder what would happen if you forced them down into the interior of SC, then got them out of the jeep and blocked their return with the jeep itself? Would they STILL die? Will anyone find out? (Louis Wu 09:32:14 UTC)

Assault first bridge trick, filmed
Doum and Pat, a pair of Halo fanatics from Quebec, have made a series of movies to show how to get down to the bottom off the first bridge of Assault on the Control Room - it requires some tricky timing in coop mode. The films were encoded with DivX 4 - I found that they were viewable on a Mac with the newest DivX decoder (the Windows decoder has never been a problem). Quality is somewhat low (it was filmed off a TV screen), but you can certainly see what you need to be doing. Movies are hosted on Doum's server.

Part 1 (2.83 MB) - how to get under the bridge

Part 2 (2.06 MB) - how to get on the edge near the ground

Part 3 (4.28 MB) - where to go down

Part 4 (3.16 MB) - how to go down

Using this trick, you avoid triggering any baddies - you'll be traveling through a totally unpopulated level. You'll need to use the Banshee on the ground to head back up to the bridge, since the door at the bottom is locked. Nice job, guys! (Louis Wu 11:00:09 UTC)

Enormous numbers of screens added
A couple of months ago, GameKult.com (a French gaming site) put up their Halo review... since then they've added a mind-numbing 152 screenshots. Almost none of them show unique material - they're simply a nearly comprehensive look at the first four levels of the game. They are unique to GameKult, though, so we felt they should be in the Screenshots database here (we try to be comprehensive). Thanks to the wonders of scripting technology, I was able to add them without pain to myself... so if you are having trouble viewing them at GameKult, check 'em out in our database. (Louis Wu 00:25:59 UTC)

Explanation behind the obsession
While on the subject of the Psyjnir Complex... seems they've got a new comics storyline started. Take a look in their Comics section... (Louis Wu 20:46:03 UTC)

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