Combination Halo fansite and gaming group The Hushed Casket is celebrating its fifth anniversary; head on over and check out Midnight's recap of the past year, as well as their more exhaustive site history.

The most recent Preferred Player column over at Xbox.com, penned by KP, is on Freeverse's XBLA port of Marathon: Durandal; specifically, an XBL cooperative game of Marathon the author played with yours truly and other notable Bungiefen Geary11 and ZuP101.

Bruce "Hippieman" Morrison at Freeverse, the developer that brought Bungie's Marathon: Durandal to Xbox Live Arcade, has been working on a walkthrough of the game. While of course there is always the Marathon Spoiler Guide, which covers all three games, Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon: Infinity, Hippieman's walkthrough includes screenshots of environments, whereas the Spoiler Guide features only maps.

Spartan182 has sent in a PrintMusic file of the piano solo from the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer. We've added it to the Halo Sheet Music section, check it out!

No, I don't mean an XBLA release of Marathon, as it seems that is not to be; but rather, what was thought to be a long-dormant project to make a total conversion of Marathon 1 for the Unreal Tournament engine-- Marathon Resurrection-- has finally been released as a Final Candidate.

If you find the open source version of Marathon, Aleph One, still too low-tech for your tastes, but still want to sample Bungie's pre-Halo SF trilogy, have a look.

Sorahn has set up a sort of halo mini-site at halo.sorahn.net; within that there's a Halo 3 beta subsection where he's laid out all the ranks, weapons, and medals.

Sorahn put up a page of all the H3 beta medals he's found so far; we also put up a special H3 Beta Medals page where you can search and sort them. Work is underway on better quality images and a more complete collection, word is there are still a few missing.

With the Public Beta fast approaching, there's even more Halo-related news spiraling out of Bungie and the community.

The Year We Make Contact

Frankie at Bungie says if you make a cool enough emblem design, it'll be included in Halo 3. Check the post at Bungie.net about the Bnet reader design contest for details.

Kevin R. Grazier, a Ph.D in geophysics and a huge fan of Halo, has contributed to a book called Halo Effect that looks at the Halo phenomenon; his piece, Halo Science 101, is about the science of the Halo universe. Halo Science 101 is up now at Gamasutra.

Ducain wrote to alert me of an update at Certain Affinity's site, and it's good news all around.

First off, they're passing around the news that Frankie at Bungie.net says the map downloading problems have been fixed.

Awesome O and Pillar of Awesome just announced that they've put together a Halo trivia quiz.

Frankie at Bungie.net writes that the planned playlist update is being delayed until next week (probably) while they continue to investigate the problems some users are having in downloading Halo 2 maps.