In November of 2000, we posted a story about a listing at Amazon for the Official Strategy Guide for Halo, to be done by Sybex.

It's the console they love to hate. Hugging the hard-luck Dreamcast and excoriating the Xbox's controller for being the size of a small house, Tycho relentlessly painted Microsoft's console as the spawn of the devil-- mostly just because things are funnier that way.

But what's this? Something NICE about the Xbox? From Penny Arcade?

Ape Man has posted his impressions of the Halo prequel novel, Fall of Reach over at HBO's forum, having just finished it yesterday:

TeamXbox ran a poll in conjunction with their EBGames Giveaway contest, asking which Xbox title gamers would want if they could choose only one. Halo won out over DOA3, taking 68% of the vote. The contest gave away one free copy each of the two games from EBgames.com.

Zypper left a message at HBO that linked to another Halo review in IGN's XBox forum. ManaByte-IGN is part of IGN DVD's staff, but he is definitely a video game lover, too. ManaByte is clearly impressed by Halo, titling his post Halo is a system seller. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot. He writes:

Word comes from Louis Wu at HBO that Halo has been mentioned several times in Gamespot's latest Gamespotting feature.

Among them is Joe Fielder, a fan of Marathon and Myth, who had this to say now that he's seen Halo:

Ape Man over at Subnova was able to find a copy of Halo: The Fall Of Reach at his local Waldenbooks. Ape Man hasn't read too much of the book, but what he has read is awesome . He also hints at something:

Battleground: Halo noticed that FilePlanet has put up a new Halo video for download. The video includes the exciting intro movie to Halo, as well as some gameplay footage and is 49.9 MB large. I certainly don't have the willpower to resist this, but maybe you are stronger than I.

Electronic Gaming Monthly has posted a mini-review of Halo in its December issue. It's another very positive one, even telling the Nintendo 64's Goldeneye to move over for Halo. Check out halo_egm_review.jpg on my iDisk.

UPDATE: We've added a local copy of the image (404k).