We recieved a curious e-mail from Halo-Net just recently. It included only this:

Another item from PC Gamer's Anniversary issue, a list of the best and worst gaming moments of the last year.

Jenkz tossed us a friendly e-mail to let us know that Haloplayers has returned to life, now being served out of sunny, power-troubled California. He reports that the forums may be a bit slower at the present time, and that the hosted sites are not yet up, but that they hope to improve things within the next little while. Welcome back, guys, and we hope things will go smoother for you from here on.

As pointed out by several people (kudos for all), the folk at Battleground: Halo have recieved Matt's Weekly Halo Update. For the most part discussing the steady progress being made by the team, the update does offer a few tasty tidbits. An excerpt:

Merkinjata passed on that PC Gamer's monthly Waiting is the Hardest Part feature again comes out with Halo in the top ten, though this time just a bit lower than last:

I decided to mosey on over to Haloplayers to see if they'd returned from oblivion. Server outages and related difficulties happen to the best of us, of course, and I hadn't been able to raise their site for several days. This is the response I got today:

I had fired off an e-mail to EB World shortly after they stopped taking Halo preorders. Electronics Boutique's well-known e-commerce site was claiming that Halo will only be coming out for the X-Box. (A claim that Matt soon refuted in typical Soellar style ;-) I described the problem to EB World, the response from Bungie to their claims, and asked when they would correct the matter on their site. The response was a bland one:

After a slight delay, Halo.bungie.org has posted the latest of Matt's Halo Updates. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits, but this particular update is pretty meaty and well worth a full read.