Rampancy

CobaltNova have delayed the announcement of the winners of the first annual Rockets On Prisoner awards for the best in Halo fan films so they can chime in with a new prize sponsor-- Bungie. Currently there's no detailed information on exactly what Bungie will be providing, but knowing them, it'll probably be something very cool and worthwhile. CobaltNova also said they are looking forward to the 2004 awards, including preparing a panel of celebrity judges and adding a new

The advent of modchips and hardware hacks for the Xbox have meant even more interesting things have been found out about Halo in recent days and weeks-- even things that fansites have been discussing for a long time and thought were impossible.

Louis Wu at HBO brings word that BOLL and Phforslayer have colluded to replace the first warthog in the level "Halo" with a Banshee-- which is flyable, something long thought impossible on that level. Not to be outdone, BOLL went ahead and posted screenshots of the Engineer model in HBO's forum, in engine-- again something that long was thought not to exist in the game as shipped.

Well, as it turns out, the shipping version of Halo on the Xbox does contain a flamethrower after all, although you need a modded Xbox to use it.

Phforslayer (who wrote Aquaduct, the Mac OS X tunelling program that allows Halo to be played over the Internet) posted onto HBO's forum some screenshots he'd made, included one of the flamethrower and mentioned something called a "gravity gun". Macegac later posted a tutorial on how to get both weapons, and BOLL posted a film of the flamethrower in action. We're hosting a copy of the flamethrower video here at Rampancy.

Reports at EuroGamer and Gamers.com, as well as others, are indicating that on August 25 a new version of the Xbox Live dashbord, to be dubbed "Live Now" will be made available for download to subscribers. New features include out-of-game chatting, new buddy list editing tools, and a web interface that allows you to monitor who is online and see statistics through a new website to be called "Live Web".