Looks like the Superintendent is back. Perhaps one (or more) of the Bungie announcements that were indefinitely postponed at this year's E3 are about to be made public.

Just moments ago the countdown on Bungie.net, which had about 12 hours left to go until some cryptic announcement, changed to an apology from studio president Harold Ryan that reads:

For the last several months, we've been building towards a reveal of something exciting that Bungie's working on. We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were just changed by our publisher.

The word on the street (or at least in the Bungie.net update this week) is that Cold Storage, the remake of the classic Halo 1 multiplayer map Chill Out, will be released this July 7, Bungie Day, for free.

Monsters and Critics is reporting that Wideload Games' sophomore effort (at least, its second full-length offering) is now shipping: Hail to the Chimp is available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The PlayStation Network may have its work cut for it catching up to the onlin gaming experience offered by Xbox Live, but Crackers the chimp is lending a hand with the demo of Hail to the Chimp, the party game from Wideload, now available on the service.

Nebula nominee Tobias Buckell has been tapped to pen the next Halo novel, Halo: The Cole Protocol, due out in Fall of this year. Buckell published his first science fiction novel, Crystal Rain, in 2006, and followed it up with Ragamuffin in 2007.

ShackNews is reporting that Wideload Games' Hail to the Chimp, originally announced for a May release, is slightly delayed until June 24 so that some final finishing touches can be put on the game. Chimp is to be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and is priced at an affordable $40.

Looks like the dread intrusion of 'real life' may have finally claimed Stuntmutt, the author of One One Se7en, which after nearly five years and 777 strips, is being put into c0ld storage.

Say it isn't so, Stunt!

Twelve years in the making, the full version of Eternal, a 'near full conversion' for the open source version of the Marathon 2 engine, Aleph One, has been released:

Picking up from the end of the Marathon trilogy, you find yourself suddenly ninety-four years in the future, in the year 2905. You are on the S'pht moon K'lia, hanging in orbit over a desolate and ruined Earth.

PrimeNewswire has a press release up that says that attendees at next week's Game Developers Conference Expo will be among the first to see Wideload's first casual game, Cyclomite:

2:00 Cyclomite: Alex Seropian and his team at Wideload Shorts team present Cyclomite. This is the first ever showing of this innovative multiplayer party game. Don't miss your chance to play it. If you miss this one, it's repeated on Thursday at 11:30 am.

Hardy Lebel, the multiplayer designer of Halo 1 who also worked on Halo 2 and Oni, has set up a new games development studio in Seattle called Tyrant with Anders Hejdenberg, who worked on Battlefield 2 as its lead designer.

The seven-man studio currently has listed as its only project something identified only as "ESP".