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.

The Junkyard has put up a new webmaster spotlight article, this time on Bluestone of the new 343gs.com website. Take a look!

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.

The BBC news has done a piece on Red vs Blue, the popular webseries animated using the Halo engine, comparing it to South Park. The article mentions the popularity of Bungie's flagship Xbox game and the upcoming sequel. Thanks to Louis (again) at HBO.

We've put up a "Are You Big Enough?" Halo LANFest photo gallery from the event held on July 12 in Andover, Massachusetts by Blackstar of Blackstar Productions and attended by yours truly as well as Bungie fansite webmasters Claude "Louis Wu" Errera and Miguel "Freewill" Chavez.