[image:4047 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The latest Halo Babies comic features a tribute to Warthog Revisited by Randall Glass; go take a look.

As we write, Louis Wu from HBO is trying to rouse his somnolent houseguests for the Summer Slaying event he's hosting today; everyone wish him and the other players good luck, and be sure to read the writeup that is sure to follow. Pictures, Louis!

Wraith has managed, using the recently revealed hacking techniques, to pilot the Covenant dropship. Louis Wu, at HBO, managed to re-encode this into QuickTime at about 5% of the original file's size-- so, naturally, we're mirroring that one; so Piloting the Covenant Dropship by Wraith is now in our Halo Movies section.

c0ld vengeance, with help from BOLL and RunningRiot, have managed to pilot the Pelican. We're hosting a mirror of Pelican.mov here in our movie section and on RHL.

Slashdot has linked to a humorous look at the console wars over at Pointlesswasteoftime.com. The first part is on the GameCube, the second (which is rather short) on the Xbox, and the third on the PlayStation 2.

As I said, the page on the Xbox is a short one, but it does contain this tidbit:

There is a feel of inevitable victory with the X-Box line, despite the fact that this version is still 40 million units behind the Playstation 2 in sales and that Microsoft could have made more money off the expensive machine if it had wrapped them in hundred-dollar bills and fired them out of a cannon at passing pedestrians. But of course, that's the point. One gets the feeling that Bill Gates is willing to spend $500 per unit on the X-Box 2 and mail them out for free like AOL trial disks if that's what it takes to win.

The summary conclusion is that "the past belongs to Nintendo, the present to Sony, the future to Microsoft." Although some might disagree.

The combined Killtacular Classic and iGames Championship site reopened recently, and they are now accepting online registrations for the tournament, which takes place on September 27, 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. We've also added the Killtacular Classic to our new event calendar.

Word from redvsblue.com is that Episode 16 is done, and has been released to sponsors. They expect it'll be ready for public release on Saturday, and note that they'll be at QuakeCon in Dallas particpating on a machinima panel. Wonder if they'll be close enough to Plano to hook up with all the PC Halo Fanstock people.

CobaltNova has announced the winners of the first Rockets On Prisoner Halo fan film awards. They also want everyone to know that Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard at Bungie is, as we speak, working on creating the Bungie Prize Pack that winners will receive.

According to Xbox365, ATI Technologies announced yesterday that they have an agreement with Microsoft to develop new technologies for future Xbox products. It looks very much like this means that the Xbox 2's graphics processor will be done by Nvidia's biggest rival, possibly a result of ongoing disagreements between MS and Nvidia over costs of the original Xbox's graphics processor.

UPDATE: There's a much more detailed analysis of this situation including some rampant speculation, over at News.com.

SketchFactor over at Bungie.net has posted the results of the "Ask the Cananimators" feature interview, with answers by anim8rjb and bentlama. While the majority of the answers were with tongue placed firmly in cheek, and related to the genesis of Canadian Bacon, the relative coolness factor of the OHL and the CFL, and the prospects for the Toronto Maple Leafs, some Halo info did creep in there from time to time:

NW: We actually use IK for most of our animation. IK on the arms and legs, feet and other areas. For the most part we are really used to animating with IK. We use FK for the spine, neck, head and wrists and toes. Our animation rig is a mix of a lot of things, and through the power of MEL, it is simple to use and quick to animate with...those are the most important features of any animation rig. Thanks for asking, and please keep posting more questions like this.

Be sure to give it a read. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO as usual.

Gabe over at Penny Arcade has posted that this month's Gaming Day event, to be held at Lanwerx in Bellevue, WA on August 23, is going to feature a Halo tournament as well as some Halo 2 stuff:

To go along with our Halo tourney, Microsoft will has agreed to come down and show off a bit of Halo 2. We aren't sure yet if it will be the same stuff they showed at E3 or something new but either way it's pretty fucking exciting.

Penny Arcade, of course, is a regular webcomic focusing on gaming that has, at times, mentioned Halo in the past.

Nick has come up with a whole slew of images featuring vehicles on the multiplayer maps... where you don't usually see them. They first went up in the HBO forum, and we've archived them here for posteriority.

In order to ease the creation of many of the interesting hacks that have come up in the past few days, eXentric has created a map editor called Cartographer for editing map cache files, as well as a forum to discuss map editing. Thanks again Louis Wu.

The latest bit of hexediting hackery is Warthogs on Hang 'Em High, presented by none other than Phforslayer. Thanks to HBO's Louis Wu for the info.