[image:4041 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Tycho from Penny Arcade wrote a few lines about their last Lanwerx event, which was attended by Bungie reps and fans, and included a PC Halo tournament. Here's what he had to say:

The Lanwerx event on Saturday was a runaway success - and I'd like to thank Bungie very much for the copies of Halo PC they let us use for the event, for the two packed live demos of Halo 2, and for bringing by Joyride 's new Halo toys to check out. I'm also able to say with absolute certainty that if you should enter a Halo Tournament at some point and you are going up against the Notorious Thugs, just get back in your car and go home. Their moniker is quite accurate: Notorious because they are well known, and Thugs because they are well known for shooting people .

Hmm... maybe we need an East vs West game, to pit the winners from one of PA's Lanwerx events with the best from one of Louis Wu's LANfests. Might give the PA guys an excuse to leave the Left Coast, if only for awhile.

[image:4038 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]You're going to need those flame retardant undergarments shortly. No, not a forum flamewar, but some flaming Warthog action from Xbox hexeditor extraordinaire, BOLL. His latest opus is Wheels On Fire; we;ve put it in our Movies Section.

[image:4036 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Blackstar of BSP pulled an image from the Summer Slaying LANFest held by Louis Wu of HBO and tagged it with all the nicknames he could collect. We've mirrored the Summer Slaying Program image.

Blackstar of Blackstar Productions has put up a photo gallery from the recent Summer Slaying LAN event hosted by Louis Wu of HBO. There's also a video

[image:4037 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The guys over at Red vs Blue have done their third Public Service Announcement; this one's based on a tatoo-related conversation in their forum. It's available in the usual formats: DivX BitTorrent, QT BitTorrent, and DivX and QT.

[image:4041 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]KP and Exogenesis attended the Summer Slaying and Lanwerx events, respectively, hosted by HBO's own Louis Wu and Penny Arcade, and they both posted a bit of an update in the HBO forum; here are the highlights from KP:

The usual suspects were there: The Wu, Miguel, Blackstar, nof, Gholsbane, team OvK, Have Blue, Konrad, Neo, Lophan, Fuhrman, Geoff, the Historian, Ben (Louis' son), a bunch of cool other people (I'm having trouble remembering, sorry), and some kids who showed up at 10:30pm as I was leaving who I didn't get to play with (apparently they were lost all day, I would've turned back for home after an hour, but that's just me).

... and from Exogenesis:[image:4044 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]

Bungie was there, of course, showing off Halo 2 on a projector screen with a fairly good sound system. The quality is at least 100 times better than the videos released on the internet. Plus the first time, I was very close to the front. Prime viewing space. SketchFactor just cannot hit that jumping Ghost, though.

Although it seems this was a LANFest, and not a tournament per se, it sounds like Geoff walked away with top honors at SS, while Exogenesis nabbed himself a nifty souvenir by getting Gabe and Tycho from PA to sign a cardboard tube he found.

[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.

Incidentally, RG participated in the Lanwerx event held by the Penny Arcade guys, and was a little disappointed in his performance, which he's posted a note about at the Warthog-Jump.com site. Let's hope that doesn't discourage him from making more movies. Speaking of which... hmm....

[image:4039 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]CobaltNova has posted that the winter CPL Halo tournament will be sponsored by nVidia; there will be six prizes, ranging from $9,000 for top prize down to $600 for sixth place. The tournament will have a total of 32 teams. For details, check the CobaltNova or the CPL sites.

[image:4040 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Gearbox's Randy Pitchford is on the interview circuit again, this time giving the skinny on his career moves to Belgian Webgaming Forever. (Maybe he and SketchFactor can set up a junket to Brussels and sample some of the local beverages.)

Most of it is about his work with 3D Realms and Rebel Boat Rocker, before Gearbox was founded:

The game we were making at Rebel Boat Rocker, called "Prax War", was very ambitious in every respect. Making comparisons to Halo is very accurate - it was science fiction, it offered vehicle combat, physics, interesting characters and story and next-gen graphics. I think a good way to think of Prax War is sort of Halo meets Command and Conquer - Praxium was like Tiberium and it was a GDI vs. NOD kind of war that was going on in the game's universe.

Pitchford also notes that Prax War did eventually get some exposure, of sorts: it appeared as an arcade machine in the intro for Half Life: Blue Shift.

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!