This time, no less a source than the Wall Street Journal is being cited in association with the story that Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will drop in price to $149, and a bundle with Halo will be $169.

Well, the polls closed with a total of 18,443 votes cast, and when the dust had settled, the Master Chief had triumphed over the demon hordes of Shub-Niggurath in Id Software's Quake by a mere 21 votes, 9232 - 9211. Here's hoping there are no dangling chads in this one.

Although Halo has led most of the way, Quake is now in the lead by 57 votes, 5000 to 4943 in the GameSpy Title Fight. Looks like someone is betting the Master Chief can't stick it.

Okay, let's turn a fiasco into a free-for-all. vector40 has taken Jester's tip about braking, along with techniques of his own, goatrope's, and Orion's, and put together three vids showing how you can fly a banshee upside down, among other techniques. Links to the vids, along with explanations of what is in them, are in this HBO forum post.

Brandon "vector40" Oto, Psyrixx, and Orion are giving credit to Jester for a prime tip on flying the Banshee: the jump button functions as an air brake, scrubbing off speed. This isn't mentioned in the manual, or in the help window that pops up the first time you pilot a Banshee in the single player campaign.

It's not clear just yet if this is a real advantage over just releasing the throttle; but it is strange to note that after nearly two years after Halo's release, some pretty competent online Banshee pilots still didn't know about this undocumented feature.

UPDATE: Ok, it looks like this is less an item about a new technique, and more an item about how a bit of supposedly obvious knowledge (like a brake key that works the same way on most vehicles, banshees included) can go unnoticed by parts of the community while other parts use it regularly. To wit: Louis Wu at HBO already knew about it and has used the technique, but never posted about it since it was too obvious. (For half credit, we did check the HBO archives before posting this supposed tidbit, but didn't find anything.)

Bottom line? Move along, people, nothing to see here.

Dan at BloodGulch.com has put up mirrors of three popular Halo movies, including Randall Glass' classic Warthog Launch, and is offering hosting for good movies.

A new set of HUDless screens, from the levels Halo and Truth & Reconciliation, are up in the HBO forum, courtesy of Mills.

Goatrope has a new trick movie out that shows how you can get on top of the Maw in the cafeteria, thereby skipping the Bridge and its cutscene completely. We're hosting the Divx version here at Rampancy.

Version 3.02 of the Halo map editor SparkEdit is available over at HaloMods. It fixes a few minor errors. Thanks Grenadiac.

Round 2 of the Abandoned Base bracket has Halo up against the first true 3d shooter, Id Software's Quake. Can the Master Chief avenge the humiliating defeat handed to his favorite-yet-unnamed security guard by the famously-unnamed Doom Marine? Only time will tell. However, right now, with 6060 votes in, Halo leads Quake 3187 to 2873.

With the help of HBO's Louis Wu, we found a few more items to add to our Sheet Music page-- a guitar tab for the solo in Silent Cartographer done by Vicious Circle, XvShadow's guitar tab of the main Halo theme, Marty O'Donnell's own sheet music for Siege of Madrigal from Myth and an extension to Siege done by Robyn "Dephalt" Barbour.

Brandon has posted at COERCE that the HBO-COERCE dedicated server for PC Halo is back up.

In addition, the RSS feed for news from COERCE now seems to be working, so we've added their feed to our newsfeed page.