Xbox.com, the official Xbox site, has posted a short Meet Bungie Studios feature as well as an Overview of the Mjolnir Armor from Halo.

Count Zero has submitted a bunch of new photos to the Launch Party Coverage section of HBO. Thanks Louis Wu.

Mehve (aka Lorraine Reyes, Bungie artist extraordinaire) put her calm and reasonable two cents into an ongoing thread about whether or not Halo was disappointing over in HBO's forum recently. In the process, she pointed out some physics info from Chuck The Bear Gough on page 7 of a Halo Party feature at Invisible Dream that was posted last week and that somehow we missed.

Thanks to Louis Wu who put up the news item that led us to it.

Yeroen has posted a story that they've added a new area to the site, a Suggestions Database for fans to... well, to make suggestions.

There are a few notes already there-- a couple of requests for the return of XML Channels (yes, please! And how about Bungie.net generating one of its own, too!) as well as a note that it appears that the old Bungie.net site is still there at hydra.bungie.com.

We failed to notice before, but along with the new Letters to the Webmaster at the revised Bungie.net site, there's a new Soapbox, this time by Marty O'Donnell on how long a game should be:

And another thing - this concept of beating a game. Does one say, I just beat War and Peace, and it rocked ? No, one would sound like an idiot. Rather one should say I just finished reading War and Peace and I more fully understand the poignancy and futility of striving against man's inhumanity to man . One would still sound like an idiot, but at least one might have a better chance at impressing a chick at a party (although my daughters would never fall for it so don't even think about trying).

Sure about that, Marty? Let's hope so.

Xbox365 reports there are no plans to launch the MS console in China.

Psyrixx posts his story of Xbox acquisition.

The new Bungie.net site runs on (surprise, surprise) Microsoft's IIS software and Windows 2000. Cortana, g0t r00t?

Well, mere hours after we heard that the new Bungie.net site is up, the Halo portion of the site, called Halo: Truth and Reconciliation is also online, replacing the cryptic graphic we noted before.

The new site has sections for screenshots, concept art, storyboards, a multiplayer strategy guide, and a links page (conspicuously absent Rampancy.net... hmm).

The top story is a recap of the Xbox Launch Party in NYC by Yeoren, and there's also a link to the How To Host A LAN Party article of Seventh Column to assist people in setting up times and places to meet and play multiplayer Halo on their Xboxes.

The new Bungie.net site seems to have (at the moment, at least) three major areas.

The first is Seventh Column, described as the Official Bungie Fan Club and Underground Army. There are already five clubs listed in their directory, including one called Rampant (although the site reports they have been disbanded. Hmm).

The second is called Truth and Reconciliation which is described as a Halo community site.

There isn't much of anything there at the moment except for an interestingly-shaped, Marathonesque three dimensional image and the words watch this space.

The last is a Myth site called The Myth Vault, which includes stats, leader boards, and information about orders and accounts.

It seems that with the new Bungie.net site also comes a new edition of Letters to the Webmaster. Go now!

Mordia has announced that the new Bungie.net site is now up. Yeoren, the Bungie Webmaster, has posted this note about the site:

Welcome to the new and extremely improved bungie.net! In its previous incarnations bungie.net was a single site devoted to the Myth games, with some general Bungie news thrown in every so often to spice things up. The new bungie.net is a network of sites that encompass the entire Bungie community experience.

Thanks to Have Blue who gave the heads up at Subnova HL.

UPDATE: The seventhcolumn.org domain now points to the new Bungie.net site; so I guess now we know what the countdown was for.

mad.max posted a link in our forum to a piece at Salon by Wagner James Au, which talks about the image of Microsoft and the Xbox in the console gaming market. He's come to the conclusion that Microsoft has failed to deliver on its promises:

But the war of ideas is over, too -- and on that front, the one that really counts, Microsoft has lost, almost utterly lost. Gone is the bold promise to innovate and revolutionize gaming -- the chance to create a brand so daring and unique, it would finally seize gamers' attention away from Japan. The spirit of Monkeyboy has trickled down to the Xbox team, and almost fully possessed it.

With two possible exceptions, the Xbox and its premiere list of games are undistinguished, undifferentiated and inoffensive -- and consciously tooled to be exactly all those things. The Xbox is, in effect, the Internet Explorer of game consoles.

What are those two possible exceptions? One scarcely need ask:

In that regard, Bungie Software's Halo and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee from Oddworld Inhabitants -- both titles produced by studios within Microsoft's games division -- are the only plausible contenders on the console's premiere list. Yet, admirable as they are in their own right, neither quite reaches the status of a killer app -- a game so good as to justify the purchase of the hardware it runs on.

To be sure, Halo is an excellent, squad-based first-person shooter, set in a sprawling game world (a lush, artificial planet shaped like a ring), with an epic sci-fi story about humanity's last desperate stand against an alien coalition, fought on land, in underground bases and in aerial skirmishes above the surface. While it shares much from previous PC shooters -- including the strong narrative of Half-Life, the outdoor multiplayer combat of Tribes and the squad-based sci-fi action of Elite Forces -- it's the first to synthesize so many different elements seamlessly together in a console title.

It's already drawn the interest of PC gamers, who often dismiss console games as brainless kiddy fodder. At the Odyssey tent, one self-described PC loyalist was hardwired to a Halo demo, emptying clip after clip into hordes of dwarlike aliens. He'd already cleared his schedule for its debut, he told me. I'm taking three days off work to play it, dude! he said. But what other Xbox title is he interested in? His expression blanked a moment. Dead or Alive III, I guess, he said, without much conviction, referring to Xbox's visually arresting (but conceptually undistinguished) fight title.

The last word about Bungie in the article refers to them as one of the most respected (and oldest) computer game developers for Mac and Windows but doubts that the name alone will attract the console gaming crowd.

Louis Wu at HBO has posted a notice that there's an interview with Bungie Community Guy Matt Soell at HomeLAN. Among the highlights, he confirms that there are some unannounced surprise foes in Halo, aside from the Covenant Elites, Grunts, Jackals and Hunters we've all seen, and that adding online play to Halo would be more than a simple upgrade. He was also asked about what the experience of developing on the Xbox was like for Bungie:

Console development was something we've tried to get into as early as 1995, so obviously we're thrilled that we've finally done it. Learning the ins and outs of a system that wasn't even finished when we started developing for it presented its own challenges, but the developers didn't complain too much.

Soell also talks a bit about Halo's AI, level terrain, and future projects for Bungie.

Not much to say other than Seventh Column has updated with:

Your browser is incompatible with this site. Please upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.

Yeah, right. Keep watching the site.

Netshade at Brainrazor has put up his account of the Halo Launch Party in Chicago earlier this month. And just to warn everybody, there's a fair amount of profanity and humor at the expense of Bungiefen, so everybody don your asbestos. As for Halo, he liked it:

Visually, it's pretty kickass. Not OHMIGOD YOU NEED TO SEE HALO, not like it was when you first saw the MacWorld trailer or shit like that. There are tons of nice touches, and the fact that the framerate stays pretty good even with four players playing at the same time is a testament to the bulletproof QA testing they no doubt put it through.

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO who posted the item first.