GameSpot is reporting that Dustin "HP Darkman" Langton, winner of the Halo National Championship, has signed a management contract with Major League Gaming and also has an endorsement deal with LASR Accessories.
Pardon us if we hadn't noticed this before, but in a recent Xbox365 article, a forumgoer noted this site, Gamertag Database, which at the time of this writing lists 8,701 Xbox Live gamertags worldwide. The site isn't connected to Microsoft in any way; users can volunteer to register their own gamertags in the database, along with their location and email address, and users are encouraged to rate other gamers who use the service (think of it as a Heavenly Hosts list for XBL). There's a FAQ on the site if you have any questions. Looks interesting.
Noctavis has posted his early impressions of the Xbox Live service, having spent some time playing three games that utilize it: MechAssault, Unreal Championship, and Ghost Recon. Check it out.
David Evil Otto Candland (formerly CandyMan) has put up a primer on various methods for making online nicknames over at the Seventh Column site. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the warning.
David Candyman Candland has posted at Bungie.net that the ultimate goal for Marathon gaming has just now been reached-- Internet multiplayer. The Aleph One project now has TCP/IP networking in its Mac OS X version. Check it out.
Gholsbane at MBO has posted news that an application called MythBrowser written by Kel is now available. It takes statistics data from both MariusNet and PlayMyth servers. Right now it is PC-only but a Mac version is in the works.
Louis Wu has put up his own analysis of the Xbox Live Bootcamp event over at HBO. There are pictures as well as a set of links to other XBL Bootcamp stories at other sites.
The bottom line for Halo fans? As follows, and I'm putting this in just so we have mention of it on our front page:
So what does all this mean to the average Halo player? (After all, this is a Halo site.) Well, for now, nothing. Halo: Combat Evolved is not Xbox Live-compatible, and almost certainly never will be. Halo 2 will have full XBL support, but won't be out for over a year. However, online gaming is hot, and will likely remain hot for the forseeable future.
Of all the games on XBL right now, Unreal Championship is likely to be of the most interest to Halo fans until the real thing is out in 2003.
Doobie from udogs.net wrote in to Mariusnet to say that their site is temporarily available on the web at udogs.projectmagma.net, and they thank doughie.com for hosting their Grounds for Assault map in the absence of MythVillage's hosting until their own site comes back.