We now have a local copy of the Breaking The Rules video (18Mb) by Team Overkill in our movies area. Enjoy!

Deimos Fawkes has posted at Subnova that they've got four pages of scans from Edge magazine, which recently interviewed Jaime Case Griesemer of Halo and Myth fame. They pass on special thanks to Pallor for acquiring the scans.

Peter Marks of Bungie has interviewed Juan Ramirez, sculptor of the Covenant Elite statue, for Truth & Reconciliation. Check out One On One With Juan Ramirez (although the title is misleading; Ramirez's roommate Bob Standlee was there, too) for the full interview as well as several neat pictures showing his work.

Word on bungie.net is that a gathering will be held amongs its Seventh Column chapters in Santa Monica, CA on May 24, 2002. There's lots of information about the tournament your chapter can participate in as well as registration details, which, by the way, will open on Thursday, February 21. If sixteen player Halo goodness sounds appealing to you, then arrange for your chapter to participate in this undeniably cool gathering.

We missed this one awhile back... on February 14 xbox.ign.com posted a story confirming that Halo will finally be available to Xbox gamers in Japan on April 25, about two months after the console launches.

7HR33 has opened its site to the public, and it has a good amount of high quality content already; in particular, the Antics page has several screenshots and movies that constituted their contributions to HBO's tips and tricks section.

Count Zero over at HBO has posted about two Halo-related events at the upcoming Game Developers Conference 2002. The first is a Halo post-mortem with Case (Jaime Griesemer) and Chris Butcher. The second is a speech on Halo's audio production with Marty O'Donnell.

The Game Developers Conference is being held in San Jose, California from March 19 to 23.

Shacknews jokes that perhaps this modification might improve the less-than-stellar framerates during a few rare moments of Halo ; but in all honesty they've only watercooled the Xbox, not overclocked it. Too bad.

ShackNews noticed a Reuters story on Yahoo following up on Microsoft's recent non-denial denial of the HomeStation rumors.

Xbox.com has put up an interview with Bungie's resident audio expert, Marty O'Donnell, about his role in making Halo:

Xbox.com: Ok, nuts and bolts time. How do you actually create a soundtrack like this? Was it composed and synthesized all on a computer, or was it recorded? What's the sequence of your tasks?

MO: I worked in studios that contain many keyboards, synths, and samplers as well as digital recording equipment controlled by computers. I start there, and then when needed, add live instrumental performances to those recordings. When I mix the music, I sometimes eliminate the synth/sampler track and only use the live performance. Very little of the music plays back in the game the way it was originally recorded, however. I cut and edited the music into chunks that the game audio engine could play back dynamically based on the player's actions.

Thanks to Count Zero at HBO.

UnknownPlayer.com has posted an interview with Randall Glass, the author of the extremely popular Warthog Jump movie created with Apple's iMovie software and Bungie's Halo:

How long did it take you to create this movie?

{rglass} I have about 1.5 hours of videotape footage of the jeep doing various things. It took about 30 minutes to set up the stunt itself. I'll talk more about that in a second. Editing the movie took considerably longer. I figure it took about a day and a half (not continuous). The first cut of the vid was well over 5 minutes. I went back and forth about what songs I wanted to put in it, what sound samples worked best. Setting up the trick... I knew I wanted to launch the jeep over some sort of arch (it's pretty boring just launching it straight up. I had to make a game of it). The funny thing about that particular halo level is that when you force a marine out of the jeep, in most cases he'll run immediately back to the beginning of the level. It's hard to clobber the guy when he's running away from you. Fortunately the marines didn't run near the place where I shot the vid. So I knew that was the right spot. The perfect thing about that spot is that you can see the jeep after it's cleared the arch, so you know if it made it over. I think bungie may have secretly made that arch just for warthog jumping.. ;-)

Thanks to VoodooExtreme for noting the interview.

Rumor has been spreading over the past several months that Microsoft is building an expansion device called HomeStation for the Xbox. Microsoft has now denied the product's existance and claims it is nothing short of fiction. TeamXbox writes:

HomeStation rumors were sparked last September by a report in PC Format magazine that such a device would cross the Xbox with a PC and boast a bigger hard drive, audio and video technology and a wireless connection.

HomeStation talk resurfaced earlier in January as one analyst said he could confirm the existence of the machine in Microsoft and that it could debut later this year.

This reared its head several weeks ago. The odd thing is there is no thing called the HomeStation product or initiative, Microsoft spokeswoman Erin Brewer said.

Microsoft was interested in some of the longer-term ideas, but there's no product called that, Brewer said.

This is disappointing to some and relieving to others. It would have been nice to have the power and feature boost, but then again some would have felt pressured to purchase the potential Xbox upgrade. Check out TeamXbox's story for more details.

We've got Khen Rigzin's new video now mirrored on Rampancy.

Siva (W'rk)'s Halo video, How I Learned To Stop Playing And Love The Halo video is now available here on the Rampancy website.

The way to my heart is through metal music and Halo. After seeing Siva (W'rk)'s How I Stopped Playing And Learned To Love The Halo, Khen Rigzin took his footage, modified it a bit, and put in a new music track of his own. He then posted a link here on Rampancy to inform the world. If you liked Siva's version, there's absolutely no reason to miss Khen Rigzin's.

It's 55.6 MB Zip-compressed (uncompressed it's a 60 MB MPG) and is currently being housed at PlanetInternet. There aren't any mirrors just yet, but this site is plenty fast (I pulled 300k/sec the entire download). I'll see what we can do about hosting the video, although I'm not entirely sure we have the webspace for another big file.