News:Oracle Newsletter Volume XVI

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 Hello, Oracle Newsletter Volume XVI, and once again, the Oracle bids thee tidings in this week's volume of the Oracle Newsletter, for the week of July 8, 2007!
Bungie Day!	Dressed to Kill	Halo 3 Update - UNSC Battle Cruiser	Halo 3 Update - Epitaph & Last Resort
Meet Someone New	'Was goin' on?	Wikipedia's Halo Project	User Group Updates

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 17, 2007 Bungie Day Written by Spartan-091, Intern Writer

Bungie Day-2007. On July 7th, 2007, Bungie had it's first official Bungie Day. Bungie Day is a day that pays homage to the fact that Bungie has an infatuation with the number "07". In many, if not all, of their games they hide or incorporate 7's into the gameplay. A fine example is the 7 on Miranda Keyes' cheek. Bungie Day also allows Bungie another day to shower us with Bungie-goodies, in this case in the form of downloadable content from the Xbox Live Marketplace in the form of a Bungie Dashboard theme and new Gamer pics, including one of an infamous Bungie-Mullet. Bungie also used this day to make the 2 Halo 2 maps, Desolation and Tombstone, free after previously being $4.00. Bungie Day does not occur annually. They only occur on dates that when put in MM/DD/YY form, the dates are comprised of only 0's and 7's, sticking firmly to Bungie's 7 Love. This means that Bungie Day only occurs every 37 and 63 years. The Bungie Day before 2007's would have been 07/07/1970. The only problem with this is Bungie was not created then, nor were most of the gamers that are alive today. The next Bungie day will occur on -you guessed it- 07/07/2070. Let's hope most of us are still alive, including the entire Bungie company, in 63 years. I wonder if they'll have downloadable content for our Xbox 1080's?

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 17, 2007 Dressed to Kill Written by Spartan-091, Intern Writer

Armor variants. We, the people of Halopedia, already know that there are several SPARTAN armor variants that are going to be in Halo 3. Rumors of Covenant armor permutations also exist, even though Bungie is not saying anything about them. I, Spartan-091, am going to go over each armor type for you, making my opinions about them. You may not agree with these opinions, but that's fine. I respect myself. And my stupid opinions. Okay, here we go: MJOLNIR ARMOR Appearance: This stuff looks pretty awesome, I must admit. I mean, the classic MCPO armor. Who wouldn't like this armor type? It looks solid, just like all Spartans are, and is my favorite armor type. MJOLNIR appears just like its SPARTAN wearer: tough, strong, resiliant. Not to mention, it makes you look good. Public Opinion: Many Halopedians say that they will stay with MJOLNIR as their armor of choice in Halo 3 skirmishes, and I can't blame them. Old soldiers die hard, and so does this armor type. Personal Rating: "****" This variant's exterior is the coolest and the best-looking of all of them. CQB ARMOR Appearance: The CQB variant is reminiscent of the ODST armor, but much more bulked up than its Marine cousin. It appears to have a combat knife sheath embedded in its chestplate, allowing the wearer to place his favorite melee blade in a safe place. I'm not sure if a knife will be included in the game, but this armor is my second favorite. It looks ready for a fight and is solidly built for close-in duels as its name implies. Public Opinion: Halopedians seem to agree that this variant is the best of the new armors, and a lot of them want to make this their default selection for matches in the new game. Personal Rating: "****" This one's good. I like how its helmet is made, and its chest plate has that knife-thing. So, I'd go with this one if MJOLNIR wasn't a choice. EVA ARMOR Appearance: This permutation is similar to another well-known armor type, the Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. However, the EVA model is actually quite different from the stealthy Spartan-III armor that it resembles. For one thing, it is much more armored than SPI, as would seem necessary for a space-safe suit. This is a strange-looking variant, as the bubble-top helmet gives it an outlandish appearance. Public Opinion: Only a few Halopedians have decided to use this suit on their Spartan-II avatar, and usually only because its strange exterior grants a large amount of individuality to the wearer. In other words, wear this to get noticed. Personal Rating: "***" I find this armor to be very, very weird looking, and personally would not wear this at all. If you do want to wear it, people will recognize you for your distinctive flair for the strange. CONCLUSION Thank you, Bungie for giving us fan-boys and -girls the opportunity to customize our personal avatar even further! I look forward to buying Halo 3 and having an "unfreakingbelievable" time with it! For the Oracle Newsletter, this is SPARTAN-091, reminding you to have a good killing experience.

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 17, 2007 Halo 3 Update - UNSC Battle Cruiser Written by CommanderTony, Intern Writer

The UNSC Battle Cruiser|UNSC Battlecruiser is going to be a vehicle set for release when Halo 3 which comes out on September 25th. But people want to know more about it, and quite frankly, so do I. People want to know how long it is, how many cannons does it have, who commands it, etc. Well, in RelentlessRecusant's article about it, he states that it might have 16-36 MAC Cannons and hundreds of other launchers, guns, etc. Well I believe that 99.9%. Also, if you've seen all of the Halo 3 art from the new Halo 3 Zune, you've probably wondered where all of these Pelican's come from: Defunct link I'm thinking this new UNSC Battlecruiser is the main ship in Halo 3. What i'm talking about when I say main ship, is in Halo: Combat Evolved, we had the UNSC Pillar of Autumn. And in Halo 2, we had the UNSC In Amber Clad. So i'm thinking this will be the main ship in the game. That's where I think all of those Pelicans are from. And there's probably a lot more Pelicans, Albatrosses, Longswords, Shortswords, and Sparrowhawks in there. And just imagine the number of Marines and ODSTs you have help from!

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 Halo 3 Update - Epitaph & Last Resort Written by Phil.e., Staff Writer

Two recently announced levels for Halo 3, Epitaph and Last Resort are sure to provide endless hours of fun for players everywhere. Epitaph A brand new map, has beautiful Forerunner architecture, resembling a cathedral, with plenty of narrow corridors, great for quick, intense battles and lots of splash damage. The inclusion of an Energy Sword and Shotgun will no doubt add to said intensity. There are also Man Cannons and Radar Jammers, sure to keep gameplay always interesting. The Man Cannon ejects players into the air in the center of the cathedral area, where a platform with an Energy Sword wobbles, similar to the one of Halo 2's Midship, except smaller, and only one story, with the Energy Sword hovering slightly off the ground. Last Resort This level, on the other hand, will no doubt give players of Halo 2 a sense of nostalgia, as it is obviously a remake of the original map, Zanzibar. This time around however, it's bigger. Much bigger. The fortress has undergone a makeover, with the central part, where the flag is, being enlarged several times. The two corridors leading into it from the front have also become larger. Camp Froman, familiar to many players as the spawn point for the Sniper Rifle in Zanzibar, has a catwalk leading to it from the second story of the fortress. The wind wheel in the center of the map, the most recognizable part of the map, has also changed. The mechanism to lower the walkway that leads to it has been altered, and there is now an Active Camoflauge pickup in the center of the wheel, instead of an Energy Sword. The beach still houses several vehicles, including the new Mongoose, and looks larger as well. Judging from these two maps, it looks as if the final version of the Halo 3 multiplayer will be an incredible experience, that no one will get tired of playing anytime soon.

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 Meet Someone New! Written by James-001, Intern Writer

CommanderTony is the Featured User of this week's volume of the Oracle Newsletter! Commander Tony is another one of our Halopedians who is never really mainstream but is back behind the curtains pulling the strings. He's been here since August of 2006 and has 1,299 edits; 792 (60.97%) of those edits were on articles. One must remember that it is not about the amount of edits but the impact of those edits. Tony is also an intern writer for this very newsletter and many Halopedians have probably read his work. Currently, Tony is a First Lieutenant in the UNSC of Halopedia. If you would like to know more, Tony has an iUser and a link to his Myspace on his user page. With a background like this, great moments in Halopedia can be expected. User page: Defunct Talk page: Defunct

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 'Was goin' on? Written by RelentlessRecusant, Editor-in-Chief

This week has seen some shuffling around by the Halopedia Team! 1. Bot - Halopedia now has its first own automated bot, GPTBot, courtesy of the evah SEXAH Guesty-Persony-Thingy! It has been running very successfully for several days, and is currently handing the menial task of affixing and replacing templates to images for the sake of image categorization...now, you dare ask what the Halo a bot is? It is simply a program written in computer language that automatically does very quickly what would take usahs a very long time to do...for more details, ask Guesty-Persony-Thingy. 2. Monitors of Halopedia - Courtesy of WRAITH's concisely eloquent name for The One Usergroup To Rule All Other Usergroups And Halopedia As Well, Halopedia's users, attitude, and worst of all, its users, have been commandeered for cheese puffs by the sixth "official" usergroup, the Monitors of Halopedia (the fifth usergroup, the Multiplayers of Halopedia and not coincidentally of the same name, had been approved shortly beforehand by a community vote). In the new Monitors of Halopedia, there are five Monitors, four of which are administrators and the other just a powahless tag-a-long that wishes he could make vandals admins and block good users just like the othah four. The Featured Article section of Halopedia has been taken over by these five evil masterminds, and from now on, the powah to approve Featured Articles and also to remove Featured Article status has been entrusted by a vote of (themselves) to give that powah to (themselves). For a more uncomplexitilicious lexiconically balanced description, just see their home page. 3. Highlighting - When you go Recent Changes, oozing like an amoeboid macrophage through fenestrated capillary walls in search for users to talk to, articles to vandalize, and users to yell at, you might notice that some names are bolded and are in green text. No, it's not a glitch...RelentlessRecusant has tweaked the CSS so that now, all four administrators have their names hilighted in green text. *RR wonders if he should hilight certain names in white text* 4. Bungie.net - Halopedia now has its own official user group on Bungie.net, the official site for Bungie Studios! You can find it at this link! Join today to get access to our private forums there, and join in saucy Halo 3 and more speculation...Read more... 5. New Searchicons - Four new searchicons were added to Template:Searchicons this week - the BR55HB SR Battle Rifle, Brute Shot, Cortana, and the MA5C Assault Rifle.

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 Wikipedia's Halo Project Written by David Fuchs, Intern Writer

Many of Halopedia's denizens may not know that Wikipedia has a similar wikiproject created and run by Halo fans. Halo is committed to high-quality encyclopedic articles about the notable aspects of the Halo universe. So far the wikiproject team has produced several "Featured Articles" --which are Wikipedia's highest-quality articles-- on Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. Other articles approaching such quality include articles about the Flood and Covenant. If you're interested in joining and helping out, you can add yourself to the Participants List, or just look at the Articles List and see what you can lend your skills to. Keep in mind that there is a downside to Wikipedia in terms of comprehensiveness: Wikipedia, due to notability and gamecruft concerns, cannot have a "Weapons of Halo" article, for example (actually, it did, but that along with much other non-general encyclopedia stuff was nuked last summer... ask Relentless to tell you the terrible tales...) However for Halopedia editors, the better Wikipedia articles can help supplement the articles here in terms of sources; for example, the Characters in the Halo series page has over seventy references to quotes from the games as well as the expanded universe novels.

The Oracle The Official Newsletter of Halopedia Volume XVI - July 8, 2007 User Group Updates Written by RelentlessRecusant, Editor-in-Chief

In the Third Term of usergroup elections, I've been very impressed with the contributions of Halopedia's user groups! The Fourth Term will start on August 1st, and polls will be opening soon for the various candidates, so be sure to keep an eye out to ensure that your favorite nominee will become one of Halopedia's user group command officers! Now...some quick news. Multiplayers of Halopedia/Gamers of Halopedia - The Multiplayers of Halopedia were saved from deletion by a unanimous community vote. They were also accepted as a subgroup to the Covenant of Halopedia by James-001, leader of the Covenant of Halopedia, and for the Fourth Term elections, will be "assimilated" into the Covenant of Halopedia's command system, and the joint usergroup command panel will now have one more member in its ranks because of the leader of the MOH, and its numbers will swell to 11 leaders of the six recognized usergroups of Halopedia. The MoH also changed its name to Gamers of Halopedia to cover a more broad range of topics. UNSC of Halopedia Leadership - Blemo, General of the UNSCOH, has to take a prolonged leave from Halopedia, and will be returning in mid-August. Therefore, he was given command of the UNSCOH to RelentlessRecusant, who is currently Interim General of the UNSCOH until the Fourth Term, essentially a steward. Spartytime Chair - In honor of UNSCOH founder Spartytime, the UNSCOH Security Council has established the "Spartytime Chair", an honor given out every term by the Security Council to a non-commander member that has shown exceptional dedication. The details are being worked out now, but congratulations to CommanderTony, the first recipient of the Spartytime Chair and a newly promoted Lieutenant of the UNSCOH! Forerunners of Halopedia - Spartan 1138, Monitor of the FOH, is also taking a prolonged leave from Halopedia until around September or November, and is therefore transferring command to Phil.e., who is now the leader of the FOH and a Colonel of the UNSCOH. Monitors of Halopedia - The Monitors of Halopedia, the officially recognized but independent usergroup of Halopedia responsible for management of Featured Articles, has approved its first featured article - List of Starships, with more to come.