The massive Inside Job, a four and a half minute cutscene weighing in at about 200 mb in HD, is now up for downloading in the Halo 2 Cutscene Library. From a story standpoint, this one can't be missed. From a gorgeousness standpoint, this one is up there with the best. Go watch! Thanks, as always, to Clan Infectionist and Wraith-Ops.(Louis Wu 21:17:21 UTC)

Ducain forwarded some interesting news from laser - looks like someone's trying to bring Halo maps into Goldeneye 007. Check out the Hang 'em High movie!(Louis Wu 21:11:16 UTC)

A couple of months ago, someone (I can't figure out who) pointed out this picture at Renderosity.com - a very nice render of a Halo landscape, built in Bryce. I asked for, and received, permission to add this to our Misc Art collection, from Orestes, the creator - but somehow, I never actually NOTICED the permission. When I was looking over the pictures we mentioned this morning, I noticed his mail - he pointed out that he'd done this, as well - a render of some banshees over a Terragen'd planet. We'll add these to our queue - but check 'em out now!(Louis Wu 21:05:29 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy found a fun shirt at Split Reason - go look!(Louis Wu 19:13:21 UTC)

Bornswavia has been repeatedly insulting me and I'm well and truly tired of it.  As a result he has been demoted to the role of member.  If he persists he will be permanently banned from the group.

Next-Gen has an interview with CJ Cowan, Halo 3's cinematics director - read it for a glimpse inside the studio, a look at how the work pipeline has changed over the years, and a positive spin on Seattle's weather! Thanks, LordGideon.(Louis Wu 17:46:44 UTC)

RVideo ran across a pretty impressive artist over at Renderosity.com - Ubald has been creating Halo-related images for a couple of years now. I've sent off a request to him to be allowed to mirror the Halo content here, for ease of viewing - but you should look through the links RVideo has supplied, and if you're intrigued, there are a couple of dozen Halo images interspersed among 6 gallery pages of renders (lots of Spiderman and AvP stuff) - go crazy!(Louis Wu 16:22:01 UTC)

A couple of years ago, Cody Miller announced that he'd finished Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty, with no deaths - if you wanted to watch it in a reasonably viewable form, you had to download a two-gigabyte file. A couple of days ago, we were contacted by SPDN p0iz3n0us, who's now done the same thing for Halo 3 - but thanks to Bungie's built-in assets, the downloads are much smaller, and you don't have to take his word for it. Swing by his fileshare for 9 downloads, one of each level of Halo 3. All are done on Legendary, all are done with the Iron Skull on. (For those who don't pay close attention to Skulls, the Iron Skull resets you back to the beginning of the level each time you die - so if you finish the level with it on, you've successfully completed it with no deaths.) Theater mode rocks!(Louis Wu 13:16:35 UTC)

This has been discussed before, but the inclusion of our planet for scale is a nice touch. Stephen Loftus has used a screenshot from Halo 3 along with some previous reference info to estimate the size of the Ark. That's one big structure!(Louis Wu 13:15:16 UTC)

I'd like to apologize for a post I made yesterday, tying a UFO sighting to the IRIS ARG. While those images did surface during the ARG, they were shown to be unconnected to the game itself (the only thread I could find on a superficial search was this one). Thanks to DHalo for the heads-up. If you'd like to learn more about these UFOs, Sensei322 sent along this YouTube link of a History Channel special on them. I need to be more careful.(Louis Wu 13:11:15 UTC)