We promised that the Zune Giveaway results would be posted by this evening – but we’re having trouble reaching some of the winners, to get higher-resolution versions of their entries for display on the Results page. As soon as they come in, we’ll post the whole page – it might be tomorrow, and for that we apologize.(Louis Wu 22:01:58 UTC)

trigger119 sent word of Mario vs. Spartan, a short machinima with a very well-done battle scene between Mario and a Halo 2 Spartan. It’s only a few megs – go grab it! (If you’re curious about the new TLD for GamingTV, read this post.)(Louis Wu 21:50:07 UTC)

Heh – a reporter for the Edmonton Sun challenged Tom ‘TSquared’ Taylor to a 1v1 match on Lockout. Here’s his side of the story – and here’s MLG’s take. Funny stuff. Thanks, 3Suns.(Louis Wu 21:40:22 UTC)

rapture was messing around with Google’s new Hot Trends feature, which replaced Zeitgeist. (Check out the top searches for the week ending May 18, 2007…) Hot Trends lets you compare search terms, with lots of interactive features to play with. For example, rapture looked at Halo vs Gears of War… while KP opted for something slightly different. Careful – you can lose a lot of time to stuff like this! (Louis Wu 20:51:05 UTC)

eddie m noticed that Red Bull USA posted a video of the Halo Ghost Bike entry to the Flugtag competition this weekend in Nashville… watch the guys ham it up for the camera before their attempt… and then watch the attempt itself. I give ’em straight 10s for style, myself.(Louis Wu 20:42:42 UTC)

Nitro288 noticed that the NYCLAN website is advertising a 2v2 Slayer tournament with a $1000 purse, to be held in NYC on July 15. If you’re in the area, give it a shot!(Louis Wu 20:37:14 UTC)

Bzerker wrote to let us know that Treeskunk Productions has released Outpost: Backwash Episode 0: Before the Beginning – it’s available in multiple formats, ranging from 21 to 74 mb. It sets up the mission the Elites have before them… and the interaction between players. Go watch!(Louis Wu 18:15:47 UTC)

Today’s Guest One One Se7en strip was created by BOLL – and it shows that not everyone is enamored with Halo 3’s bubble shield. Folks might want to keep this strip in mind when playing against Stuntmutt this fall…(Louis Wu 17:03:15 UTC)

Sane Intolerant let us know that he’s created two new Halo Toy Box strips – he says they’re both centered around Shadowrun. Look Before You Teleport, and Reusable Targets. I don’t get them. But then, I never played Shadowrun. (Please don’t flood me with mail explaining these; I don’t really need to know.)(Louis Wu 16:44:53 UTC)

Nathan Gibson, who’s maintaining the website Maximum Fear as a repository of information about the Iris ARG, let us know that he’d love some help. If you’re interested in working on extra content for the site (mostly editing and putting together theories from content sent into the site), stop by the site – his email address is in the top left corner. (Louis Wu 15:30:39 UTC)

Skavenger, unhappy that he’s been out of the Halo news for so long, has whipped up a really cool piece of machinima. Oh, wait, that’s right… he’s only really capable of mediocre films. Unwilling to foist that sort of work on you, he’s fallen back on his old favorite – a puzzler. This one starts as a word search – but that ain’t how it ends… go see what you can do with it. C’mon, Skav needs the attention. (Thanks to Morningstar for posting it – Skav’s smart enough to know that when he gets near the forum, things start breaking.)(Louis Wu 13:02:01 UTC)

Gravemind has taken a look at the human weapons Bungie has included in the Halo series, and wondered a little about how they’d work if Bungie had stuck closer to reality in their design. (As he says in his forum post, it’s just a “what if” speculation – don’t take it too seriously.) It’s in two parts, due to space limitations on 1Up blog posts – part 1 is here, part 2 is here.(Louis Wu 12:56:28 UTC)

Wow. bs angel has customized her pink Spartan… with a screaming guitar. LOVE the frets. (Louis Wu 12:32:29 UTC)

TheGhost wrote to let us know that the author of the WowLoader program we mentioned yesterday has released the source code for his work, in the hopes that someone can pick up where he left off. The post he made on h2vista.net explains what’s missing or needs work – and the loader, as well as the source code, can be downloaded from there without having to jump through the Rapidshare hoops. Programmers… start your engines!(Louis Wu 12:28:44 UTC)

A few days ago, we mentioned an article at the Hushed Casket which detailed the situation with a college student swept up involuntarily in the Iris ARG – rapture just gave us the heads-up about a YouTubed clip from G4’s Attack of the Show in which they interviewed the guy live. If you start hearing rumors that Halo 3 is coming out for the Playstation 3… you can totally blame Kevin Pereira. (Louis Wu 23:13:33 UTC)

By now, the news that Falling Leaf is working on a program that will allow you to play Halo 2 Vista under XP is pretty common knowledge (though some of the issues with the company are not quite so commonly known – but that’s another story). They’re shooting for later this summer, though… but why wait? An enterprising programmer known as xtc has released WowLoader-0.2.rar – a tiny program that will allow you to install Halo 2 Vista under XP. How well does it work? In the words of Samusaaron3, who told us about it:

The game currently does not seem to run flawlessly – I have a pretty nice system, but I have to turn the settings down pretty low to have it run smoothly. Not bad for a free program though.

Intriguing news for those who don’t want to upgrade to Vista! (Louis Wu 22:54:18 UTC)

The last of ZZoMBiE13’s guest One One Se7en strips went up today, as a special Sunday Strip – Elites might be able to kiss better, but they’ve got some other problems.(Louis Wu 16:42:45 UTC)

EliteSniper177 extracted all the Halo artwork from his Halo 3 Zune, packaged it up in categories, and made a zipfile out of it. He also provides instructions on how to use them as backgrounds.(Louis Wu 16:39:49 UTC)

Sigafoos let us know that The Riot 53 is now up – discussion of their recent LAN, and of course community updates. Go listen – 26 minutes, 10.5 mb.(Louis Wu 16:34:01 UTC)

A couple of days ago, Rookie Rabbit Productions released The Spartan Effect: Episode 5. It’s up to their usual standards (check our news archive for older episodes), and they’ve asked for some hosting help, so that folks don’t have to deal with FileFront if they don’t want to – we’re happy to oblige. You can grab the original WMP9 file (61.5) or a re-encoded QuickTime (58.5 mb) from our servers. (Their server has links to many other flavors; if you’d rather watch this on YouTube, you certainly can.) (Louis Wu 14:47:52 UTC)