Thanks to Narcogen, who did a nice job over at Rampancy.net of rounding up some reviews of the Mac and PC versions of Stubbs the Zombie, Wideload’s Halo-engined game. Gamespy grabbed the PC version, Inside Mac Games and MacWorld tackled the Mac version, and Gaming Horizon did a more general (probably Xbox-based) review. c0ld vengeance left us high and dry, review-wise.

Marty O’Donnell posted a pretty important note in the Marty Army 7th Column group – some folks have had trouble following this link, so I’m going to post the content here (with Marty’s permission):

If you buy an Xbox 360 – DO NOT play your old Halo or Halo 2 games without getting the update from Xbox Live. Without the update the audio will suck. Without the update you will think that your new Xbox 360 is broken. The funny thing is that you won’t even be able to play any other games without getting the update so the audio suckage won’t be apparent with any other “backwards compatible” games -except for Halo and Halo 2.

As audio director of Bungie Studios I want the fans to have the best audio experience possible. The emulator that is resident on the shipping hard drive and allows Halo and Halo 2 to be played was shipped before the audio emulation was finished. I’d hate for anyone to play Halo or Halo 2 and think that anyone at Bungie intended the audio to sound that way. Feel free to ask the folks at Xbox about this: Xbox 360 BC .

It’s clear that getting the current emulator won’t be very hard – even for folks without Xbox Live accounts – so there’s no good reason not to upgrade before playing. Thanks, Marty! (This message was NOT brought to you by c0ld vengeance – though it IS his birthday today.)

Cybrfrk spent the day at the Arizona State High School marching band competition yesterday (congrats to his son’s band, rated as Excellent at the event!). He was taking pictures with his digital camera when Sandra Day O’Connor High School, from Deer Valley, Arizona, took the field – they performed a program called ‘Halo 2’. He recorded it using the camera’s video mode – so the video is small, but the audio is fine; check out the songs they did! Eight and a half minutes, QuickTime (14.3 mb) or WMP9 (13.7 mb).

Jillybean points out that the Halo Story Page has been updated. Busy beavers over there…

There’s a pretty impressive montage over at Halo2Forum.com – ItWasLuck has released a bunch of full game vids (not montages, but start-to-finish games) with halo pros in them, now you can see some of the highlights of these and other matches. The guy is pretty impressive with a sniper rifle. 83 mb, WMP9 format.

Mintz sends word that Halo: Portable is now online. It’s all about providing Halo content for the Playstation Portable – if you have a PSP, this is a site you should visit! Check it out.

Juxtapose points out that if you’re a Bell Sympatico High Speed DSL subscriber (yeah, you have to live in Canada), you can get a free Xbox or Xbox360 game when you sign up for certain Xbox Live subscriptions. Details can be found on his Arbiter’s Judgement blog.

Wow. Spent yesterday at the Machinima Festival, where Rooster Teeth went home with 3 Mackies (Excellence in Machinima Writing for P.A.N.I.C.S., Best Editing (for Strangerhood), and Best Independent Machinima (for Red vs Blue Season 3), and Chris Burke went home with Best Machinima Series for This Spartan Life. (Since we provide Chris with his movie bandwidth, I suppose you can say that HBO has award-winning bandwidth!) There were lots of other awards; these were the only Halo-related ones. Saw lots of friends, old and new, saw lots of good machinima, got inspired by panel discussions that suggested where machinima might be going in the future. All in all, a fantastic day. Put me a little behind, though, in terms of HBO… I’ll do my best to catch up. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

Wired has an article about the Machinima Film Festival (where I’ll be headed in a few hours, actually) and machinima in general – there’s a brief mention of Red vs Blue, which gives us our Halo hook. (Other Halo projects will be up for awards today – they just weren’t mentioned in the article.) Thanks, bluedude345.

Last night, Chairleg Productions’ Waiting In Line passed the MPRRS – we’d already posted a note about it, and Chairleg said they weren’t looking for hosting… but passing the MPRRS means we’re happy hosting versions the original host isn’t offering – so for folks who’d rather watch QuickTime (and who don’t want to settle for the PSP-formatted version), you can now grab a full-size QuickTime (23 mb) of this video from us. British queue humor, applied to the Xbox360 situation – grab a copy! (And if you’re seeing this for the first time, our news post from Thursday contains a WMP9 link hosted by Chairleg.)

Halo: Blood Covenant is a 2D sidescroller we haven’t heard from since May – but last night Tucker let us know that they’ve released a short (38 second) vid showing some of the progress they’ve made. The last time they released a movie, it killed their servers – so we’re putting up copies of this for them – please download here. WMP is 4.1 mb, QuickTime is 4 mb. Looking pretty fun!

Over at Team3D.net, F13ND sat down with Hotshy to discuss this week’s practice sessions – plenty of interesting stuff for folks who want a glimpse into the pro circuit. Go read!

Bungie’s Weekly Update was posted last night – there’s quite a bit of info about some playlist changes coming in the not-too-distant future, there are answers to basic questions about interoperability between the Xbox and the Xbo360 for games like Halo, and info about how Halo and the new higher-res modes available on the 360 will work, and some weird stuff about Marty in Korea. (Pete’s not as old as Frankie makes him out to be, either.) Go read! Update: Hehe – looks like I missed an entertaining thread about this last night. To TheDaringDuke – don’t worry, Frankie and Shishka are jerks. Especially Frankie.

Stuntmutt found some news about a series of CI-boys figures based on Xbox game characters. He hunted around until he found this – are those cute, or what?

JoeIce dropped by our forum yesterday with a pelican model he’d adapted from a Warhammer 40K piece. Today, he came back – with another dozen images, showing off the Pelican, a Master Chief, and an MC on a Ghost. That Ghost ROCKS!

Today’s One One Se7en takes a subtle shot at a certain type of Xbox Live player. The thing is… if this is you, you probably won’t get it.

Guess I went too long this time between Fan Fiction updates – there are 24 stories and poems to read today. Get cracking!

Gah. I totally spaced on putting this up earlier this week. insidi0us continues his work on speedruns (yeah, I know, we should be leaving this stuff to High Speed Halo… but insidi0us sends it here, and it’s just so amazing!) – his latest target is Two Betrayals. The current run is only on Normal difficulty… but he shaved SO much time off the Going Nowhere Fast record of 25:03 that I couldn’t pass it up. He finished the level in… yep, 11:52. (!!!!) Probably the sweetest move in the run comes at around 9:20… but man, the whole run just kicks. This is big – because it’s long – and the quality isn’t fantastic… but if you’re a fan of speedruns, you gotta see this. (He released a 17:23 Legendary run last month, so while he might not be able to get a sub-12-minute run on that difficulty, we know for sure he can beat the previous record by at least a third.) Two Betrayals, less than 12 minutes: WMP9 is 87 mb, QuickTIme is 90 mb.

Halo Babies has put up a new strip today… it, too, sends birthday wishes to Halo 2. It also points out one of the hazards of the Spartan uniform…

We got word from Dennis Powers that there’s been a resurgence in HaloCE interest in the past month – more than 47 different maps have been released since October 1 (bringing the total available for download at Halo Maps to 568). Maps are getting more sophisticated since the release of the complete Halo tag set in October. Swing by and see what you can find! While you’re there, you can check out the Halo CE Chronicles DVD – he’s giving out the entire story (two seasons, 20 eps) to folks who’ve donated $10 or more to the website.