F13ND has posted the next installment of his ‘Noobs Guide’ over at Team3D – this one gives some tips on flanking, with the help of Saiyan. If you didn’t get this the first time around, this guide is NOT for noobs – it’s for anyone looking to improve their gameplay, by focusing on advanced strategy tips. (In fact… it can’t even be USED by noobs, since the descriptions and techniques that are suggested tend to be things that beginners would have no clue about.) That said – these are great reads. Go check this one out.

Looks like you can buy all the Series 4 action figures directly from the Bungie Store. (You can buy them from a lot of places – but the profit from the Bungie store goes towards the World Domination effort.) Thanks, LegendaryMark.

The South Dakota State University Collegian has an article on why Halo 2 might be losing you dates. Duh. (Of course, this doesn’t apply if your girlfriend plays Halo…)

Four new movies at Halo2Forum today – The Last Man Standing (12.7 mb) is a Halo 1 story summed up by its title, and there’s a montage trailer from Domain Productions (21 mb), a demo of a mod that turns Banshees in to X-Wing fighters (28.3 mb), and a montage/gameplay vid from OscarMayerNinja (73 mb), where games are broken into ‘missions’; there’s less cutting, and more fast-forwarding. All vids except the domain productions vid are in WMP9 format – that one is .AVI.

Normally, there’s enough content over the course of a week that the Tied The Leader Halo blog gets a single wrapup mention. We got mail from 3Suns, though, suggesting that a new article, ‘Open Letter to the Timothy‘, deserved a mention of its own. Upon reading, I’d agree. XerxdeeJ points out that not every young player deserves to be lumped in with the screaming ‘Timothys’ made famous by 2old2play – sometimes, having young ‘uns on your (older) team can be a good thing. Go read.

The current episode of Exterminatus Now (a webcomic) contains some game-related wallpapers in the text writeup (scroll down to the bottom) – the Lothar Hex paper is Halo-related. (Pretty cool, too.) Thanks to Hanchen Lu for the heads-up (we heard from Lothar Hex, as well, but he was about 6 hours behind).

Narcogen, of Rampancy.net, was interviewed by Taso, of the High Impact Halo forums, and the result can be found in that same place. Where DID this guy come from, and what does he do now? Go read to find out. Thanks, Ducain.

Today’s One One Se7en takes a different look at Dead or Alive 4… no pining for a curvaceous Spartan this time.

Ash pointed out a pretty fun vid that got front-paged over at High Impact Halo; a live marine, launched up to the double-bridge on AotCR. It got the thumbs-up from Ducain, as well. It tickles my funnybone that today, less than two weeks from the fourth anniversary of the release of Halo, people are STILL finding new things to do with the original game. You can grab two different WMP9 vids in the forum thread that the HIH newspost will get you to, a short one showing just the successful jump and a longer one showing some pretty entertaining buildup – we’re gonna offer you a QuickTime version of the longer one, as well, because… well, because we’re like that. Nice work, SneakyPete!

Podtacular episode 21 is up – this one focuses on clans and community updates. 10 mb, half an hour long. Go listen!

Designation Se7en is a webcomic – that’s devoted its 343rd episode to a Halo funni. Thanks, Coolhand2.

Blow Me Away, the charity auction to benefit hurricane victims, continues to gather eyeballs and bids (to date, the auctions have over 150,000 pageviews and are hovering right around $9000, with four days to go), but if you’re in Auckland, New Zealand, there’s an auction tonight for a different cause. At the Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre, they’re having their annual fundraising gala tonight… and part of the festivities include a charity auction, which includes, among other cool items, a Peter Jackson-autographed Xbox with Halo 2. You can read the details at Scoop.

Joe Staten has written the third installment of his Great Hollywood Journey (the first piece was mentioned here, and the second here) – he’s just returned from touring WETA’s studios in New Zealand, and he sounds positively giddy. Go read. Then yell at Frankie for always hogging the credit.

Stephen Loftus used Guerilla (part of the Halo Editing Kit released for use with HaloCE) to overhaul some of the information in his Uniforms on the Pillar of Autumn article. Go check out what’s there now!

Whoa. Now THERE’S a deal. Australian Halo’ers can buy a Halo 2 Xbox Live Kit – for $99.99 (about $75 US) you get the Halo 2 Limited Edition (pretty hard to find these days!), plus 12 months of Xbox Live and a communicator. Sounds like a great deal! Thanks, AussieXbox.

Well… I was planning on gussying up the interface a bit (my php skills are just SLIGHTLY better than they were last year at this time…), but time is an omnibus. (Don’t even ask.) The deadline for entries to our 343 Guilt O’ Lantern pumpkin carving competition came and went last night… and when the dust settled, there were 53 entries. Some are funny, some are simple, some will take your breath away. The rules for judging are the same as they were last year: you have five votes, they all count evenly. You have a week to cast them (though you have to cast them all at once; you can’t vote for 3, then come back and vote for 2 more). Voting opens right now, and will close sometime next Tuesday, late. (Or maybe Wednesday morning, if I’m not around Tuesday night.) Please, please, PLEASE read the directions – if you vote for the wrong pumpkins, those pumpkins are getting your votes, because we’re not messing with stuff. Look over ALL the pumpkins; if you pick 5 from the first page, you’ll be skipping some killer entries. In fact, the ‘next page’ button at the bottom of the page simply cycles around; once you’re done, you start over. So look through everything, maybe ruminate for a day or two, THEN vote. (Or vote right away – but look at everything first.) If you’ve forgotten what the winners go home with, check back on our contest page for the prize lists. Tell your friends to vote – but don’t tell them HOW to vote; make this a fair contest, no ballot stuffing! This is all about fun, and I gotta say, there are some amazing pumpkins again this year. Go see!

Marty Wells sent along a couple of pictures (this one and this one) showing 2 months of work for the Halloween costumes they wore last night, a “fun night of costume contests and bar hopping.” The original filename of the first one was “My name is Michael J Caboose and I hate BABIES.JPG” – do you think they’re RvB fans? Pretty nice work!

Ben Hollis writes to let us know that XBList has been updated to version 2.0; it’s now compatible with the new Xbox.com, has the ability to load XBL Gamer Tiles as well as Halo 2 emblems, and can popup notifications when your friends sign on and off. It’s a Windows program. Check it out!

MLGPro has completely overhauled their site and forums; the focus is much more on user interaction. I could live without some of the Flash… but it’s certainly more powerful from a community-building standpoint. Reaction on their forums is split between folks who love it and folks who hate it. Video on Demand, while still not Mac-accessible, is now FAR more searchable and sortable. And there are a few new articles to read over, some about the changes, others of more general interest (there’s a player spotlight on Ogre 2, for example). Check it out! Thanks to several people for pointing this out – Ryan Etsell was first.

There’s a writeup of Saturday night’s Video Games Live concert in Seattle over on Bungie.net; sounds like the Bungie guys had a pretty good time! Marty says I shouldn’t give up on the concert series… Marty’s a pretty nice guy. I can definitely get behind Frankie’s call for more cowbell! (His ‘First’ post on our forum actually made me laugh.)