Se7en One has put together a page on the ‘Glide dragon’, his name for the birds (or, I guess, insects, according to Se7en One) you can see on the Delta Halo and Regret levels of Halo 2. (Look closely – that’s the HBO Helljumpers website, not HBO; they just use a design based on ours.) He also posted this info in our forum. Interesting collection of information gleaned from a few sightings!

Stuntmutt stays focused on the DoA4 Spartan in today’s One One Se7en. How bad would it get if she weren’t wearing armor?

Twenty two new pieces in the Fan Fiction section since Friday. Dang, they’re keeping busy…

The New York Times has an article (registration required, don’t forget about bugmenot.com) on the genre-melding of movies and video games, and it focuses on Peter Jackson as one of the prime players that is bringing cinematics to games, rather than the other way around. Halo, of course, is mentioned (although King Kong plays a bigger role in the piece). Interesting read. Thanks, Adam Daniel.

Episode 10, the season finale of the Outpost Coagulation machinima series, has been posted over at TreeSkunk Productions. (If you’re having trouble finding them, trigger119 published direct links in this forum post (for the low-res) and this post (for the high-res). A cliffhanger…

c0ld Vengeance found a mod for Halo 2 that changes all enemy resources to UNSC resources – so that you’re fighting marines, Pelicans, hogs and tanks. He put up a short vid showing a fun encounter – check it out! (The forum post contains a link to the mod as well, if you want to try it yourself – but remember that you have to have a modded Xbox to make this work. That link also contains a couple of movies – one showing this global war mod, the other showing a ‘Betrayal’ version where you’re teamed up with Hunters against the rest of the Covenant.)

The Rockets on Prisoner 2005 Awards are nearly done – all of the winners have now been announced (you can find the full list on the RoP website, and at some point, an enormous (1 hour, 22 minutes) video containing the entire ceremony will be up. Congrats to all the winners!

The latest episode (episode 4) of the Halo Nation podcast has been posted – 45 minutes, 50 mb. From their description: “We get to play some Xbox 360 games, Every 10 Minutes Tips, Halo-isms, Girls of Xbox Live, and no singing (we promise)…” Thanks, animefx.

KP has written up a rather comprehensive guide for IRC n00bs; if you would LIKE to hang out and chat with HBO regulars, but aren’t sure how to go about it… go read this page. (It’s aimed mostly at Windows-based chat clients… but the general ideas work fine with Mac clients, too. We’ll be linking this in a more permanent location soon (but right now, I have to leave).

QuackJAG put together a great video for Elnea’s ‘Blow Boys Away’ music parody (first mentioned here), and Elnea mentioned it in her Red vs Blue journal (RvB membership required). The thing is, it’s hosted at YouTube, in small, Flash-only format, which seemed… belittling. So I offered to provide space for a larger version, and QuackJAG accepted. You can grab the vid (23.5 mb, 720×480, WMP9 format) from us, now. Great use of HaloCE! (Elnea also created a new sketch for him, in thanks – you can see it in our gallery here, or see what her son did to it in her journal there.)

A RATING TEN sent us word that he’d finished his montage, and that he had enough bandwidth left this month to serve it himself. The high-res version is six and a half minutes long, 640×480, in MPEG2 format, and weighs in at 246 mb. (There’s a lower-res version available on the downloads page – 32 mb – for folks who can’t handle the big one.) He also started a thread in our forum, if you want to comment.

Red vs Blue Episode 65, ‘Looking for Group’, was released last night for sponsors (which means it’ll be available for the masses by tomorrow sometime). Clearly, Caboose is a closet RPG player. And Simmons is… well, pretty dumb. Props to sarge, for the best epithet of the week (“Great sodium chloride!”). If you’re a sponsor, go watch. If you’re not, wait a bit. (And please – don’t feel you need to tell us when the public versions are live… we announce RvB episodes ONCE, and assume anyone who isn’t a sponsor can count to 48, and figure out when to look for the version they can see.)

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a London-based tournament to be held over Xbox Live – it took place on Friday, and the winning team was [TmC]. Thanks to [TmC]’s Samscrim for letting us know!

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dennis McCauley wrote a column for tech.life@play called ‘Xbox Hitting the road’. (You have to sign in to read it in its original location, so you might as well grab it from a syndicated location, instead – The Wichita Eagle is running it, for example.) It’s taking a look at the run the Xbox has had (assuming that it’s dead now that the 360 is about to be released – a bad assumption, maybe). The end of the article lists McCauley’s top 10 Xbox games – Halo is number 1, Halo 2 is number 7. Nice!

This Spartan Life has updated with a new video blog entry – blog 04 continues to chronicle the Bodyguard Competition. Some nice camera angles (I’m impressed with how careful the competitors are to not kill the camera people); I’m guessing he’s getting closer to picking a winner. QuickTime (13.8 mb) or WMP9 (10.5 mb) formats. Go check it out!

There’s a nice interview with Matt Soell over at Gaming Nexus – he talks about Stubbs the Zombie, and though much of the info is already out there, there are a few new and interesting questions. Go read! Thanks, Rampancy.net.

The movie trifecta is completed with a high-res version of one of the high-speed runs we mentioned a couple of days ago. I wished for higher quality, Cody Miller answered me. You can grab a 640×480 QuickTime (82.5 mb) of Jeff’s Cairo Station run from our server; the original source was VHS tape, so it’s still not crystal-clear, but it’s much better than the 320×240 version released Thursday. (We’re not going to get in the habit of hosting speedruns; that’s what highspeedhalo is for… I just wanted to see it better, and Cody obliged.)

Another recent submission to the MPRRS that the reviewers gave their thumbs-up to was the HALO 2: Mombasa trailer. This is a trailer for the second installment of Clan Dyslexia’s re-enactment of the Halo 2 story (the first installment was mentioned here, here, and here), and aside from being too dark in places, is a gorgeous filming of the Earth sections of Halo 2. You can grab the WMP9 version of the trailer (20.6 mb), or a slightly less dark (but still hard-to-see in places) QuickTime version (20.9 mb) – and then settle in to wait for the final product, because this one looks to be amazing.

Halzred submitted his latest montage to the MPRRS; he didn’t want hosting (it’s already being hosted over at Halo2forum.com – WMP9, 64.9 mb), but it passed with a pretty high score, and we always try to make hosted movies available to as many people as possible… so I’m putting up a QuickTime version (65.9 mb) just for those who need it. Great editing, great gameplay, fantastic timing. Go watch!