Captain Spark turned in another batch of dialogue snippets for the Dialogue Databank – I’m LOVIN’ that female marine clip. You can use the above link to browse the submissions, or grab the whole batch from his website.

The Team Hardcore playlist went live yesterday. Stuntmutt takes a look in today’s One One Se7en.

The Group Drawing for the World Cyber Games event, taking place next month in Singapore, occurred last night (well, this afternoon, Singapore time – about 10 hours ago). The Halo 2 competition pits 17 teams against one another – they’re split into four groups, with two teams from each group moving on to the final 8-team single-elimination tournament. The US team made group D, and will be duking it out with the Netherlands, Colombia, Canada, and Switzerland for a shot at the final round. (The other three groups have only four teams each.) Good luck to all 17 teams – we’ll see who comes out on top in just about a month!

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned PolyMallet, Chris Hughes’ personal site. Recently, the gallery page was updated with new work, including a number of Halo pieces. (The Early Work in Progress Cortana is pretty interesting.) Go check it out! Thanks, Harry Al-Shakarchi.

There’s another top story up on Bungie.net tonight – it’s an interview with Bob Glessner, the newest Bungie hire. He works for Mat Noguchi, doing Tools programming (the fact that he’s working primarily with Halo map-creation tools says some specific things about Bungie’s next project). I think Noguchi gets a bad rap in this interview – I mean, I’ve spent several hours with the guy, and I’ve NEVER seen him bite the head off a chicken. Good read, though. Check it out. As usual, Frankie manipulates the system to get credit for telling us. (He steals kills on XBL, too.)

Eep – this passed the MPRRS yesterday, but I forgot to post it. I just want to say that this is probably the last of its kind that we’ll entertain here; I do NOT want to become the defacto host of iPod-formatted films. That said, the reviewers approved it, so I’m passing it along. It’s Gladiator Evolved (originally released a month ago, in regular web formats, to rave reviews), and it’s been formatted to play on the new Video iPod. It’s 54.5 mb, H.264-encoded, with a screen resolution of 320×144 pixels. (The original had 4 times as many pixels.) If you’ve got a Video iPod, and want to see how a great Halo vid looks on it, this is one to grab. For everyone who suddenly gets the idea to reformat every great Halo vid for the iPod (or the PSP, or any other non-web-standard viewing option)… please, find your own host. Thanks!

Broken Console Productions have posted Episode 7 of their ‘Squadron’ Machinima – it’s available in both WMP9 (16.6 mb) and QuickTime (16.9 mb) formats. The squadron is… running into trouble. As usual, high-quality workmanship all around… go watch!

It’s official – as of now, the Leaderboards on Bungie.net are gone. Also, the Team Hardcore playlist should be live very, very soon. (As in, later this afternoon.) Here’s hoping that the level of cheating goes down, now that there’s much less to be gained!

The Stubbs the Zombie site was updated yesterday (in honor of the game’s Xbox release) with a fantastic trailer of ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ by the Raveonettes. Disco Zombies… it don’t GET any better’n that. Thanks, Karri.

Z points out a nice montage trailer over at Halo2Forum.com – 58 mb, WMP9 format, really clear footage. Give it a look!

Dave Cheung, of Chugworth Academy, is worried about what having Peter Jackson on board might mean for a Halo movie. Check the image linked at the bottom of the news post on this page for a graphical depiction of his fear. Thanks, Kaari Koehn.

The Best Villain nominees (and winner) have been posted over at the Rockets on Prisoner Awards site – thanks to Spartan 777 for the heads-up.

Frankie wrote up a summary of statistics about Halo 2 on Xbox Live – and while it’s chock-full of the normal things you’d expect (like what percentage of arranged games are played on each map), it’s also got just plain silly stats, like how much money would have been earned if every hour spent playing matchmaking had been spent, instead, earning minimum wage, or how much you’d make if you had a nickel for every game, or how close to Reach you’d get if you stacked a penny for every second played. (Well, maybe not that last one. But that’s only because he didn’t think of it.) He’s also inordinately proud of beating everyone to the punch with the news – cause yeah, he POSTED it. But he’s like that. Go read. Update: Skavenger found a few more facts you might be interested in…

After a very, very, VERY long dry spell, the Miscellaneous section gets the beginnings of an update – another 6 months of entries have been added, thanks to The Morningstar. (To be totally fair, I’ve had the Excel file with these entries sitting on my drive for almost 7 months now – this is NOT his fault, it’s mine.) The good news is, though, that there’s now an easy-to-use interface for adding more entries… so it’s quite possible that this particular subsection of HBO might get caught up soon!

There’s a large local tourney in London, this coming Sunday – Halo 2 is one of the games on the block, it’s £5 to play or £3 to watch, and prizes include Xbox360s and lots of other goodies. More info can be found in the press release on GamesIndustry.biz.

The DC Independent Film Festival is currently accepting Halo movie submissions – and if you go through MachinimaDudes.com, and your movie is deemed ‘worthy’, you won’t have to pay the $15 submission fee. Details (including length requirements) can be found on the MachinimaDudes front page – the entry form itself contains information about formatting and the like. Entries must be in by November 4, so get cracking! Thanks, Dan Bliton.

Sometimes, the real world intrudes on our virtual world, and shows up in Stuntmutt’s One One Se7en. This isn’t really one of those times.

Thirteen new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section. Go read!

That Weasel dropped us a note to say that another Rockets on Prisoner pre-release is out – go grab the vid showing the nominees and the winner for Best Editing, Sound, and FX. Also, an official date has been set for the grand finale – next Sunday, October 23rd, at 8 pm Eastern. Go look!

The full results for the MLG LA tourney can be found over at MLGPro.com – Team3D took the 4v4 title, and Karma beat Ogre 2 for the 1v1 competition. Thanks to 3Suns for the heads-up (who says the Video on Demand coverage of these games was spectacular).