Wow. Jamie98s has put up a bunch of movies over the last four months – but this one might be my favorite. It’s called Metal Gear Solid, and it’s (as might be expected) a story starring Solid Snake, from the MGS series. Jamie’s plot description: “Solid Snake is deployed to a secret miltary base to disarm a nuclear warhead and destroy a top secret project known as Metal Gear.” Audio is from MGS, video is all Halo (with a few special effects thrown in). Fantastic job – simply fantastic. It’s rather large (107 mb in WMP9 format, 100 mb in QuickTime format), because it’s rather long (32 and a half minutes), so we’re starting it off as a BitTorrent download. You can grab the WMP9 torrent or the QT one – your choice. We’re also providing quite a bit of seed bandwidth (2000 kB/sec per torrent), so downloads should be speedy, and should STAY speedy if early downloaders leave BitTorrent open after they’ve gotten a copy. In a day or two, we’ll provide direct download links, as well, for folks who can’t handle BT. Enjoy it – I sure did.

Elnea has been sketching up a storm since the data loss suffered by Red vs Blue a couple of days ago – there are two new sketches (one is an early version of a piece of artwork already in the collection, the other is crash-related)… and while you’re there, there’s couple of new avatars at the end of the Avatar section. Nice stuff!

Sith went through the current playlists, and broke out the weightings for maps and gametypes on each one. Interesting data!

Gamespot has put up a new article on the Best Launch Titles of all time – and Halo makes the list (at number 5). They had really nice things to say about the game:

With Halo, [Bungie] accomplished the rarest of feats: It broke through to a new audience in the biggest way imaginable and set an extremely high standard for subsequent Xbox games. Halo’s influence is undeniable. The game might have seemed derivative at first glance, but its numerous subtle innovations have been borrowed by countless other games since.

I’d agree with that… thanks, prometheus.

So last night, Ducain pointed out a post he’d made over at High Impact Halo, giving props to WLT, a trickster who managed to put not one, but TWO hogs on top of one of the Blue Beam towers in the level Halo… along with himself. It’s one of those totally useless, totally amazing tricks that just makes you want to giggle. We’re hosting copies of the film, to save on WLT’s bandwidth – you can grab the vid in its original WMP9 format (18.9 mb) or a re-encoded QuickTime (19.3 mb). Halo is nearly 4 years old. Halo 2 is almost a year old. And there are STILL people spending inordinate amounts of time setting up, and executing, new demonstrations of Halo physics fun.

Pinkuh’s new comic, Lost the Lead, has a promo comic up in our forum now. (The full site is still waiting for the coding to be finished.) Go read!

A couple of new pieces over at MLGPro.com – there’s an article on Storm Ventures, an up-and-coming team with promise, and a gallery full of pics from MLG Seattle. Good stuff! Thanks, 3Suns.

Gamespot says the rumor that Halo 3 will be shown to the public at X05 in Amsterdam next week is false. (Whoa, what a surprise.) I suppose I’m glad they came to that conclusion – but I’m really only posting this so folks can stop telling us they said this. It ain’t announced until it’s announced by Bungie – and trust me, the day that happens is a day we’ll make a LOT of noise.

This Spartan Life has added another video blog entry – it’s a dispatch from the Bodyguard Competition (part 1, actually). During the competition to see who’ll make the best bodyguard, the cameraman has a really hard time staying alive – you gotta wonder about a bunch of applicants for a bodyguard position have trouble telling the difference between friendlies and hostiles… Pretty funny – go watch. (WMP9 coming later today, the next couple of parts of the competition coming in the next two weeks.)

DOH! Webshift gently reminded me (via the forum) that while I’d updated the reordered I Love Bees page yesterday to include the last three chapters, I’d forgotten to make a news post about it. Go grab the end of the story! And feel free to use that forum thread to let Webshift know what you think of the project!

Bungie’s Weekly Update is now posted, and the majority is spent discussing a new playlist coming in a few weeks – it’ll be known as Team Hardcore, and it will be significantly more difficult than anything currently on Matchmaking. (Go read the update for full details.) There are also small tidbits about other stuff, and a decided lack of info about Halo 3 (or even the EXISTENCE of Halo 3), and a great Mister-Chief-as-a-baby pic. Check it out!

The time has come – we’re officially announcing this year’s 343 Guilt O’ Lantern pumpkin carving contest. The prize list is rather substantial, though I haven’t found the time to sort out what’s going in which goodie bag, so as of now, I can’t tell you who gets what… but rest assured that there’s some cool schwag in there, and that the top three pumpkins (plus a non-North-American pumpkin, if we get any) will be splitting it all up nicely. You’ve got just over a month to get us your entries – don’t rush it, take your time, look over previous years’ entries, plan out your masterpiece… the winners last year were pretty slick, and my guess is, we’ll be getting some amazing entries. Now… where did those carving knives go?

Captain Spark released another 22 dialogue snippets today – you can grab them from his website, or you can browse them in the Dialogue Databank. Some pretty funny ones in this batch!

There’s still time to get entries in for the 117 Words contest being run by Stuntmutt and Jillybean – the contest ends today! (No whining about needing more time, either – 117 words isn’t very much at all, you can write them over lunch.)

Now, I’m not sayin’ that Stuntmutt was taking a direct shot at me with today’s One One Se7en… well, I know he wasn’t, cause I try not to even PICK UP the sniper rifle, but just in case… phpthbbbb.

Teamcoltra wrote to point out Geeks Paradox, with a collection of Halo 2 Game vids for download. They’re poppin’ up everywhere…

That Weasel posted a note about a new TWTv sub-site – MODex, a group dedicated to eploring mods (for HaloCE, it looks like). Check ’em out.

anti noob posted a note about his new website, and the featured item, a new montage. 68 mb, WMP9 format, hosted on FileFront. (Lots of killtaculars.) Look around!

Gamespot has put up a new preview, new screenshots, and new videos for Stubbs the Zombie (the ‘Do the Zombie‘ vid featured at the top of the preview is hilarious) – go check this stuff out. I can’t wait to drive around in the sod-o-mobile! Thanks, Wort Wort.

3Suns ran across This Gaming Life, a collection of gaming screenshots with added captions. There are lots and lots of Halo ones – and some are quite funny.