Today’s Halo Babies takes a shot at the new Nintendo Revolution’s controller… go read! Thanks, mrsmiley.

Normally, we don’t make site notices on our front page – but this one’s a bit… unusual (special, I suppose). -Hp-FIL4, from the MLG forums, pointed out that his movie site, xtina, had never been mentioned here at HBO. And he’s right. Which is surprising, because the collection of movies available is rather large, and in some cases quite rare. There’s lots of gameplay footage, for folks who like to watch that… there are tips vids, and tricks vids, and the first season of Red vs Blue… there are hack videos. Lots of stuff. And the connection’s decent, too (though a post like this might actually be a bad thing for that). It’s been around for quite a long time – if you’ve never been there, you should check it out!

There’s a great interview over at Gamasutra with Alex Seropian, of Wideload Games. He discusses how the business model works (outsourcing assets rather than creating everything in-house), and how they expanded the Halo engine to fit the needs of a zombie-based comedy action-thriller. It won’t be long now – the game will be out next month! Give it a read. Thanks, Roger Wilco. Update: there’s also a preview of the game over at GameSpy – they call Stubbs (the character) ‘rotting, putrid [but] lovable’. Hmm… thanks, Rampancy.net.

8 new Fan Fiction pieces in this mid-week update. Go read!

A month ago, we posted a sub-4-minute Silent Cartographer speedrun from insidi0us – the only thing that SLIGHTLY drew away from its awesomeness was the fact that it was run on Normal, instead of Legendary. He’s fixed that. He uses roughly the same tricks to shave time off on this run as he did on the last one, with one exception – there’s a grenade jump just after picking up the invisibility that’s simply beautiful in its time-savingness. He panics a bit near the end, I think… but the last overshield holds until the checkpoint, and he comes in at 3:54 – amazing. We’re hosting copies of both his original WMP9 version (33.2 mb) and a re-encoded QuickTime version (34.8 mb) – if you like speedruns, grab this one!

Darksage has completed the first version of his Floodgulch for Farcry Instincts map; it’s a reproduction of Blood Gulch for Farcry Instincts, but with quite a bit of standing water. He’s planning on setting up a dedicated server for folks to download the map this evening, from 5pm-midnight, EST. (If you grab this, please set up your own match, rather than playing off Darksage’s server – he wants to reserve the bandwidth for downloads. To download the map, join the game hosted by Darksage OSI or Darksage OSI V2.) He’s planning on creating a flythrough of the map soon, so people can see what’s involved… but here’s your chance to play it first!!

The reordered I Love Bees release continues – today we have a couple of large chapters, 9 (34 minutes) and 10 (30 minutes). The meat of the story is beginning to come out at this point… go listen!

Wow – rockslider has written up a highly-detailed guide on a new bit of fun to be had on Halo (the second level of the original game). He calls it the Arc of Death, and from reading his description, it sounds like a blast! (Um, literally, I guess.) Give it a read, then try it out for yourself!

StealthSniper22 created a ‘new kind of montage‘ – it’s called ‘The Stalker’, and it’s composed entirely from real XBL Matchmaking Head-to-Head games. It’s AMAZING how often his opponents don’t notice him following them. (Or, in some cases, standing on their head…) It’s hilarious. A lower-res (320×240, 22.3 mb) version can be found in this post, and a higher-res (640×480, 52 mb) version is linked in this post. Both are WMP9 format. (I’m willing to work on a QuickTime version if there’s interest.) Go watch – and giggle. Update: Now available as a QuickTime, as well (480×360, 53.1 mb, smoothed a little bit).

Another HBO toolbar, this one from Keyes. No pic, but in his words, ” a news searcher, popup blocker, chatroom for toolbar users, handy dandy links, quick link to HBO, and a scrolling front page news ticker.” Works in IE and Firefox (on XP). Sounds handy!

David “wlkng nghtmre” Antunes sent in a bunch of pics showing off a table he made last year – the ultimate TV stand, as he puts it. Pretty fun battle scene! Check it out.

Broken Console Productions has posted Episode 5 of their ongoing machinima, The Squadron – grab it from their Videos page. Things are about to heat up… writing is a fun mixture of serious and silly, filming is topnotch. Go watch! (19.3 mb in WMP9 format, 18.1 in QT.)

Hehe – I have SO acted out today’s One One Se7en in real games… man. Sometimes, a comic just hits home. (Though Stuntmutt assures me that he had someone completely different in mind when he wrote this particular strip…)

TychoVII sent word of a video he and some friends finished up over the summer. In his words, it’s “a blend of the infamous Halo 2 gametype ‘Zombies’ and the movie ‘Shaun of the Dead’ using songs from the SOTD soundtrack.” It’s funny, well-filmed, and showed me a number of cool jumping tricks to use in my next game of Zombies. Quality is quite good. It’s available from their server (QuickTime format, 63.7 mb, over 10 minutes long), though I’d host it in a heartbeat – it’s definitely worth watching. Grab a copy, and enjoy!

Two more episodes have gone up in Webshift’s reordered I Love Bees audio files. Things are starting to get crazy – go listen!

Z sends word of another pair of montages at Halo2Forum.com – one is a trailer – Crypty teases for his upcoming montage vid with very nice editing reminiscent of Dan Chosich’s Framework vid from a couple of years ago (15.8 mb), and OscarMayerNinja’s Montage 4 is five minutes of effect-laden sticks and snipes (63.3 mb). Both are WMP9 format. Go watch.

Well, I was wrong – there IS some Halo-related content in the OrigenXbox360.com website… the TeamXbox people snagged the XML file that contains all (well, maybe not all) the actual content, hidden or not, on the site – you’d think they’d have learned to protect that by now – and apparently, two of the available spots to visit Origen will be taken up by the top of the Double-Team leaderboard at Bungie.net. Go read the rest of the article for more details, including info on the OTHER spots. (We’re not going to be announcing more news about this unless it’s Halo-related – but it seems that SOME news, at least, WILL be.)

Wow, very cool. This is the first clip I’ve seen of the Video Games Live production of the Halo music – visit this page, as of right now it’s the first ‘Live Performance’ (a few down from the top). Short film, but makes me want to see that show! Thanks to Schedonnardus for the heads-up.

I hesitate to post this, because the LAST new website Bungie touted went offline for bandwidth overages within a few hours… but hey, they’re still up now. Halo Movie Online was set up to discuss ‘the latest rumors and facts as they come forward’ about the Halo movie. (Here’s hoping all the ‘who do YOU want to see in X role?’ threads go there, too…) Check it out! Thanks, Frankie.

Sponsors vs Freeloaders Episode 8 will be coming out a bit over a week – but they’ve posted a teaser to whet your appetite. (If you haven’t seen this series, you really should watch the later episodes – the actual storyline kicks off around episode 5, and since then they’ve been getting better and better.) The trailer is a brief 35 seconds long, and available in WMP9 format (7.2 mb) from one of their servers. If you’d rather watch it in QuickTime, I’ve re-encoded a copy (6.1 mb).