Stuntmutt puts forth an alternate speculation for why a couple of the Halo 2 characters ended up working together in today’s One One Se7en.

HollywoodHalo’s Update 7 passed our MPRRS last night – go watch this for updates on sites like Bungie.net and High Impact Halo. The Pumpkin stuff is a little… odd. Go watch! Just over 30 mb, in either WMP9 or QuickTime formats.

A couple of days ago, Eisen Feuer posted a bunch of dialogue snippets to our forum – high-quality recordings of the various multiple-kill announcements in multiplayer. We’ve finally added them to our Dialogue Databank – one that doesn’t show up in that link is ‘Un-Freakin-Believable‘ which was in the databank before, but in a much lower-quality recording. These are good enough for use in machinima projects, I’d say…

This Spartan Life is hosting a Halo competition on XBL today, at 1pm, EST (that’s a bit less than 5 hours from now). The winner will become a semi-regular character on the popular show, as Damian’s bodyguard. Competitors must be 18 or older, and clearly you must also have access to XBL (and a broadband connection). Full explanations and rules can be found in this post on their forum (registration required to see it). They need email ahead of time – so if you’re interested, sign up and read the post to see what needs to go into it!

The next episode of Nephrons (‘Nephrons – Minus Five’) has been released by ChairLeg Productions – and it’s passed our Movie Peer Review Rating System. You can grab it in PSP-friendly form (368×208, 16.2 mb, MP4 encoding), directly from their site… or in PC-friendly form (standard 640×480 formats) from us; WMP9 format is 44.3 mb, QuickTime format is 40.6 mb. In their words, “a variety of unusual subjects such as thumbscrews and Walrus Kings but still no actual on screen bullets….yet.” Go watch!

The HaloCE community continues advancing the product – Wave of Lag points out a thread on the Gearbox forum where The Ghost demos the first cutscene in the Maw, completely rendered in HaloCE. (HaloCE was released as multiplayer-only; there was no explicit support for campaign play. That didn’t stop these guys, though.) Looks like custom single-player maps aren’t that far off!

Broken Console has posted Episode 3 of The Squadron – it’s called ‘Dinosaurs and Clones’. Pretty nice work, overall! You can grab a WMP9 version (22.6 mb) at their site… and we’re hosting a QuickTime version (21.6 mb) for them (because AnubisUK disappeared before he could get it linked on his own site). Comments can go in AnubisUK’s thread on our forum. Update: The QuickTime is now at their site, as well.

1Up has posted a review of the Multiplayer Map Pack. Well, it’s more than that, really – it’s an 11-page-long strategy guide, with general gameplay tips, weapon respawn times, video clips, map-specific strategies… pretty impressive across the board. Thanks to Sabata for the heads-up on our forum.

Voting is now open to the public in the third annual “Rockets on Prisoner” awards – swing by the site, and vote for your favorite films of the past year! Thanks to That Weasel for all his hard work in making this happen.

Very nice – oil writes to point out that his stat tracking site has been updated; you should go visit! I checked it out, and it calculates a LOT of stuff. Comments can go in this forum post by DRT 117.

Overswarm is back from summer break, with a bunch of new goodies for you in the Not So Common Sense Strategy Guide; if you head to the Articles and Extras section, you’ll find two new pieces – one points out some of the LESS-desirable playstyles out there (try not to fall into one of these categories), the other looks at specific gametypes, and the strategies that might help you improve your game at them. In the Movies and Commentary section, there’s a new Advanced Vehicle Guide, this one covering Scorpions and Wraiths – watch it to glean tips for better offensive (and defensive) use of these monsters. Go read!

Another piece of Halowiki news… LegendaryMark has written up a useful article discussing how to make the most of a matchmade team, especially bigger ones. Sometimes the most frustrating thing is getting people to pay attention to you… this might help. Go read it!

Many people wrote in with news of Halo references in the movie 40 Year Old Virgin… I’m not sure that’s a good thing or a bad one. I think Reinhard Mazariegos might have been first.

Wow. PEZ has adapted an existing script for Firefox that, when installed in your browser, will add links to any bungie.org or bungie.net page that contains keywords with corresponding pages on the Halowiki.net website. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense, go read the page he’s put up about it. I just installed the Greasemonkey plugin and his web linker script… and both Bungie.net and bungie.org just got a whole lot more linked for me. (The new links to halowiki content are differentiated from existing links by a dotted red underline – so you’ll know which ones are ones we put there, and which ones are supplementary info.) Cool! (If you don’t use Firefox – any platform – this is useless to you.)

There’s a writeup of a custom gametype called ‘Snowball’ over at Geezer Gamers; it’s a little like Zombies, but not really. The thing that makes it… well, odd is the requirement of teabagging your opponent. (You have to.) It’s a funny writeup for a somewhat unique gametype – go check it out! (Thanks again, 3Suns.)

Dyslexia has written up a post-mortem of the MLG Las Vegas event – it’s a fun read. Oh, the mixing of gambling and pro Halo… thanks, 3Suns.

The Weekly What’s Update has been posted; there’s info about the upcoming free release of all maps that are currently not free (and you should definitely download them soon after August 30, because they WILL be integrated into all playlists; if you don’t have ’em, you don’t play), and info about Kirkland, where the Bungie team is moving to (apparently, the other game developers complained about the smell so much that Microsoft moved them several miles away). And there’s a link to Aaron Walpole’s Canadian Idol page – he’s in the top 5 now (this was mentioned by D-Man earlier today, but I passed on it because it’s not really Halo news… but since it’s in the WWU…). And there’s a mister chief picture that just creeps me out. Go read.

Z points out a new montage, from Bballplaya12, over on Halo2Forum.com. 64 mb, WMP9 format. Lots and lots of sticks and snipes. Good timing, and some of the sticks (especially the ones on Lockout) are pretty impressive. Go grab a copy!

One One Se7en, at a loss for its own content, sucked in Halo Babies today. Poor Baby MC…

DarqKnyght created a spoof montage – ever wonder what it would sound like if Homer Simpson played Xbox Live? Wonder no more! Timing is beautiful, and there were several laugh-out-loud clip choices (for me, at least). Warning ahead of time: anyone who chooses to denigrate the actual gameplay shown (“those weren’t very impressive kills”) on our forum will be mocked mercilessly by me – this montage is NOT about the masterful play, it’s about the great matchup between gameplay and Simpson snippets. Go watch – it’s funny. 34.4 mb, in either WMP9 or QuickTime formats.