Podtacular!, the Halo 2 podcast we mentioned last week, has a new episode up – 21.4 mb, 46 minutes long, covers a variety of subjects, including general tips, specific level strategies, and more. Go listen. (We heard from a couple of people about this – Donaff Baz was first.)

AJay points out SpartanComics over at MySpace, a series of well-done Halo-based comics. (To be fair – Shooty Guy pointed this out last month, but initially there was some unpleasantness about what ELSE was linked from the page Shooty Guy was pointing to, so I passed on it – and by the time it got fixed, I’d forgotten that it hadn’t been front-paged.) In any case, go read now!

Interesting – according to Stars and Stripes, Halo 2 is the most popular game at Forward Operating Base Lagman, home of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, in Khandahar, Afghanistan. The local exchange is selling controllers “like wildfire” – partly because so many people are playing, and partly because the fine grit in the air is really hard on controllers. Yet another hazard of war…

Don’t have enough Bungie schwag? Go visit the Bungie Store – there are lots of new goodies, from t-shirts to posters to action figures. Read about it on B.net. Thanks to Cybrfrk, whose email was noticed before the RSS feed was.

Three up, three out… a third offering to make it through the MPRRS last night was a video called ‘Happy Go Lucky’, put together by Ryan Stevens, Ashley Akers, and Nathan Stuart. In Ryan’s words, “an elite wakes up in the morning and goes to the store, but nothing is as it seems.” It’s pretty inventive in the overall presentation – I’m looking forward to more from this team! You can grab a copy in WMP9 format (35.7 mb) or QuickTime format (33.7 mb).

Halo shows up in the strangest of places… wheeler found a piece of fan art for a game called ‘N’ – it’s a “minimalist Lode-Runner-esque puzzle platformer”, with a stick-figure ninja as the main character. Visit their downloads page, you’ll find dozens of fan-created images putting N in a variety of settings… including the level Halo. Oddness.

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Red vs Blue will be premiering the Season 3 DVD at Lincoln Center on August 21 – and they’ll be showing it again at the Penny Arcade Expo, in Seattle, on August 26. In a recent post on the Red vs Blue website, Burnie suggested that visitors to these events might get a sneak preview of Season 4, which is set to debut the following week, on August 29. Looking forward to it! (Thanks to Chris Ramirez for reminding us.)

We’ve never needed to put an ESRB-style warning on One One Se7en before… but maybe a POBE1 warning would be more appropriate. Yeah. I had nothing to do with this one. Yeah.
1. Pissed Off Bungie Employee

Video number two for the day – this is a teaser trailer for a montage video coming out soon, from Mikeman27 and Nefarious Dan. It was released on our forum last week, but got minimal feedback… so they submitted it to the MPRRS, where it passed. The large frame around the content is actually there on purpose; it’s an attempt to keep you from full-screening the vid. (Mike assures me that the final vid will be of higher quality, and won’t need this limitation.) Timing’s quite good, action is suitably frenzied. 13 mb, in WMP9 or QuickTime formats.

A number of movies have passed our own Movie Peer Review Rating Service recently; the first is quite small (1:50, just over 5 mb, in both QuickTime and WMP9 formats) – it’s a trailer for an upcoming 8-episode machinima based on the novel The Fall of Reach. The project is coming from a British Clan, and their website contains more info about the project (including a call for voice work). The video itself is predominantly cutscene footage, from both Halo and Halo 2, with some nice timing and coordination. Check it out!

We got a note from Gene, a member of HaloZination, a German Halo 2 clan which has been working on a machinima series – there are currently three episodes, downloadable from their website. They’re all in WMP9 format, and range from 45 to 75 mb apiece. Without understanding German, this one makes very little sense… but we haven’t heard of a lot of projects that aren’t in English, so if you DO speak German, give this one a look!

Anton P. Nym found, over at the Escapist, an article on machinima, as well – and again, Red vs Blue is held up as an example of how to do it right (along with Randy Glass, and his latest (non-Halo) work) – but mostly, the author laments the huge amount of mediocre work available on the net, and suggests that if the RIAA gets involved, at least the number of “just-plain-crappy videos” (his words, not mine) would decrease. Eh. (I was also unhappy that many of the example links at the end of the article were dead ends.)

The New York Times article we mentioned yesterday is online now (free registration required, or visit bugmenot.com for a username). NB was right – it’s a great article. It focuses pretty heavily on Red vs Blue, while looking at the field of machinima in general – go read this!

Over at Halo2Forum.com, there are three new movies to grab – P3MBY made a second montage (QuickTime format, 117 mb) – lots and lots and LOTS of sticks. On the same page, you’ll find a link for KwicK’s Montage (WMP9 format, 50.7 mb) – P3MBY is a member of the same team (xT Minnesota) as KwicK. And then, in this thread, you can find a link for Xpl0d3r’s ‘Things I Learned While Playing Halo 2’ (WMP9 format, 62.6 mb) – I think it boils down to ‘don’t be stupid’, but I’m not sure. That’s a lot of bytes to download!

A couple of net reviews out there for you – Xbox World Australia has given the Multiplayer Map Pack a once-over (they liked it, but would have appreciated some single-player love), and Gaming Horizon has pinned down Halo 2 (yeah, the game, not the map pack) – if you’ve read any of the hundreds of reviews that were published a few months ago, you’ve seen their gripes before (and their kudos, too). But there it is.

Fan Fiction writers must be focusing on the 117 Words contest – in the last 5 days, there’ve only been 8 new submissions. Go read!

NB writes to say that on page 20 of today’s New York Times Magazine is an article about machinima and Red vs Blue. I couldn’t find it online yet – probably will show up tomorrow, since the Magazine section is part of Sunday’s paper, even though you can buy it on Saturday – but it sounds like it’s worth reading!

As you may or may not have noticed, the Seeker link we had on the right side of this page is gone. It turned out to be more resource-intensive than Subnova could handle (a full explanation is here). If the situation changes, we’ll be sure to let you know!

The Codex Series, Episode 19, is now online – ‘Power Plays’ is the second-to-last episode, and has some great scenes in it. Great action, nice suspense… go watch! The final scene will be posted at 7 PM Central time (that’s midnight, UTC) next Friday night… they want as many people online as they can get. Go watch this episode and start building your anticipation!

That Weasel dropped a note letting us know that the Third Annual Rockets on Prisoner Awards has officially kicked off. There are 9 video categories and seven sub-categories – and the public is encouraged to participate by nominating videos of their choice. (Each person gets 1 nomination per day for the next 7 days – so be sure to keep going back.) Voting begins on August 17, but there should be plenty of interesting stuff between now and then. Check it out!