trigger119 had to leave for a while – but he’s put up a bunch of content on halomachinima.com that might interest you:

• WMP9 and PSP-compatible versions of Bunker27Goose’s Used Car Salesmen, a Real Men of Genius spoof
• Outpost Coagulation, for PSP (as well as WMP9 and QT, which were always there)
• Stryke Force for PSP

Go look!

This weekend (GT)Juggler hosted a lanfest about 40 miles from here. I couldn’t make it – which saddens me, because according to KP, it was a lot of fun. Juggler just posted a bunch of pics – take a look!

Stuntmutt must have been driving with KP recently – check out today’s One One Se7en.

Cybrfrk found a short film over at Machinima.com, entitled ‘You’re Fired’. According to the film itself, it was made by the Sponsors vs Freeloaders team, but it’s credited to Panda Productions on the Machinima.com page. In any case, it’s what happens when Sims 2 and Halo come together in a film… Update: Just got mail from Amanda Stanley, the brains behind Panda Productions – it seems she’s engaged to Sevenar, from SvF (congrats, both of you!), which explains the co-working. It’s her film, though.

Just six pieces for you today in the Fan Fiction section – go give ’em a read!

3Suns points out some CPL footage available at Gametrailers.com – there’s a general clip (with a small amount of Halo footage) and a Halo-specific clip, both from the CPL Summer Event which took place about a month ago in Dallas. Team 3D and Team Exigen (first and second place winners, respectively) talk a little bit about what helped and what didn’t.

Daily Game has reviewed the Multiplayer Map Pack – and found it wanting. “Plenty of fun, but you’re better off waiting for them to become freebies.” Read the whole review for details. (Hehe – they can say this – they’re PLAYING the maps right now.)

[HC]D-Man found a 3-page editorial in the July issue of a magazine called GVGames – it can be downloaded in PDF format (the editorial begins on page 41), or read online. There’s nothing really new here – it’s a not-very-professional rant about how Halo 2 sucks and Halo was the best game ever. If you’ve spent any time on our forum (or any Halo forum, for that matter) – you’ve heard this rant, sometimes more eloquently put. What intrigues me is that it shows up in this form in a magazine…

Saturday morning, we got email from Z, at halo2forum.com, that Dymdez’s Montage II had been released, along with a request for submission to the Movie Peer Review Rating System. It took about 36 hours for the movie to work through the system – in what might be a first, it didn’t receive a single score below passing. Go watch some fantastic montage footage! 44.7 mb, in DivX format.

Chaos Recon pointed out a presentation, in PDF format, called ‘Research in Game Development: Halo 2’ – it looks at how different problems can be attacked, and what some of the pros and cons of each technique might be. It looks like this was presented at the Microsoft Research Asia Theme Workshop 2005, in Beijing, this past May, by someone named Hao Chen. (I don’t know exactly who this is – the server hosting the bios for the conference isn’t up at the moment.) A good read, for anyone interested in the tech behind the eye candy! Update: oops – Hao Chen is listed in the Halo 2 credits under ‘Engineering’ – my bad!

Vella pointed out that there’s a really small Halo mention in the latest Wired – in the Found section (a ‘Last Page’ feature of Wired which shows ‘Artifacts from the Future’), there’s a shot of the crossword puzzle from an edition of the New York Times in 2019. 65 Across is ‘First video game to nab Oscar: “______ 4″‘… and the answer is filled in already, as ‘Halo’. Heh. This is online at Wired’s site. (Thanks to Dzejms, who reminded me I hadn’t posted it yet.)

A week or so ago, we got email from Mars Man 0013, stating that the 9 multiplayer maps were available on the September OXM bonus disc. Unfortunately, we’ve now received confirmation from both TURBO and Max Power that this info is not correct – there are no maps on that disc. You’ll have to buy them the normal way, or wait until August 31 and download them for free from XBL. Sorry!

PumaHog Productions has released its Toy Soldiers Series Trailer – an introduction to their upcoming machinima series. I’m likin’ the Elite. Check it out! 25-36 mb, depending on format (WMP9 and MPEG1 available).

corpseguy has posted an update for his MC Helmet (we mentioned this yesterday) – it’s now painted. Looks great!

IGN has posted their Top 100 Games of All Time – Halo makes the top third. Thanks, DPowers90.

Ross Gemuend is working on a rendered animation – MC vs some Elites. I can’t watch the second one (the combination of WMP9 encoding and an AVI format seems to make it unwatchable on a Mac – but if you’re on a PC, it’s the bottom link, labeled ‘MC Vs Elites’), but the first one has been locally mirrored (for the original DivX-encoded AVI), converted to QuickTime, and sped up – because Ross mentioned that he originally planned it to be 4 times as fast, but slowed it down for detail. You can find all links in his first post. Farther down in the thread, 7he One converts it to WMP9 format, and adds sound – quality suffers a bit, but the sound is a nice touch. Check this out!

Reinsoft has whipped up another rap parody – this one is called Rocket Part 1, and is set to R. Kelly’s ‘Closet Part 1’… you can find it in this forum post. 3:22 long, 2.7 mb, MP3 format (or streaming).

There’s a ton of info over at MLGPro.com about results from yesterday’s competition at Halo Nationals 2 – more coming today, including full writeups, but for basic info about who won – swing by their front page! Thanks, 3Suns.

There are more updates over at the Halogen site – there’s apparently a video (Safari refuses to recognize the ‘Forum’ link, so I can’t see it), and info about some new units. Since they plan to update every couple of days, please take this news post as an indication that if you’re interested in this conversion, you should visit every couple of days – we’re going to pass on posting a ‘there’s new stuff’ note two or three times a week. And maybe, MAYBE, they’ll fix the Flash so that it’s visible in more browsers… thanks, logical2u.

We don’t usually post trick stuff any more – High Impact Halo does such an amazing job covering that whole field that stepping in seems like trespassing – but yesterday, something pretty darn cool got posted to our forum… something that I couldn’t pass up. KadeshSa gave us a movie showing a nice hog launch on Assault on the Control Room. Big deal, you say? You’ve seen a million of ’em? Yeah, well… how many have you seen where the launcher was SARGE? The vid’s only about 6 and a half megs, available in both WMP9 and QuickTime formats – the thread starts here, download links are in this post.