A few days ago, we posted a pretty impressive parody from Patriarch917 – he’s back, with another one. This one is called ‘Hide‘, a takeoff of Slide, by the Goo Goo Dolls. 3.7 mb, MP3 format. What are you waiting for? Go listen!

In July 2004, Xbox Live hit the 1 million subscriber mark (taking roughly 20 months to get there). Today – 12 months later (nearly to the day), they hit 2 million. How many of those are directly attributable to Halo 2? Thanks, Cybrfrk. (And sorry, Marty – it just popped into my head.)

OftenK found a pic of a Covenant Elite costume from Comic-con. Pretty nice work!

Sometimes, clan tryouts don’t go as you’d expect. Today’s One One Se7en looks at alternative goals.

Narcogen has taken another look at the ‘Digital Couch’ concept – has Bungie lived up to its promise of providing us with a virtual extension of our physical living room, or are real-life gatherings still the only way to enjoy gameplay? He makes some good points – go read the latest Narc’s Retort!

Okay, that Cairo Station vid we mentioned yesterday is sort of a mess right now. There are a ton of versions floating around; there’s the original MPEG version, there’s a 180 mb WMP9 version trigger119 created from that (which has been mirrored by jtdoepke and torrented by amaroq), there’s a 120 mb WMP9 that comradx himself created, and there’s a new 127 mb WMP9 that has the credits included in the film. (This last doesn’t seem to be accessible on the net yet.) Because the WMP9 field is so tortured, I’m staying away from it – you can find links for every version I just mentioned (except the MPEG, and the newest comradx version) in the High Impact Halo thread we mentioned yesterday. What I CAN offer is a 135 mb QuickTime version, available via BitTorrent (with decent seed bandwidth) – this was created from the 120 mb comradx-created WMP9, coupled with his latest credits file. Wow – I gotta say, if movie creators would just be patient and line up their bandwidth BEFORE release, life would be simpler for everyone. That said – this one’s worth watching, so go grab a copy! (Of course, it might be re-encoded again in 15 minutes…) Update: [HC]D-Man has put up a version of the 127 mb WMP9 (the one that corresponds to our QuickTime – encoding by comradx, includes credits) on HaloCHAT – the download is being handled by Filefront, so bandwidth shouldn’t be a problem.

Ten new pieces in the Fan Fiction section today, including some good stuff by Dave Luck. Go read!

Looks like the team that’s putting together the Metroid mod for Halo CE has put up a website to keep track of their progress – check ’em out! Thanks, MasterGrief. Update: their popularity has forced them to switch hosts – you can find them here.

Reinsoft posted a link to a new Halo rap song using the Game ‘Dreams’ beat. 3.3 mb… didn’t do it for me, but make up your own mind.

F13ND has posted an interview with Team 3D’s Saiyan, over at Team3d.net – go read what makes this guy tick. (This is a guy who helps pay for college by winning Halo tourneys.)

Talk Xbox has posted an interview with BornRazz, who seems to be a random Xbox Live player who created a montage vid. (The montage itself is available for download in the interview.) It’s not clear to me after watching what makes this deserve its own article… but it’s there, and you can watch it. 19 mb, WMP9 format.

Another mini-review of the Multiplayer Map Pack was poasted yesterday on the website of the Fort Wayne News Sentinel – more love for Bungie. Go read.

Wow. Go check out Bungie.net – there’s a new article up, explaining how tomorrow, July 20, Autoupdate 4 will be released – if you’ve got modded content on your box, and you connect to Live, you’ll be banned from matchmaking. Period. Permanent, no appeals. You’ve been warned… (There’s more info, including details – go read. And comment on our forum!)

Dennis Powers has written up a page explaining the goals behind his Halo CE Chronicles series, answering some of the frequently asked questions he hears, and addressing some of the criticism. Give it a read!

ShadowX submitted a vid to the MPRRS last week, entitled ‘Halo The Movie’. It uses Halo 2 cutscene footage, married to dialogue from the Final Fantasy trailer (much as Brian Josselyn did three years ago for the original Halo) – some reviewers felt that it actually impinged on Brian’s intellectual property. (I can’t accept this – it’s game footage and a trailer soundtrack, and the clips that ShadowX used are different than the ones Brian used.) He’s done a nice job picking relevant clips, and the vid is quite small (7.7 mb for the WMP9 version, 8.2 mb for the QuickTime version) – so what are you waiting for? Go grab it! Update: We got a rather strange series of emails about this – apparently, this movie WAS made by ShadowX, but was not SUBMITTED by ShadowX. He told me that it WAS inspired (heavily) by Blackstar’s film (which, by the way, was re-encoded by Blackstar sometime back, and can be found in its latest form on this page), and that he (ShadowX) would rather be judged by his newer film, which he mentioned here. The only mystery remaining is who is the guy who submitted this movie… and why?

Over on the High Impact Halo forums, comradx released Cairo Station, the first of seven episodes that will make up his full-length feature film based on Halo 2. A significant percentage of the film is made up of cutscenes from the game – but then, if he’s reproducing the Halo 2 story, doesn’t it make sense to use them? The movie is almost 40 minutes long, and contains some great camerawork. (I haven’t had time to watch the whole thing yet – but I’m impressed so far!) comradx has released a 120 mb WMP9 version via YouSendIt – likely by the time you read this, it’ll be offline. There’s a slightly lower-res version hosted by trigger119, at halomachinima.com. We got word of this too late to be able to help out at the moment – but it’s possible I can get something online in the near future. (It won’t be today.) Go watch! (Thanks also to Ibeechu for additional info.) Oh, yeah – and don’t forget to download the credits video as well!

Dennis Powers, of GearboxGameZone, writes to point out that Jahrain, the creator of the Zelda mod we’ve mentioned a few times (for Halo Custom Edition), has released a ‘pre-alpha’ version of a single level.

The map, Hyrule Field, features a Zelda biped instead of the Spartan and includes new weaponry in the Zelda theme, a working and mountable animated horse and a large interesting landscape. Although there are still some Halo style weapons and a large “bug list” this early release will give players a taste of what is to come.

You can grab a copy from GGZ.

A rather odd story was posted on TechnologyReview.com yesterday – it contains speculation that Halo 2 could have been released at the end of 2003, but was delayed a year to add polish necessary to push Microsoft past Sony’s Playstation 2. Aside from the fact that Halo 2 WASN’T ready for release in 2003, and that the position that a more polished game will sell better than a less polished one is so obvious as to not need an article like this to be clear to most people… I guess this might be worth reading. (I can’t really understand why it’s even up – maybe someone can explain this to me someday.) Thanks, Google News Alerts.

More info on the Video Games Live tour ‘cancellations’ – jdman2289 points out that on the news page of the site, there’s an explanation stating that due to the overwhelming success of the series, many dates are being added, and many dates are being rescheduled. At this point, existing tickets are expected to be honored – don’t rip ’em up yet! More when we know it.

Jeff, from Video Gamers League, points out that there’s new info about tourneys in Dallas, New York, and LA up on their website – swing by for rules and entrance info. Dallas is this coming weekend, LA plays on August 6, and New York happens on August 7. Get ready!