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!

trigger119 wrote to say that a new machinima trailer has been posted at Halomachinima.com – it’s for a project called ‘Installation 451’, and the trailer’s nicely done. WMP9 and QuickTime. Go grab a copy!

coaxke, of futuristic sex robotz, wrote to say they’re looking for an illustrator/cartoonist to do robot characterizations (Futurama style?) of all the members of Futuristic Sex Robotz for their new web site. Samples should be sent to this email address. (These guys put together one of the funnier Halo rap vids out there.)

prometheus did a bit of searching, turned up a few Halo-related podcasts. You can find links to the one that worked for him in this forum thread.

Dyslexia continues his series of Halo pro interviews with a chat with Str8 Rippin, put together at MLG St. Louis. Good read! Thanks, 3Suns.

2old2play has put up episode 5 of their podcast, 2old2type – site discussion, tournament discussion, lots of cheating stuff. 31 mb, just over an hour. Go listen!

It might be good for sniping, but… today’s One One Se7en shows the dangers of insensitivity.

Interesting idea… Andrew Matlock has resurrected his Coté D’Azur design for HaloCE – you can see an evolution of pictures (including current versions) in this Gearbox forum thread. Thanks, MasterGrief.

Nine new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section this Monday – the writers never sleep!

HitManBobster pointed out a Red vs Blue Soundboard at AlbinoBlackSheep – clips from the various characters in the series, set up in Flash. Sound quality is lacking, but the organization is nice.

Xbox Solution has reviewed the Multiplayer Map Pack – they liked it quite a bit. Go see their comments! Update: another review today – this one from Globe and Mail (a Canadian newspaper). Interesting – I guess folks needed a week or two to play…

A few days ago, we got email from Matt Cheeser, alerting us to ‘This Spartan Life‘ – a pretty unique concept; Damian Lacedaemion is a talk show host who uses Halo as a set. His guests talk about a lot of things – games, yes, but plenty of other things. It’s machinima… mixed with talk show television. It’s fun. There are five episodes so far. (They got a pretty good review on G4’s Attack of the Show – we’ve taken this long to mention them because we wanted to help with bandwidth first, and setting up took a little while.) Go watch!

Aztec pointed out a new update from the HaloDev team about Prometheus, the all-in-one model manipulation tool that a series of prominent Halo modders (the good kind, not the kind that are cheating against you on Warlock) have been building. Lots of disasters, lots of under-the-hood changes, not a lot to actually SEE; this one is basically to let you know they haven’t given up.

kons0uL wrote a followup to his blog rant about cheaters and matchmaking that we mentioned yesterday – this one clarifies his position about his expectations, and about where he got them from. Go read!