Is that an icon in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? Today’s One One Se7en points out a Bungie oversight… sort of.

SSGT Cutter points out that yesterday’s DOOM Toons (a comic based on DOOM, hosted at PlanetDOOM) has a cameo by the Master Chief. Not sure I get it… but there you are.

Interesting. Yesterday, we got email from bluestrike2 – it contained a very pretty PDF (159K) with all the respawn times of all the weapons on the Halo 2 maps (minus grenades and vehicles. Then, not 7 hours later, we got email from Typher, who’s contributed to our online version of this content in the past – with this information (including grenades this time) for the five new maps. Download, or online – your choice! (Compare ’em – they’re pretty close, though I did notice some differences.)

gigiskapoo pointed out a rather strange Flash animation at DeviantArt… well, go watch.

Tim Dadabo might be best known to Halo fans as the voice of 343 Guilty Spark – but he’s done quite a bit more voice work than that, in the Halo games and beyond. He’s got a new website online… and there’s a pretty hilarious montage of his game character voices, with Spark talking to Leisure Suit Larry, Corporal Perez, and a host of other folks (just follow the ‘Games’ link). Look around!

TeamXbox has put up a series of videos showing Warthog Jumping on the new maps – nothing that a regular visitor to High Impact Halo hasn’t seen, but pretty interesting for a high-traffic general Xbox site! Watching hogs get toasted by Terminal’s train hasn’t gotten old yet… WMP9 format, 15-30 mb each.

The BBC has put up an article on Video Games Live, the concert series playing video game music – with audio clips from Halo, Mario, and Tomb Raider. Good stuff! Thanks, Mr Danger.

Looks like Rumble Pit, Team Skirmish, and Team Preview stats have just been reset. Thanks to Gamer2017 (who also warned folks that Bungie has said that the preview playlists will be removed in late August, once the new maps are free for all). Update: oops, Rumble Pit and Skirmish lists are normal; when I checked my stats, I had ‘no games played’ listed, so I made an assumption – it was wrong. Only the Preview lists have been reset (or, more accurately, only the Team Preview list was reset – the Rumble Preview list was new as of yesterday, and didn’t NEED a reset.)

Another of the recent torrent of movies clearing our Movie Peer Review Rating System is a teaser for an upcoming machinima series. ‘The Squadron – Advert’ is a short trailer for the upcoming season of (yeah, you guessed it) The Squadron, a human-vs-covie matchup. 2:05 long, available in WMP9 (7.2 mb) or QuickTime (6.8 mb).

This was posted a week ago on Halo2Forum.com – but SWAT Halo69 mentioned it on our forum yesterday; it’s his 6th montage, and it contains some very nice footage with great timing. (Music choices are… questionable – but maybe that’s just for folks who need songs not to be strings of curses.) It’s huge – 75 mb, WMP9 format.

Thirteen new stories to read in today’s Fan Fiction update – so what are you waiting for?

Over at GearboxGameZone, Dennis Powers has posted a note explaining that the new season of Halo CE Chronicles will use over 20 HaloCE maps – and that each week, you’ll be able to download the maps featured in the current episode. On the front page are the first two maps – Snowy Assault and Pillar of Autumn Space. If you haven’t tried ’em – grab ’em and load ’em up!

Halo Pro has posted an interview with WaLKa, a regular on the Halo Pro circuit. Always fun to see into the lives of these guys! Thanks, 3Suns. Update: Ducain pointed out that antiviral apps on WinXP are heavily triggered by visiting this link. If you’re using Windows, and you’re not firewalled… tread with caution.

Gah. I meant to post this yesterday, but forgot. We mentioned a movie from High Impact Halo – a montage of Warthog launches put together by Dark Helmet – and I said that if there was any demand, we’d put up QuickTime versions, as well. There was demand – so I posted a high-res QT (40.9 mb) and a low-res QT (18.7 mb). Grab the one that suits your needs!

[HC] D-Man posted a direct download linkto the WMP9 version of Halo 2: Road to Glory; it’s still available via BitTorrent (see the original news post for details), but if you can’t (or won’t) use BT, check this out. It’s hosted on FileFront, which means you have a pretty good chance of getting the entire 421 mb file without the server dying. The QuickTime version should be posted soon.

Another thing that went up while I was wasting my evening away on Xbox Live was the writeup of the most recent Halo 2 Humpday Challenge – it wasn’t really on Humpday this time, it was Friday night/Saturday morning (depending on which team’s frame of reference you’re using), but it was a solid matchup between Bungie and Team Korea. (It was a big enough deal on the Korean end that there was an audience.) Go read the writeup – and for once, SketchFactor didn’t need to make up excuses as to why Bungie lost… because they didn’t lose. Good writeup – nice games!

Bungie’s updated the XBL Halo 2 playlists – you can find the latest lists on the Playlists page at Bungie.net. Some good choices, some… not so good choices. Go play!

The weekly Tied the Leader forum update was posted today by XerxdeeJ – you’ll find a summary of the half dozen or so new articles put up since the last update. (There’s also a pretty new interface for the blog.) Just a quick note – it’s interesting how much mail we received about this article mentioning the Jeep Hurricane, a concept car that looks an awful lot like a warthog. The thing is… it got a TON of coverage in our forum last January, when it was unveiled at the 2005 Auto Show. (The earliest post I could find was this one, by KaworuNagisa.) It’s interesting to me how things seem to go in cycles.

Matt Cox (known around here as Mothergoat) has written a review of the Multiplayer Map Pack for Lawrence.com – go give it a read! (It’s very well written, and comes up with some conclusions that aren’t the same as all the other reviews you might have read – worth listening to.)

Final Supremacy has released the first two episodes of a machinima project called ‘Black and White’ – this is the story of a team of SpecOps Spartans who need to hold back a rebel uprising. Vids are in DIvX or MPEG format, and run about 40-60 mb each. Grab them from their media page!