Z, over at Halo2Forum.com, lets us know that they’ve released a trailer of Dymdez’s next montage – some nice timing and lots of superfast snipes. DivX format, 15.6 mb.

IGN has posted an article entitled ‘The Best First Person Shooters on Xbox‘ – and Halo and Halo 2 took the top two spots (not in that order, though). Nice! Thanks to RC Master for noticing.

There’s a great piece over at Bungie.net – apparently, the message that EB Games has been giving to Australian buyers of the Maptacular Map Pack (that they’ll be banned if they go online with the new maps before the street date of next week) is false; you will NOT be banned. In Sketchfactor’s words:

Bungie and the Live Team will not be taking any action against anyone who has these maps early, despite rumors that have been circulating the ‘net.

You won’t see the new maps in matchmaking playlists before Monday, July 11… but you’re welcome to play custom games with your friends (provided they have the maps as well, of course) with no fear of bannage. W00t!

Man, you know it’s bad when Cortana gets into the punning. Careful stepping into today’s One One Se7en.

Chargoyle has been working on a Lego Scarab, to scale with the Lego people themselves. You can see pics at his website – fun!

Gregory Austin let us know that Zool Inc is working on a live-action Halo fan film. It’s entitled “117”, and he’s sent along a small teaser poster for the film. In his words:

Set in the style of “The Fall of Reach”, “117” details the life of Master Chief, starting from his first promotion to Petty Officer, to?the dawning of the Mjolnir body armor.

Post-Production will begin soon, and we will release a teaser trailer. Expect more updates soon!

Keep your eyes open!

HaloChat pointed out on our forum that games using the new maps (not to be played by the general public before next Tuesday, on pain of banning) can be seen on the Bungie.net stats pages – using the Game Viewer, you can get a decent idea of the overall layout (in some cases, better than the gameplay vids released recently). Follow the links in his post for more details!

Eight new stories in the Fan Fiction section today – go read!

It’s time for XerxdeeJ’s weekly Tied the Leader update – his blog contains an endorsement of CarnageStats, a slam at cheaters, defenses against cheating, a rant about how often Warlock shows up in matchmaking, and a pair of readers polls – Map Picks and Best Gamertags. Go read!

trigger119 announced the release of Crossfire’s ‘The Harvest 2’ yesterday on our forum – but things were so crazy I didn’t get around to mentioning it. (This is partly because I wanted to watch it before I wrote about it – and the thing is 30 minutes long.) It’s the full version of the vid we mentioned a trailer for a few weeks ago – film quality is pretty good, storyline works nicely. The BloodSignature team did a great job of keeping it all together for a half-hour video! trigger119 is hosting a WMP9 version at halomachinima.com for them (right-click/option-click to download – streaming won’t work) – it weighs in at 114 mb. We’ve decided to put up a QuickTime version, as well, to help out – 110 mb. I’m actually pretty happy to see folks taking on more ambitious projects!

There was some serious demand for the Relic flythrough we posted yesterday – seems when Bungie.net mentions something, folks come to grab it. We put a second copy online to handle the additional load – which seems to have lessened. Because of that, we’ve posted the four older flythroughs – Containment, Warlock, Sanctuary, and Turf. All of these have been online before – but these versions (especially the QuickTime ones) are higher quality than most of what has been released, and none of them have watermarks. (Speaking of lack of watermarks, GameTrailers.com has put up their own versions of Elongation and Relic – they’re identical to the ones we posted yesterday, but it’s always nice to have multiple sources! Thanks to Christian Andersen for letting us know.)

Bearded Ferret wrote up a nice review of the Maptacular Map Pack, which he got his hands on yesterday. Go read for his recommendations of gametypes and highlights.

Duo, saddened that nobody noticed on their own, has pointed out that the w00tness strip from a couple of days ago contained four covenant cruisers with gravlifts and two crashing cov cruisers. Geez, people… where’ve you been? (There’s an absurdly high-resolution version, as well.)

Looks like Eisen Feuer has updated his Art of War strategy series at TalkXbox.com – The Art of Deception is a great read. It’ll help you fool your enemies into dying before you do. There’s a hefty writeup, complete with pictures, plus a video, demonstrating the techniques, in two formats. Go read and watch! Thanks to Thomas for the heads-up.

XboxZone, in Australia, has made good use of the early release of the Maptacular Map Pack down under – you can find 5 eight-minute movies (one for each of the new maps, all WMP9 format) showing lan play in the offices. Free registration for download required. Thanks to Rodney Campbell for the heads-up.

Bungie continues its new map overview series with a fantastic writeup of Relic – great pics, great gameplay stories, invaluable strategy tips. What timing on my part – when I posted the Relic flythrough vid earlier, I had no idea they’d be putting this up tonight – read one, watch the other, immerse yourself in Relic goodness! Thanks to all the folks who wrote in about this – looks like Tru7h SeeKer was first.

Apologies for the delay – QuickTime versions of the recent RvB-created Elongation walkthrough (Hi-Res, 26.2 mb | Lo-Res, 12.2 mb) are now available from our server. I meant to get these up a couple of hours ago – family obligations made that impossible. If you’d rather have the WMP9 versions, they are, as they were 3 hours ago, available from Red vs Blue themselves.

As promised, the Hi-Res Film Oasis flythrough/overview of Relic is up for your enjoyment – man, I love the timing in this one. Marty’s music is SO well incorporated… wow. And the imagery and camera work give you a fantastic sense of the epic feel of this map for CTF games. Go grab a copy!

Red vs Blue has released their next map walkthrough – this one is Elongation. Burnie’s walkthrough is much less exciting than the Film Oasis version we released a few hours ago, but it’s far more practical, if what you need is weapon placement and commentary on flow. (Grab ’em both!) We should have QuickTime versions available in a few hours. Thanks to many people – first was Ibeechu.

Briar, the guy we mentioned yesterday making some really nice Master Chief armor, has added a pair of shots for the SMG to go with it. (They’re the first two shots on the page.) Thanks to beetlecrazy12 for the heads-up.