Mercury is worried about how a Halo movie might turn out. He pins down why in a nice blog entry over on The Oracle. Go read!

Over at Geezer Gamers, there’s an article containing foolproof tips for improving your Halo 2 performance – if you’re a geezer gamer. I have to remember to work on my reflexes later today. Thanks, Jamey Tisdale.

The Weekly What’s Update has been posted already at Bungie.net (thanks, Frankie) – go read it for stuff about what’s happening with the hackers using modded Containment/Warlock maps, plus lots of other tidbits. Go read!

Wow – this one’s unusual. Laird, from Sponsors vs Freeloaders, sent along a rather large request. Easier to simply quote him (with a few typo corrections):

In the footsteps that of episode 8, I am taking auditions for Freeloaders for episode 9. So if you’re looking for a role on SvF please feel free to send an audition to laird@sponsorsvsfreeloaders.com (Note all auditions need to be adlibbed, a normal format (Mp3, wav, ogg), and be yourself (different voices etc…) Please don’t alter your voice recordings in anyway so we can judge it in its raw format.)

Wow – they’re looking for 50 actors. Go audition!

When in doubt, pun really badly. That’s Stuntmutt’s motto, nicely demonstrated in today’s One One Se7en.

Yeah, Fanfic is offline again. Yeah, it’s being worked on. No, it won’t be up before tomorrow. Yes, a long-term solution is in the works. Yes, the fastest way to really annoy me is to post snide comments about how this section is always down on our forum. That is all.

Another batch of dialogue snippets from Captain Spark – once again, you can snag ’em in bulk from his website, or browse the new ones in our Dialogue Databank.

A week ago, rywateska posted a note on our forum about a montage vid he put together, to commemorate his need to leave the Halo 2 community. It was hosted over at cheapassgamer.com (still is, in fact) – but he then submitted it to our Movie Peer Review Rating System. The reviewers liked it – an impressive feat these days for a montage vid. Great timing, nice music, decent video quality. We’re releasing two versions – a QuickTime (44.2 mb, bungie.org | mythica.org) and a WMP9 (45.8 mb, mythica.org | bungie.org). If you haven’t already seen this, grab it now!

Today’s Halo Babies comic needs no real writeup. Or, maybe more accurately, any writeup I do will simply be digging a deeper hole.

Awesome. Over at High Impact Halo, Dark Helmet has created a fantastic tutorial vid showing how to collect grenades for Halo 1 grenade jumping – not just the basics, but how to make a really nice, tight pile. Soundtrack is from South Park, and deserves a NSFW warning. 29.4 mb, WMP9 format. For the heck of it, I’ve added a QuickTime version – 28 mb – as well. (I wrote this up about 8 hours ago, but somehow forgot to post it. Duh.)

Not long ago, Goose submitted Bunker 27 Episode 1, “In the Beginning”, to our Movie Peer Review Rating System. The vid didn’t pass, but he got a decent amount of useful feedback; he went back, re-edited the film to fix some of the problems reviewers noted, and resubmitted. Second time’s the charm; this one made it through. Nice visual effects, silly humor, good filming. If there’s anyone stupider than Donut out there… it’s Goose. (The character, not the real-life filmmaker.) Grab this in WMP9 format (31.2 mb, mythica.org | bungie.org) or QuickTime format (27.8 mb, bungie.org | mythica.org) and enjoy! If you like it, they’ll make more. (They’ll probably make more anyway, actually. They said they would, anyway.)

I’ve been meaning to write this up for some time – apologies to everyone involved. About 6 weeks ago, we posted a note explaining the hardships facing a prominent community member, Tina Leyk, and put a link on our front page, giving folks access to a PayPal link to help out, if they chose to. Not long ago, I heard from Tina about her situation – there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the Halo community saved them; they were able to remain where they were, without being evicted. (Thanks, to everyone who pitched in – you guys rock!) The bad news is that a couple of weeks ago, they were hit with a major vet bill; they learned that their cat looks to be in the early stages of kidney failure, and the initial bill of $400 (CDN) is kicking their butts. I’m passing this news on because I believe that anyone who’s pitched in something to help them deserves to know whether they’ve done any good (you have, believe me), and to update folks wondering how they’re doing in general. Here’s hoping it all works out in the end!

A few days ago, Agonizing_Gas wrote up a satirical post on the 2old2play forums about a 13-year-old who realized his attitude on XBL was influencing his life – yesterday, stosh posted a sanitized version on Bungie.net. We were gonna pass on this… but it was noticed both in our forum (though, scarily, the poster believed it might be a true story), and via email by a bunch of people – so if you haven’t seen it, go read. It’s pretty funny.

Yet another R.net heads-up… this one is a blog entry from Wil Wheaton, discussing the recent agreement between the Screen Actors Guild and video games publishers (we mentioned it last week). Wil’s point of view is that actors deserve more. There’s a well-written counterpoint over at Game Girl Advance, suggesting that while everyone might WANT more, actors aren’t any more entitled to residuals than, say, animators – but that if publishers had to pay EVERYONE residuals, nobody would publish games. The whole issue is becoming more important, as gaming continues to make inroads into mainstream entertainment, and budgets (and profits) continue to climb. Stay tuned – we may have something more in-depth about this in the near future.

Another transcription of the Halo main theme has been posted at Rampancy.net; Devin Eastman has submitted an archive including a MIDI file, a PrintMusic document, and a PDF containing the score. You can find comments by Devin in the R.net news post. (Registration – free – is required to download the archive.)

IGN posted a short piece about what they want to see in the Halo movie once it hits the big screen. I found this at Rampancy.net, where Narcogen said their list ‘makes Baby Jesus cry’ – he ain’t kiddin’.

Area 55, from Halo Hoger, has been released for HaloCE. Animated scenery, new enemies and character models, custom dialogue. 10 mb or so. Give it a try! Thanks, MasterGrief.

More versions of the Microsoft-commissioned map overviews are appearing – 1Up.com was first out of the gate yesterday with Containment, though the aspect ratio is all wrong. (Their QuickTime link works now, though – thanks, Blackstar.) GameTrailers.com is now serving QT and WMP9 versions of this – 480×360, about 8 and a half megs each. (Thanks, Christian Andersen.) They’re also hosting similarly-sized versions of a Warlock trailer from that series. The first version of Warlock to show up, though, was at TeamXbox, in WMP9 format, at 640×480 (16.1 mb) – thanks, Oddworld. Look for the other 7 maps to be spotlighted soon around the net.

In keeping with the plan to highlight a new map each week until the release of the Map Pack in early July, Bungie.net has posted a preview of Backwash. Screenshots and developer commentary bring this map to spooky, eery life – check it out!

Stuntmutt gets off track in today’s One One Se7en.