Apologies – the server handling our fan fiction section is currently having problems. Its maintainer, Deimos, is on his honeymoon, and won’t be back for a couple of weeks; we’re hoping to get things running again before then, but for now, at least, FF is offline. Sorry about this!

Major League Gaming has posted an info page for MLG Philadelphia, coming up in late July. It includes a look back at the Pennsylvania tourney that started it all for some of the staff – an interesting reminiscence of a much less professional time. Go read! Thanks, 3Suns.

We have two cutscenes from the Maw for you today in the Halo Cutscene Library – the opening scene from the level, as well as the Bridge scene. Beautiful imagery, diabolical villians! Go watch.

Ferrago.com has an article about glitches in videogames – and the last (and biggest) example is Halo. Thanks, aaron.

In today’s One One Se7en, Stuntmutt takes a look at the Halo Movie buzz, and comes up with a scenario that makes me pray that Alex Garland doesn’t like sticking with the same actors from movie to movie…

XerxdeeJ posted a note about updates on Tied The Leader, his Halo-related blog. I swung by – and there are quite a number. Profiled XBL personalities, women gamers who can kick his butt, silly things you hear on XBL, a disturbing Halo 2 clan, and how multiplayer gaming has evolved over the years are just a few of the new bits. Go read!

Last week’s Halo Humpday Challenge never happened; or maybe it just got postponed. There was a challenge match between Bungie and the Halo Babies crew last night, however. (mrsmiley spammed his Friends list last week, telling us not to bother him, because they were preparing for this match – Thursday, I think – so maybe something came up that kept it from taking place until now.) There’s no writeup at either halobabies.net or bungie.net yet – but thanks to Bestmasterchief, you can look at the stats for the three games right now. They split the first two games, and the third (team slayer) was a squeaker… but Halobabies pulled it out, 2 out of 3. Nice going, guys! Update: mrsmiley has posted a writeup of the event on Halo Babies now – he takes great pleasure in showing off a nice triple kill in hi-res glory, and coming really close to calling Bungie cheaters on game 2. Hehe – let’s see how this turns out in the Bungie writeup!

Outpost Coagulation Episode 8 has been released – you can grab a copy at Treeskunk’s website, or at HaloMachinima.com. 8 minutes long, and the voice acting continues to improve. Nicely done, overall. 56.4 mb, in WMP9 format. (There’s something funky about halfway through that keeps me from being able to encode this as a QuickTime file – it plays fine, but it won’t convert. Sorry.) According to the Treeskunk website, this might be the last episode for a while. Update: trigger119 wrote to say that although the main writer was going to be gone for the summer, he (trigger) would finish the last two episodes of the season, so there are more coming. (There’ll also be outtake releases and such while Bzerker’s gone.)

Wow – it’s pretty impressive how far SuperSunny is bringing the rendered view of Halo CE – check out the screenshots in this forum thread. Thanks, MasterGrief.

Yeah – more vids from the 5 new maps at TXB, too – 7 of ’em, to be precise. All in WMP9 format. Thanks, Reconaz.

ON-X points out that there’s new map gameplay footage at Gamespot, as well (surprise, surprise). Go grab the five new vids!

IGN has posted a summary of the last five maps to be released next month, as well as new vids for all of them (downloadable for Insiders, streaming for the public). If you haven’t seen what these look like yet – go check ’em out!

The highlight of E3 this year for many of us was actually not part of E3 – it was the party at Deanero’s house on Friday night. Originally dubbed ‘Plasma Fiesta’, its name seems to have morphed to ‘D3’ – Dean’s Desserts and Deathmatch. There’s a great writeup of the party, complete with pictures and lessons that can be learned for your own lanfests, over at Bungie.net – and never let it be said that SketchFactor doesn’t take every opportunity possible to rub in the fact that Frankie missed the salsa at this year’s event. Go read!

Not directly Halo-related, but somewhat important for the viewing of files on this site – Apple has released a Public Preview of QuickTime 7 for Windows. Go grab a copy today! Thanks, Sorahn.

More details on the Halo movie script, shopped to Hollywood studios yesterday – Frankie says it’s pretty darn good. (The rumors, though, at places like Coming Soon (thanks, Saint [lpn]) and Gamespot (thanks, Savage Yoshi) are that the demands made by Microsoft – $10 million advance against 15 percent of the film’s gross – are enough to have scared off New Line and Dreamworks already.) More when we know it!

My goodness, I can be forgetful. Another vid passed through the Movie Peer Review Rating System last night; it’s called ‘Eskimo’, and it was created by Jamie98s, recently in our news for his 28 Days Later re-enactment. Eskimo is a 4:25 long vid telling the story of a man’s journey to find his eskimo friend. Warning: it does NOT have a happy ending. (Funny, maybe… but not happy.) You can grab it in WMP9 format (14.6 mb) or QuickTime format (14.5 mb). Enjoy!

The Halo Cutscene Library now has the five cutscenes from Keyes available – a couple are quite short, but that’s how it goes. Enjoy!

anti noob created a really nice Halo 1 tricking tribute vid, grabbing some of the best moments from dozens of vids showing some of the best Halo tricks released, nicely put together. 13:16 long, 58 mb, DivX encoding. In addition to the thread on our forum, there’s a thread at High Impact Halo – toss in your own 2 cents!

Johnny Suede pointed us to a link to his montage vid, Buckwheats. Lots of snipes, nicely timed to Drowning Pool’s Bodies. 54 mb, MPEG1 format.

deadmonkey found a new guitar tab for the Mjolnir Mix over at Mxtabs – check the forum thread for possible corrections.