Thanks muchly to Fazeaway, who’s minding the store while Deimos is away – the Subnova branch of HBO is back up and running properly, which means Fan Fiction is back online. Go read!

There’s a great summary of Elongation, complete with screenshots and developer commentary, up at Bungie.net right now. This is the first of 5 weekly map previews, leading up to the release of these maps in early July. Thanks to all the folks who sent in links – I think Nedus might have been first.

There’s a new guitar tab – this time for The Last Spartan – over at Powertabs.net… thanks, Shadowsniper689.

Like Halo action figures? Wanna save a little dough? Over at littleplasticmen, all in stock, non-exclusive HALO 2 action figures are only $11.70. (Gee, I wonder how they came up with that price?) Sale runs through Sunday. Thanks, hacksolo. Update: PJ Hamlen points out that littleplasticmen’s shipping costs are several dollars more than their competitors – so even though the figures are less, if you only buy one or two, you won’t save very much money. Bummer.

Nearing completion of the Halo Cutscene Library – today’s releases all show the end of the Maw, and include the standard ending cutscene, as well as the short piece that changes if you play on Legendary, and the scene you get if you DON’T make it to the Longsword before the ship explodes. Go watch!

The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have been getting ready to strike over contract disputes with video game publishers – but a deal was struck yesterday that will keep that from happening (pending approval from the unions themselves). Voice actors will receive a substantial increase in minimum pay for video game work, but will not receive residuals (payment for each game sold). Residuals are standard for movies and television, and as voice acting in video games like Halo 2 and GTA: San Andreas is being done more and more by big-name Hollywood stars, this looked to be a thorny issue (probably will be again, in the future). Thanks, Mr Yun.

Over at Kikizo.com, there’s a nice long video interview with J Allard about the Xbox 360 – and of course, Halo 3 gets mentioned. The interviewer asked if the idea that Halo 3 would ship to coincide with the PS3 (a comment that’s already been discredited) would go against the existing philosophy of ‘we’ll ship when it’s ready’ – Allard’s answer did a so-so job of staying away from the whole CONCEPT of Halo 3 (which is the current goal of Bungie PR):

We’re never going to ship a Halo game (if we were to make, hypothetically, Halo games in the future) – we want to have the Bungie team – we want to give them the amount of time they need to create the product that they envision.

So: he’s not saying that anyone’s working on Halo 3 – but if they WERE, they’d be given free reign to finish it they way they wanted to. (This clip is about 6:30 in or so.) Thanks, Eastbeast314 (who found it on Major Nelson’s blog).

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!