There’s a short note over at Bungie.net – apparently, the official Nile Rogers website has announced that Marty has finished mastering the Halo 2 soundtrack. No other info is given – but if you’ll remember, the Weekly What’s Update on May 14 suggested an early July release.

It’s not a Top News Story, for some reason… but the Halo Humpday Challenge has now been written up by Frankie. Polite and genteel – he’s a gracious winner. (I’m not sure what that ‘continued on page 2…’ thing is at the bottom of the second game…) Go read. (As a side note to SketchFactor: when your internet and cable TV both go out, there’s this thing called ‘outside’ – you can go there and find stuff to do. It’s cool.)

Wow. It’s taken an inordinately long time to prepare – and for that I offer abject apologies – but as of today, the Halo Cutscene Library here on HBO begins to be built. (The Halo 2 Cutscene Library has been online for several months now.) Today, we offer you the opening scene from Pillar of Autumn, as well as a film containing all four versions of Sarge’s speech to the marines (depending on difficulty). If you’re on a high-bandwidth connection, you can grab the 640×480 versions, in either QuickTime or WMP9 formats… and for those on slightly slower connections, we’re also offering 320×240 versions (in both formats). At the moment, we’ve got a pair of mirrors for each film, but we’re happy to add any other mirrors; if you’d like to host these yourself, simply send us the link and we’ll add it to the page. Enjoy!

Another movie has passed through the Movie Peer Review Rating System – this one is a filming of Monty Python’s ‘The Argument’ sketch. It’s the work of The7ftman, and what reviewers liked was the editing and environment choices. (Don’t look for a lot of gunplay in this one…) You can grab it in QuickTime (29.4 mb) or WMP9 (29.6 mb) formats.

Early this week, Paradox sent along a couple of pictures of his new work-in-progress, a model of the Halo rocket launcher. We’ve started a gallery for this, and will add pictures as they come in. Looks to be pretty heavy-duty!

Looks like this week’s Halo Humpday Challenge pitted Bungie against 2070Films – Dan Chosich posted links to the games themselves, though we still need to wait for the official Bungie writeup. Bungie blew ’em out for the first two games, but 2070Films won the third game, and the unofficial chaser was pretty darn close. Nice playing, guys!

Dennis Powers, of the Gearbox Game Zone, points out that the HaloCE 1.07 Hot-Fix patch is now available for download on his site. (Gearbox has chosen that site as its primary distribution point for this file.) It’s 4.6 mb, and brings HaloCE back into parity with HaloPC (which was patched a couple of days ago). This patch fixes a vulnerability which could allow a malicious client to hang a server. Go grab it now!

I was a little hesitant about posting this, since I’m afraid that some of the people who see it from a front-page post won’t bother to learn the context, and Roger Wilco will come off as a much harsher person than he really is… but it’s just too funny to pass up on. Ross Mills posted a note this morning, lamenting the ‘end of the golden age’ of the HBO forum; some people (mostly newcomers) agreed with him, some people (mostly folks who’ve been around for years) suggested that the whole quality thing is cyclical. Roger Wilco chimed in with a pretty positive message, overall… but the opening is… well, harsh. Funny… but harsh. But Funny. Funny enough that it’s worth a front-page mention. If it amuses you, and you don’t recognize the name… search our news for him; you might find a few other things of interest.

Jillybean tosses around popular sci-fi references with abandon as she plucks a few morsels from the cornucopious Halo Story mailbag. (Yes, I know that’s not a word.) The focus today seems to be Forerunner. Go read!

Whee – still ANOTHER movie. This one comes from Fireb0rn (whose last offering was ALSO quite good) – and it has the honor of garnering the highest score of any of the 130+ videos that have so far passed through the Movie Peer Review Rating System. It’s called ‘Talking Smack Over Xbox Live: An Educational Film’, and it is, in the words of its creator, “a rip-off of those classic Leave it to Beaver style 1950’s educational shorts using Halo 2 to tell the story.” Filming is great, filter use is great, voice acting is great, content is pretty darn funny. You can grab a WMP9 version (17.2 mb) or a QuickTime version (17.1 mb). Don’t forget to drink your milk!

Captain Spark has turned in another 33 dialogue snippets, this time a combination of Elites, Grunts, and female marines. You can grab the lot on his website, or search for (and listen to) the ones you want in our Dialogue Databank.

Cortana gets roped into tripe into today’s One One Se7en… gotta watch that.

Another MPRRS release for you today – this one comes from Spuzzum, and is called ‘Sticky Style’. It’s basically a runthrough of Cairo Station (well, the highlights, anyway) – but the timing is amazingly good. (Gameplay’s pretty good, too…) Gameplay is Heroic, because some of the stuff Spuzzum was trying was “a little too suicidal to pull off successfully with a little flair”. Flair, he’s got – in spades. Anyone looking to make montages – you could learn from this guy’s sense of timing. Available in QuickTime (20.6 mb) or WMP9 (18.6 mb).

There’s a Halo 2 Walkthrough posted up on IGN FAQs (among other places) – if you’re having trouble with the game, and our Legendary Walkthrough hasn’t helped, try this!

Peter Moore talked to GameDaily – mostly it’s about Xbox stuff, but Halo gets a few mentions; there’s a discussion about the impetus behind the I Love Bees promotion, and a look at backwards compatibility, with Halo and Halo 2 being the only two named titles at the moment promised to work on the 360. There’s also a clarification of the silly ‘1 billion users’ quote from last week.

Tactic let us know that Outpost Coagulation Episode 7 (Canook and Special forces) has been posted – you can find it at Tree Skunk Productions or mirrored at halomachinima.com (thanks, trigger119). Voice acting continues to improve, a new character (or two) gets introduced, the plotline moves forward. And oh, yeah… the warthog has a hangover. I’ll toss up a QuickTime version in the near future. Update: There’s a QuickTime version here, now (27.1 mb).

SketchFactor has written up a summary of Bungie’s involvement in E3 this year – it’s posted at Bungie.net. If you weren’t there, this will show you what you missed – at least the Bungie-related portion. Go read!

The Halo2CE team continues their recreation of Halo 2 maps in the HaloCE engine – check out this news post for pictures of last night’s test of Warlock. Looks pretty amazingly close! Thanks, $t@nKy.

SketchFactor has posted a fan-written look at E3 over on Bungie.net (with a focus, of course, on Bungie) – a few pics, a mini-interview… go read! Thanks, TheLethalSpartan.

The first movie to make it through the Movie Peer Review Rating System (with a passing score) for almost 2 weeks is ready for release. It was submitted by imSuck, of Halogrid.com, and is called ‘Jump Tactics Spoof Episode 3’ – it’s a spoof of the jumping vids released by serious teams like Jump Tactics and Broncho’s Friends, and it’s pretty funny. This one features guest appearances (heck, they guest-STAR) by Kealii Maluu and Anti Noob (of the REAL Jump Tactics team), and spreads real, killer jumps in amongst humor and silliness. It’s 640×480, 10:29 long, and roughly 50 mb, depending on flavor:

WMP9 (53.2 mb) – bungie.org | mythica.org
QuickTime (49.4 mb) – bungie.org | mythica.org

There’s a slightly higher-res version, hosted at halo2forum.com, linked off the HaloGrid page – but there seems to be something wrong with the encoding – I can’t get it converted to QuickTime. (It plays fine as a WMP9.) It’s 10 mb larger than the version we’re hosting. Go grab a copy (either from there, or from here), and watch today!