Mother’s Tooth sent along an interesting email this morning – and I wonder, now, what sort of repercussions this will have in the long run. He’s looking for voice talent to play Miranda in his ‘The Age of Miranda‘ machinima series; he’ll supply a small script (10 words or so) to be recorded and judged. If there are enough applicants, he’ll put it up to the fans; post the clips, let fans pick the best one. (Up front, in case anyone doesn’t realize it – this is NOT a paying gig. It’s for the love of the game, like any other machinima project out there.) If this works out, I could see the idea increasing the quality of voice talent across the board… voice acting is one of the weakest areas of machinima releases to date, and this idea could change that. If you’re interested in applying, contact Mother’s Tooth!

Seems that last night’s Halo Humpday Challenge was against the Xbox Live team – there’s nothing up at Bungie yet, but Major Nelson has posted a quick summary on his blog. XBL took the first two games, the third was a tie. (To be fair, all THREE games were pretty close.) Thanks to Narcogen at Rampancy.net for pointing this out.

Didn’t take long – the first Halo Stats widget for MacOSX 10.4’s Dashboard has been released. You can check your levels in the various gametypes from your desktop. Thanks, Lacsap.

Ooh, that looks nice – According to Joyride, Gamestop will be selling a battle-damaged Warthog in July. There’s also a new version of the Master Chief and an ODST (among other things) coming out in August. Poke around – there’s tons of new ones listed. Thanks, Madda Cheeb2.0.

Mother’s Tooth has posted Episode 2 of his ‘The Age of Miranda‘ series over at That Weasel Television. This one makes use of a mod we mentioned a couple of weeks ago created by TheTykoMan. That poor Miranda – I’m glad I don’t have dreams like that!

XerxdeeJ has started up a new Halo-related blog – this one’s titled ‘Tied The Leader‘. There are a couple of articles up already; the most recent looks at how sportsmanship is related to online anonymity. (Personally, I think Penny Arcade nailed this one last year – but XerxdeeJ’s take, while less pithy, is a tad more in-depth.) Give it a read!

I went into our uploads folder recently to try and clear out the content that needs to be added to the various subsections of the site. I was pretty scared by what I found. Half the submissions came with no identification at all. (We have to toss these.) Many came with random identification; the submission might be ‘mycoolpicture.jpg’, but the file explaining who submitted it might be called ‘for hbo.wpd’ (I can’t even READ wpd files – and if I could, it would mean that I’d have to go through every single one to figure out what goes with what). Even though we have an entire subsection devoted to movies, and another to fanfic, we’re still getting submissions directly uploaded for these sections. There were TONS of scripts uploaded in the hopes of hacking our systems. And on, and on. I’m gonna make it easy for everyone. From now on, there’s only a single ‘Uploads’ link in our navbar. It goes to a page which explains, pretty clearly, what we accept. Read it – or your content will be tossed. You’ll be asked for basic info. Supply it – or your content will be tossed. You’ll then be given the opportunity to upload your file. If you run into trouble, and you’ve followed the directions, go ahead and email us about it… but if you can’t be bothered to read the instructions, don’t expect us to answer you.

Zelp modified his own Forza racer – check out the results! (We mentioned one of these yesterday.) Update: And another one – thanks, Hypnotoad.

Hehe – Uncle Clive (a British gaming site) had its own recommendation for last week’s elections in Britain… it’s currently on the top of the page. Thanks, Lothar Hex.

Today’s One One Se7en explains a gameplay contrivance in a whole new light. No wonder the guy’s filled with rage!

Hehe – nice! 3Suns found a fun Forza custom car that’s pretty Halo-related at Tabwin.com. At the moment, it’s no the front page, 7th row (!!), first column… but if it moves, here’s a direct link. That baby’s probably pretty fast…

mrsmiley updated the art section of the Halo Babies website… and man, there’s some amazing stuff in there! Go check it out – but be sure you have a little while, there’s a LOT!

Dennis Powers points out a post he made at the haloce.gearboxgamezone.com website. There’s been quite a bit of interesting material released recently in the HaloCE community – swing by to read about it, and download it!

Overswarm has added a couple of notes to his Not So Common Sense Guide – the first is a status report on the front page, to let people know that he’s not as available as he’s been in the past (so please be patient), and the other is a new Frequently Asked Question, explaining the best way to keep on top of site changes. Here’s hoping this helps.

In late January, Mike Miller began a Legendary Walkthrough of Halo 2, and for the next four months, he’d release a new level, once per week (or so), with hints, multiple plans of attack, and plenty of video examples, to help you get through what (at first) seemed nearly impossible. Today, that guide is finished; Mike’s writeup of The Great Journey, Halo 2’s final level, has been posted. It contains more than a dozen movies, as usual in both QuickTime and WMP9 formats for your viewing convenience, and quite a bit of discussion about tactics and approaches. There are also some very practical—though non-trivial to implement, especially for folks like me, somewhat less coordinated than Mike—ideas for the final battle with Tartarus; give it a read! I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mike for his work on this project; even when the skills needed were out of my league, the consistent quality of the writing, the thoughtfulness and comprehensiveness of the analyses, the practicality of the video aids – all the pieces he put together were polished, professional, and clean. I’m proud to have been able to help get this guide out to the Halo community, and I know that Mike’s gotten quite a few people through the game on a difficulty level they might not have reached on their own! Update: DOH! I forgot – he also updated a few bits on the intro page (mostly near the bottom). In fact, it’s been updated 4 or 5 times since it was first posted; if you haven’t read it through in a while, it might be worth another look!

Drew Santorello and Mark Werner like to bring their virtual playthings to life; they sent in a few pics of weapons they’ve recreated in real life. Check ’em out!

The third movie to make it through the MPRRS today is the second episode of the Necrosis Clan’s eponymous series. You can grab it from their site (WMP9 format, 3.4 mb) or from ours (WMP9 format or a 4.8 mb QuickTime). Again, dialogue comes from the Dialogue Databank; it will be interesting to see how long they can make that work. Screensize is quite small, so some of the action is a bit difficult to see.

Another vid that made it through our rating system – Foilman’s ‘Final Pass’, a Halo PC montage. The man loves his rockets… This is available in WMP9 format (42.9 mb) or QuickTime format (34.4 mb). There are some rumblings on our forum this morning that the quality level of passed films is dropping a bit; I’d like to remind everyone that the system is still evolving. We just added a number of new reviewers, who may or may not have their ‘reviewing’ legs yet; and regardless of experience, with only 20% of our reviewers weighing in on any particular movie, the consistency of scores is going to drop a bit. We’ll probably compensate by raising the passing bar. Be patient – we’ll get there!

The Movie Peer Review Rating System continues to evolve; we’ve begun to add tips for movie makers, and you can find them on the Submitter FAQ page. A recently-passed vid came from MereCatFish, a member of the HBO Helljumpers clan. It’s basically a collection of stuff that amused him in-game; some of it is great, some is a bit… well, you’d laugh harder if you’d been there, I guess. My favorite part was a single in-game score screen that comes up around 5:11. 14 players, 13 are dead. And one has quit. It’s available in both WMP9 format (26.8 mb) and QuickTime format (21.9 mb) – thanks to Mythica for the hosting. (We’ll be releasing a couple of other vids today, so I thought I’d spread the love.)

B0ggyB sent us a note about his DeviantART site, which has a number of Halo-related items in its gallery:

• Arbiter sketch
• Elite model (made of blue tac)
• Drone variation
• Ze Arbiter

Go check it out!