Pico stopped by (welcome back, Pico!) with a stop-motion flick showing aoff a battle between… well, a lot of folks. Including Master Chief, which is what makes it all Halo-related. Pretty fun piece! (I especially loved the bit where Diablo flips Kaneda’s bike – nicely fluid, and great shadows!) There are multiple download links in Pico’s forum post – you can grab his H.264-encoded QuickTime (56 mb), or our own Sorenson3Pro-encoded QuickTime (61mb) or WMP9 (54 mb) versions. Give it a shot!(Louis Wu 03:08:13 UTC)

SPARTAN 294 was the first to notice the new Bungie Weekly Update (it’s in our Weekly Update Archive, too, if you’d rather have the light background) – lots of cool info in this one. Stuff about how matchmaking deals with ‘mixed skill’ parties, fascinating details about how the game chooses which spawn point to bring you back on, a cool tidbit about your plasma pistol, info about how screenshots are put together… and more. And a trap. bar. Go read!(Louis Wu 02:40:52 UTC)

DigitalPh33r has kicked off a new machinima series – ‘It’s a Wonderful LIVE, Episode 1‘ chronicles his experiences with other gamers, as affected by his Recon armor. Thanks, SPARTAN 294.(Louis Wu 02:26:00 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy followed up on her story about Nathaniel, the unlucky gamer who had his Xbox 360 cleaned a little too well – looks like Bungie went a little overboard in an effort to even things out. A feel-good story for sure! Thanks, the Light Show.(Louis Wu 02:23:11 UTC)

The PRWeek 2008 awards were given out on Thursday night – and Microsoft and their external PR firm Edelman took home Technology Campaign of the Year for the Halo 3 launch. Nice work!(Louis Wu 02:20:32 UTC)

Terminator182 has updated his HBO News Widget (for Mac OSX’s Dashboard) – bug fixes and graphical tweaks make this useful tool even better! Check it out.(Louis Wu 02:08:20 UTC)

Leviathan has been working on Pixellated Halo for a while now – he’s getting tired of boring still shots for updates. So he made a movie. It’s a bit over 3 minutes long, and it does a good job of showing off gameplay, scenery, and cutscenes – it looks pretty exciting! You can grab it in WMP9 or QuickTime format from us – your choice. (It’s about 7.5 mb, either way.)(Louis Wu 02:05:47 UTC)

Sometimes things only get done here when people do them, and then tell us about it. Not long ago, HaLo2FrEeEk, of Clan Infectionist, contacted us about some hi-def (720p) versions of the Halo 2 cutscenes he’d created, using Halo 2 PC. They were beautiful… and big. So we’re sharing the load. If you visit the Halo 2 page of our Cutscene Library, you’ll find a new option – HD (WMP9 or QuickTime). If the link says ‘ci mirror list’, clicking it will visit a load-balancing script on the Clan Infectionist server, and point you to the best download option, spreading the bandwidth hit. (If the Clan Infectionist website is offline, our local mirrors will still be available.) Because the files are so large, we’re going to be releasing them slowly – right now, only the very first cutscene is up, but there’ll be more as we see how big the demand is. Go see how good ‘One Size Fits All’ looks in high definition!(Louis Wu 17:33:47 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy found that her Friday Caption Fun experiment last week went really well; there were over 100 entries from users, some of them very funny. Go read what folks thought of the last entry… and think up your own witticisms for the new one she just posted!(Louis Wu 15:13:36 UTC)

Keegan stopped by to let us know that he’s started work on an Arbiter helmet; you can see some early progress pics in his forum post. NIce!(Louis Wu 13:12:18 UTC)

Just six new pieces in the Fan Fiction section this week… go read ’em!(Louis Wu 13:06:31 UTC)

Bungie played the guys from Rare this week in their Halo Humpday Challenge – apparently, they were forced to play at the crack of daw- um, 9 am. Poor guys; I hate having to get up that early. Even with that ridiculous requirement, AND some sneaky player shenanigans… they STILL won (though only by a hair; the first game was close, the second game closer, and the third game they actually lost). There’s a hidden apology buried in the writeup somewhere… can you find it? Thanks to LackOfKnowledge for the heads-up (I was too busy playing Grifball last night to notice).(Louis Wu 12:58:12 UTC)

Adam Grumbo let us know that the Austin Wind Symphony will be performing “The Music of Video Games” tomorrow night, at the Bethany Lutheran Church (which I assume is in Austin – the website makes ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION of how to find the locale – there’s not even a street address to Google); Adam will be present, in full Master Chief regalia, so stop by and take some pics! (This is NOT a Video Games Live production – they’ll be in Austin later this summer, working with the Austin Symphony.)(Louis Wu 22:43:20 UTC)

Today’s episode of Another Halo Comic Strip might actually provide an alternate explanation for Stuntmutt’s decision to retire One One Se7en…(Louis Wu 19:19:51 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy found a video made by Richiedude, of the 405th, showing the evolution of a fan-made Spartan helmet. Pretty cool!(Louis Wu 19:18:25 UTC)