Mechroneal writes about a Halo 2 tourney in Medford, OR, April 15-17. It’s being held at Creature Coffee, entrance is $10 for singles, $25 for teams, top prize is $100. There should be info added to his website later this week.

MereCatfish sat down with Masters1337, a HaloCE modder working on the Coagulation Halo 2 CE mod (among other things). Go read his opinions on HaloCE vs Halo PC, where Gearbox stands in all this, his thoughts about Halo 2, as well. Update: seems I got a critical fact wrong – Masters1337 is NOT part of the Halo 2 CE team, he’s part of the Halo 2 conversion map team. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks to both Masters1337 and NiTrOuSoXiDe for the heads-up.

Another art update at Halo Babies – some really nice stuff! (It’s not all Halo-related… but it’s all fun!) Thanks to PlasmaFire for the heads-up.

MLGPro.com has posted an interview with Sergio, the quiet member of x6. Go read it! (Thanks, 3Suns.)

Halo 2 is up against Burnout 3, Far Cry, GTA: SA, and Half-Life 2 in the Video Game category Spaceys Viewers Choice awards – go tell ’em what you like! Thanks, Cary Trussler.

TalkXbox has posted the next chapter of its Art of War strategy guide – it’s called ‘The Art of Marksmanship‘, and it contains an instructional video (25.6 mb, MPEG-4 format) to go with its text instruction. (The video seems like more of a montage – SP and MP – than ‘instruction’… but Eisen Feuer acknowledges this on the page itself.) Thanks to BattleVark for the heads-up.

STK won the 2v2 Halo tournament run by XTournaments last weekend – congrats, LiL Poison and Poison! More details can be found on the XTournaments site.

Cheers, Mr Danger lets us know that the Halo Team has been listed in the Top 100 Most Influential People in the World in the newest Time Magazine (you must be a magazine subscriber to read this online). Way to go!

Progress continues on the Movie Peer Review Rating System; we’ve tweaked the required final score to be a bit lower (it seemed we were weeding out EVERYTHING), and we’ve added 3 more reviewers to the ‘Required Reviewers’ total – when we required 7 reviewers, a single low rating could knock a contender out of the running (and at least one reviewer has been rating vids consistently below average). We also changed the wording on the response that submitters get if their movie doesn’t make the cut; they’re now encouraged to use the feedback to improve their movie, and resubmit. (That was always part of the plan, but I don’t think we made it clear enough – this system was built for two primary reasons; to weed out some of the overabundance of videos… but also to help moviemakers IMPROVE their skills.) The first result of these changes – a video that was submitted, and rejected, was edited with an eye to the criticism and resubmitted – and it passed. You can grab comradx’s Halo 2: The Movie (Trailer) in WMP9 format (29.2 mb, mythica.org | bungie.org) or QuickTime format (29.2 mb, bungie.org | mythica.org) – it’s the first teaser of a full-length movie based on the Halo 2 storyline, using cutscene footage mixed with David Galindo’s impressive works (with full permission). There’s a thread devoted to this project over at High Impact Halo.

Mommeeeeeee! He’s at it AGAIN!

I HATE it when my notes get buried, and I forget to post something. Yaksha visited our forum yesterday to announce Episode 6 of Sponsors vs Freeloaders – Overrun and Underwhelmed. Film quality continues to be quite good – and there’s still a plot. Multiple resolutions are available. Grab a copy!

In order to ‘get’ this week’s One One Se7en, you have to 1) remember the names of downloadable maps Bungie plans to release in June, 2) be old, and 3) have watched some REALLY bad television in your youth. That’s… um, 7 of us. For the rest of you, there’s Google.

Wow. Now THIS is something… I haven’t seen before. A collection of south Texas religious groups (they might all be the same entity; I can’t tell – but we’ve got Fuzion Church, Crossroads Baptist Church, and Chi-Ro Ministries) has put together a series of Halo-based machinima to promote a Christian weekend retreat – and to promote Christian principles in general. Movies are in QuickTime format, and available in a couple of different resolutions each. Definitely points for innovative use of modern technology to get across an age-old message… thanks to HaloPlanet for pointing this out.

Thirteen new pieces of Fan Fiction for you this morning – the weekend catch. Go read!

The comic flood doesn’t end. (It would be really nice if some of it would slow down until the creators had time to make stuff FUNNY… but hey, you can’t have everything. And no, I’m not saying they’re ALL un-funny… just that some are coming out so quickly that the chance for humor is trampled by the rush to release.)

• Last Stand Page 11 was released last night.
• Halo in Paradise got another episode.
• This Island Earth got another ep, and the first two were worked on some more.

I’m wondering when the fan apathy is gonna set in, with all this content release… Update: Bye-Stander has gotten a new episode today, as well.

This… is just a bizarre article to see at a site like HowStuffWorks. (Then again… maybe it’s not.) Thanks to Ian Wiseman for the heads-up. (There’s voting at the end – be sure to vote.)

There’ve been a ton of movies announced on our forum recently; none of these have been submitted to our peer review rating system, so they’re not eligible for HBO hosting, but you can still check them out:

• Praetoria Guard has 3 films out (one is a blooper reel)
• KoTHALO has released a trailer for 3lite, another zombie-type movie
• Spartan92290 posted a note about Grunts Gone Wild, a grunt party movie (better link here)
• Nighthawk 117 put up a vehicle antics film – acrobatics in Halo 2

I’m sure there are others I missed.

TrickingIT.com has set up a movies database where you can rate released films. At the moment, it’s mostly just promotional info about recent or upcoming films (the majority of posts have no ratings at all)… but I guess the more people who use this, the more useful it will become. (You must be registered at that site to even SEE the database.) There’s more info in a forum post made by Phan7om, as well as on the TrickingIT.com front page.

Wow… must be comic time. We’ve been told about three new ones this weekend:

• 2401 is sort of a One-One-Se7en-esque strip from Guilty Spark – humor is a bit spotty, but it’s early yet. As of this writing, there are 7 strips in that thread.
• Halo In Paradise has just a single strip up – and apparently, something went terribly wrong when he saved it (so it’s really small). Strip 2 coming soon.
• This Island Earth is a merging of Halo and a classic 1955 B-movie from Andrew Gaynor of Black Art Studios; there are currently two pages up, with more coming soon, homework allowing.

In addition, we got mail from Über-Chief 69 about bandwidth problems with Resolute (mentioned a couple of times recently in our news). If anyone wants to help… hmm. I’d tell you to contact him via his website, but there doesn’t seem to be any contact link at all there. Oh, well.

We’ve placed a link to the Movie Peer Review Rating System on the news pages – if you’ve got a Halo movie you need hosting for, go visit! (There’s now a stats section at the top of the page; you can get an idea of what we’re seeing by looking at approval rates and processing times. Initial response has been smaller than I’d expected; is it possible that folks aren’t willing to face the opinions of their peers, or is it just that suddenly, nobody needs hosting any more?) We’ve also augmented the ‘Hot Pages’ list on the right with a couple of new links (more coming soon, maybe). Update: A page has (finally) been added that contains links to all the articles we host here that have been written by Stephen Loftus.