The New York Daily News needed help narrowing down your videogame choices for the holidays – so they went to the Penny Arcade team. Their advice? You can’t go wrong with Halo 3. Thanks, Quikthnkr.(Louis Wu 18:56:27 UTC)

argodaemon let us know that the Halouvre has a boatload of new content, built up over the past few months. If you haven’t been recently, you haven’t been!(Louis Wu 18:23:09 UTC)

Today’s One One Se7en bugs me a little.(Louis Wu 15:53:55 UTC)

Once again, I’d like to apologize for the inexcusably long queue for our artwork sections; I’ve just posted over 50 new images in the Miscellaneous Art section, and this only clears the queue through August 1. Yes, that means there’s still four months of backlog! On the plus side, I’ve also added a (long-asked for) easy way to increase the number of images you can see per page; it was always doable manually, but now there’s a link at the top. Another nice tidbit; in searching for older unposted Misc Art entries, I found a bunch of wallpapers that should have been posted last week; they’ll go up soon. (So will the next batch of Misc Art, I hope.) Some of these current images were posted on our forum, and all of them are pre-Halo 3… but there is some amazing work in this batch, so you should look through! (Louis Wu 14:40:23 UTC)

TTL Demag0gue let us know that Reclaimer Chapter Two, Part Three is now online – looks like Viper’s woken up something… bad.(Louis Wu 11:18:06 UTC)

Blayne Scott has created a bunch of custom Halo action figures – he’s currently selling them on eBay, because he’s moving. Swing by his forum post for links and pics (there’s some pretty cool stuff in there!). Near the bottom there’s a general link to ALL his eBay auctions; there are a bunch of non-customized Halo action figures for sale, as well. Go see what he’s got!(Louis Wu 11:15:16 UTC)

Apparently, the idea of video game music performed by professional orchestras is catching on; Music 4 Games has an article about a show coming up in Holland in a couple of weeks. Games in Concert will contain music from over a dozen video games, including Halo. The performance will be conducted by Laura Karpman.(Louis Wu 10:58:54 UTC)

Sigafoos wrote to say that The Riot 75 is now up – 16 mb, 41 minutes of good stuff. There’s an interview with Athena and Excardon of halo3.junk.ws, and the beginning of the Community Awards (no registration needed to vote). Go listen!(Louis Wu 23:20:15 UTC)

In the midst of this holiday weekend, I managed to forget to post the week’s Fan Fiction submissions – they’re up now. Sorry. Go read.(Louis Wu 17:18:04 UTC)

Kotaku has a pic of a Master Chief cake made by a reader for her husband (well, commissioned, I guess). Rice Crispy Treats for brains! Mmmmm… thanks, Ross Mills.(Louis Wu 17:11:43 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy found a couple of new Halo 3 themed Xbox 360 faceplates on eBay – go see if your Xbox needs a lift!(Louis Wu 16:33:03 UTC)

Yahoo says Halo 3 is one of the games you should be looking at for holiday parties. Right up there with Smarty Pants and Super Mario Galaxy. Thanks, TylerDurden76.(Louis Wu 17:48:34 UTC)

Maximum Fear let us know that the Campaign Contest kicked off by Community Projects (we mentioned it on the 17th) is now over – the winner is Ezandora, who submitted a run of the Covenant which scored an insane 347,620 points. Read about it on Bungie.net.(Louis Wu 15:44:50 UTC)

Another Halo Comic Strip looks at a problem many of us have right now… excuse me, I need to go make some soup.(Louis Wu 13:49:45 UTC)

We’re a bit late this time around… but Sodagod reminded us that his Inside Halo news program is still going strong on Machinima.com – Episode 2 was released a couple of weeks ago. Watching it gives you a whirlwind overview of the Halo community over the past month or so (with lots of humor) – and it brings to light one of the biggest headaches facing Halo machinimators today: the weapon-lowering trick for Halo 3 does NOT work over Xbox Live. The Bungie guys are on break this week – but I plan to see if I can get an explanation for why this was set up as a local-only function sometime soon… because it makes people like Sodagod crazy, and you wouldn’t like him when he’s crazy. While you’re there, you should also check out his Inside Halo Overviews – I haven’t found any convenient way to link to each of them on Machinima.com, but there’s a great playlist on YouTube that links to most of them so far. There’s one on Equipment, several on vehicles (the new Covenant Vehicle overview isn’t there yet, but you can watch it on machinima.com), and one on skulls. Good stuff!(Louis Wu 13:34:35 UTC)

Aglor pointed out a small vid made by Team Banana Yellow – it’s a parody of the old ‘I coulda had a V8!’ ads. Brought a chuckle…(Louis Wu 13:01:02 UTC)

The most recent Halo Wars update was posted earlier this week on the Halo Wars forum – it contains a shout-out to Joe Staten for his work on Contact Harvest, and a nice tidbit about the addition of voice snippets to the sound mix of the game. I wonder if, down the road, there’ll be a databank of those snippets on some Halo Wars fansite… thanks to Simpsons Rule for the heads-up.(Louis Wu 12:59:10 UTC)