Tony Albert sent along a kind note with a description of some new music of his:

I’ve been a lurker of the forums and news pages for a couple of years now, and although my involvement in the community is non-existent, my admiration for the creativity surrounding Halo is immense. That said, I wanted throw my own creativity into the fray by submitting a song to you that I have written in homage to Halo. I believe it has universal appeal, but hopefully readers of Eric Nylund’s ‘Halo: The Fall of Reach’ will be hard pressed to identify it’s speaker as anyone but the master chief, John 117 himself.

The song, a 6.4 mb mp3, can be grabbed from our server. Solid southern rock, with a nice Halo-based theme after the second chorus. Give it a listen!

Mhaddy from the Junkyard writes to point out yet ANOTHER Homefront update on the Junkyard forums. (These guys are stepping up the pace.) There are 12 new screenshots of single player mode (which is just multiplayer mode – with up to 63 bots). There will be another update on Friday, with a release date announcement.

Speaking of repurposing assets… I wasn’t going to mention this right away, because I was hoping for a reply from the website owners first… but the number of emails we’re getting from viewers makes it hard to wait. Over on the Mountain Dew/Slurpee Halo 2 page, there’s a new download – they’re calling it the 339 SFX Player. It’s a downloadable Flash application, for both Mac and PC, and it’s simply an interface for playing ‘over 50 exclusive Halo sound clips’. The problem is – every single one of these clips was taken from our Dialogue Databank, with no credit whatsoever to the original collectors. If you really want sound clips – visit the Databank; there are over 1200 snippets, instead of just 50 (though you don’t get the funky Flash interface for listening to them that way). With this flood of Halo-related advertising hitting the net (and other avenues) recently, it seems that a few places have forgotten about general ethics.

A number of people have written us about ‘new screenshots’ at Gamespy.com – these are neither new, nor screenshots. They simply extracted a bunch of the artwork from the newly remodeled halo2.com. Oh, yeah – and then they put their own watermark on it.

Okay, I wasn’t going to post this, because it’s clear that the folks at nilerogers.com WANT you to watch the flash animations that go with the music… but for a lot of you, that’s a less than perfect solution; the animation doesn’t preload, it streams… which means if your internet connection isn’t suitably fast, you hear a second or two of music, followed by 5 or 10 seconds of silence, followed by a few seconds of music… and so on. This is clearly not what ANY musician would want for their audience. You can download the full 2:55-long snippet (this is NOT the entire song this time, thank goodness) here, and play it when you’ve got the WHOLE thing. Please visit the main website in any case, and check out the info they’ve got there; I’m not trying to circumvent their ability to let you know what they offer, I’m simply trying to give people a chance to hear this music as both Marty O’Donnell and Incubus would WANT to hear it, rather than in pieces. The list of people sending in links (as well as the list complaining about the choppiness) is far too large to enumerate, but thanks to all.

Another IGN Countdown article – this one is a short summary of Ivory Tower, one of the multiplayer maps that beta testers got their hands on. Read it for a summary and a couple of basic gameplay mode ideas.

Well, it took longer than any of us expected – but you can now grab ‘Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ in one fell 203 mb swoop. If you don’t know what this movie is, here’s the first news post I made about it. We’ll continue releasing chapters for folks who don’t want the whole thing in one shot – but for those with a fast connection, you can grab the entire movie tonight, and watch the whole 30 minutes without waiting. I just watched it again this afternoon… and I must say, I still believe this is one of the best pieces released in the Halo community – ever. Update: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter website is back up with a new forum, if you’d like to discuss this movie.

IGN continues their Countdown to Halo 2 series with a showdown – Halo 2 vs Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Yeah. Thanks, Creaper609. Update: In a twist that’s vaguely surreal, it looks like GTA: SA has ALSO been pirated and released to the net, before official publication. The Gamespot article is eerily similar to the Halo 2 piracy articles from last week. Given the number of megaahit titles being stolen this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some major changes in how copy protection is handled in the future (changes that will, like as not, make life far more inconvenient for law-abiding consumers). Thanks, Dean.

A few days ago, we mentioned that Ms Man had made it to the bottom of Truth and Reconciliation – at the time, there were only photos and a short, hard-to-understand vid. At this point, there’s a full 12 minute, 42 mb WMP9, showing the whole level, with step-by-step instructions. It’s really impressive. I don’t have an alternate download link right now – but if Ms Man’s bandwidth runs out, we’ll add one tomorrow. There’s a forum thread over at High Impact Halo about this stuff.

The World Cyber Games website is streaming video from many of the Halo matches in this year’s tournament – you can find them on this page. Registration (free) is required to watch. Thanks, Bagre.

Over at nilerogers.com, there’s a new snippet available from the Halo 2 soundtrack – this one is Odyssey 1st Movement, from Incubus. Looks like the web team there has learned their lesson – figuring out the direct URL to the mp3 isn’t as easy as it’s been in the past… and it’s doubtful that this one is longer than the snippet itself. Hehe. Anyway – go listen. Thanks to Alex Cross, Eric Biro and Zachary Hahn, who let us know within seconds of each other.

There’s a new episode of Afterwar (episode 6) over at Black Arts Studios – looks like the Master Chief might be in trouble!

Speaking of books… Ross Mills ran across a curious entry at Amazon UK. It’s a book entitled “The Halo 2 Battle Guide: Advanced Combat Techniques“, and purports to be written by ‘an experienced Halo 2 Beta tester’, chock-full of multiplayer tips. Publication date is December 17. As far as I can tell, it is not offered by Amazon in the US.

eddie m pointed out a ‘Trade Kit’ for retailers made by Piggyback Interactive for their upcoming Halo 2 Strategy Guide. It contains different covers (including a very nice large version), an insert and a product sheet. The download is 2.1 mb, and requires registration (free). It’s still unclear whether there’s going to be a difference between the Prima guide available in the US and the Piggyback guide available in Europe – but they seem to have the same cover, so…

Alex Cross pointed out this post mentioning that a new Halo 2 Soundtrack snippet has been posted to nilerodgers.com. This track is called “Follow (1st movement of the Odyssey)”, and it’s done by Incubus. Hardcore!

Once again, the end of the day arrives, and the day’s One One Se7en is almost passed over. Today, that would be depressing, because it covers a subject that inspired headlines like “THE DEATH OF XBL!” when it was first announced… and Stuntmutt’s take was so close to my own I actually turned around to see if he had been watching me. (He’d need pretty good eyes, given that he lives about 3000 miles from here… but you never know.)

Uriel has written a rant about the bungling of the Halo 2 LE release in Germany – apparently, a pretty bad job of estimating how many would sell was done. The language is not for kids, but the anger is universal.

Another Halo 2 sighting in random web comics – today’s Joe and Monkey drops the name. Thanks, The Tropical Storm.

Want to see the artwork that made Halo as beautiful as it is, but think that $22 is too much to pay? Wal-mart is selling it for $13.83 – that’s a couple of bucks cheaper than Amazon. (Realize that you’re eating away at Eric Trautmann’s royalty check every time you look for bargains, though…) Thanks, ZigZag Master.

rockslider has added a Halo dictionary to his site – it’s called ‘Halo in a nutshell‘, and it’s pretty dang funny. Go read some.