Holy moley… in the last couple of days, a TON of tools for decoding the alien font used on halo2.com have come out – and now, you can find not one, but THREE different fonts available for writing your own messages on Wallpaper or whatever. We mentioned two tools yesterday – now there’s a third (37K), and it’s functionally identical to Chappy’s Konfabulator widget, except that it runs on a PC and is built with .NET. The three fonts come from MrFluffyPants (8k), Multipilot (8k), and eek (5k). Grab ’em all, see which one suits you best. Okay – there’s plenty more news for today – but real life takes me away from the computer for a bit; back in a couple of hours. Update: focused7 has updated his decoder to sort shapes by common feature. Link has been updated.

Wow. The email response to the closing of the forum has been surprising, to put it mildly. Folks writing to us have been overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the forum closed until November 9. However – I want to hear from the whole HBO community, not just those who bother to write emails. To that end, I’ve set up a simple poll – please cast your vote. Thanks!

Every once in a while, a Halo movie comes along that’s head and shoulders above almost everything else out there. Great filmography, awesome sound, fantastic voice acting… if you look back on all of the Halo machinima creations that have been released (we’re not talking music videos now, or gameplay presentations), there are only a couple that are up there in a class that can stand alone, be of interest OUTSIDE the Halo community. (Red vs Blue is probably the most prominent example.) Now (in my opinion), there’s a new one. ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ is a 30-minute movie which has it all; great acting, great storyline, great cinematography, great music, great effects. Humor and pathos, all rolled into a Halo-driven package. 30 minutes is WAY too much to release on the web in this format, so they’ve broken it up into 6 episodes. The first one (as well as a 1:14-long, 7.5 mb trailer) is available on the HiaLH website; It’s 2:51 long, 20 mb, in QuickTime format. To ease the load on their server, we’ve mirrored this episode at mythica.org (and the trailer, too). Episode 2 will be released sometime early next week. Our forum is still down, so comments should be sent directly to the team (check their Contact page for email addresses) or to us – we’ll pass them along. Update: As many of you have noticed, the HiaLH website is offline right now, for exceeding their bandwidth. We’re tossing up another mirror of both of these files; you can find the trailer and Part 1 at files.bungie.org. We’re talking about BitTorrenting the entire thing, but give us some time to work it out.

Recoil points out nice bonus deals from Canadian sellers, if you haven’t already ordered your copy of Halo 2. Best Buy is offering a free T – the Blue ‘2’ logo on the front, ‘Go Earth. 110904’ on the back. (This doesn’t seem to be available on the online store, and Recoil doesn’t say what color this shirt is; most of the freebies I’ve seen have been black, though a white one exists, as well.) Over at Futureshop, they’re offering free mini action figures (one of two packs). Again, this doesn’t seem to be available online, so visit your local store.

There’s a note over on Xbox.com from the Assistant Editor of the Official Xbox Magazine talking about their next issue, and the massive Halo 2 article planned for it. The mag will be out on November 2, one week before the game is out, and will contain (it looks like) information about the entire Campaign mode. Up to you whether you buy it then, or wait until after you play. (Subscribers, of course, will get it even sooner.) Thanks, Ash.

Oh, man… in all the mess of yesterday, I managed to forget to post yesterday’s One One Se7en. That might have been a good thing… you decide. It’s up now.

IGN’s Halo 2 Countdown article for yesterday is called ‘Lockout’, and gives a couple of decent Multiplayer ideas for use on the map Lockout. Go read!

Very cool. Chappy has created a Konfabulator widget (138K) to ease translation of the code found on halo2.com. This requires Konfabulator, a MacOSX in-system javascript runtime engine that allows you to put cool functions on your desktop. This one is pretty useful, if you’re trying to decode a message; simply click the appropriate symbols, and the message will be typed out in the text bar at the top. A sample screenshot is here (78K). Again – this works in MacOSX only. Update: I just noticed that there’s a PC equivalent, of sorts – IWTPH2 created a small app that allows you to do the same thing. A tad harder to use – but it runs on a PC, which the widget does not. 🙂

While I took the night off, the Halo world went on – and Frankie posted another Bungie Weekly Update, this time over at Rampancy.net. He rants a bit about piracy, and then describes a weeklong Press event in San Francisco he just got back from, where journalists were allowed to play the game from start to finish, in order to write their reviews in time for the November deadlines. There’s some nice imagery in his description of Legendary difficulty… Go read it, and feel sorry for the crying Mister Chief. We got lots of notes – earliest one was from 343.

On Breaking Benjamin’s website there’s a mention of an upcoming MTV Making the Video Game: Halo 2 special, which they will be featured in. It’ll air on both MTV and MTV2 between November 5 and November 9 – a full list of showtimes can be found in the link above. Thanks, Ted Ruscha.

For folks working on the decoding of the various pages at halo2.com, there’s a great thread over at the Unfiction forums; you’ll find a really useful decoder based on shape, rather than alphabetical order. (If you want alphabetical order, there’s also this one, posted over in the Bungie.net forums – but the signal to noise ratio is much higher over there.) Pretty much all of the text has been decoded at this point. (I even know it’s right, because BOLL cheated, and extracted the XML file that’s being used to GENERATE the text – and it’s in English. No, I’m not gonna show you what he found, because it’s not particularly sporting.) The only things that are not yet decoded are the three password-protected screens in the Prophet subring. And according to one person on the Unfiction forums, those will not BE decoded until the Flash asset involved is actually updated with a real password. So for now, enjoy the site, and the new glimpses into the wonder of Halo 2… and try not to stumble over any major spoilers on other sites. Update: for the lazy among you, NK has decoded the entire site, graphically. It removes the enjoyment of doing it yourself… but hey, nobody’s forcing you. Because it’s far too much work right now to set up a page where you can see these one at a time, I’ve packaged them all up (43 images in all) – you can grab them here (1.8 mb). Thanks, NK!

Need something to read? Something to fire up the neurons and kick the axons in the pants? Try the Halo Story Page. Chock full of conjectural hypothesizing and loaded with really neat stuff. And it’s been updated. Today. By me, strangely enough.

The overhaul of halo2.com is complete – sort of. It’s pretty much unviewable on a mac – it works well on XP/Firefox and XP/IE (though the IE version takes over your screen; there’s no way to get to the desktop any more, without closing the window). The outbound link is also busted, though I’m sure they’ll fix that at some point. All text is in the same code as the teaser stuff we mentioned last night. It’s fun to explore – though there ARE vehicles, weapons, and buildings (and maybe aliens – I haven’t fully explored it) that you’ve never seen before… that’s your spoiler warning. There are at least 3 downloadables – I found some wallpaper. Thanks to Elite TAR, who pointed it out first. Update: I was wrong – the site IS viewable on a mac; OSX/IE5 seems to be a useable combination. (I didn’t even test IE before, since Microsoft abandoned development on it over a year ago.) Thanks, -Nash–housewares. Update 2: w00t! BOLL managed to find a direct link that lets you view the main part of the site (at least the North American version) in a window – it’s now watchable on Macs (any browser)! (It’ll also respond better for PCs that aren’t the top of the line…) Thanks, BOLL!

It hurts to do this, but the forum is shut down for the foreseeable future. Why? Because even though our stance has been consistent, folks out there still don’t take to heart our policy on leaks, spoilers, pirating, etc.

Considering it’s not a right but a privilege, instead of tearing our hair out for the next few weeks until Halo 2 officially launches, we’ll turn it off (you can still read, but you can’t post) if we think you folks are making things too difficult for us to moderate and stay on top of.

Why do we have to feel like we’re fathers punishing our bratty children? I don’t know, I really don’t. Peace out.

Forgot to post this last night – Hawaiian Pig did another RvB MegaBattle pic, but with a twist – it’s the Anti-Leak Edition. Ouch!

Kryptonic lets us know about a new piece of artwork by vegasmike over at DeviantArt. Before you go – realize that this is a sketch of a new enemy that shows up in the latest issue of EGM; some people consider its mere EXISTENCE to be a spoiler. If that’s you, don’t follow the link. For the rest of you, check out this really nice sketch!

pOgO points out an auction on eBay.co.uk for a pop art Halo 2 painting. I sort of wish the artist had chosen a pose that DIDN’T come straight from a screenshot… but it’s a nice work, anyway. (Me, I wouldn’t be selling stuff like this when Microsoft Legal’s in such a tizzy… but then, I’m a coward.) Speaking of eBay, the full action figure auction we mentioned recently has heated up; current bid is over $1,000, and the number of visits has turned the counter over. It’s still a deal – you’re getting stuff you can’t actually buy ANYWHERE – but man, that’s a lot of dough.

More new comics out there today… J_Speeder talks about a new episode of E.A.R.”T.H.” (though it’s in movie form, and a mammoth 45 mb, on Freewebs, so I’m guessing it won’t be accessible within about 10 minutes of this news post), and Halo Babies has a new strip up, looking at one area Cortana MIGHT not be the sharpest tack in the box. (Halo Babies also has an interview with the creators of MC and Cortana, and an anti-piracy message up as new content.) Go see!

Today’s IGN Countdown to Halo 2 article is a diatribe about pirating – appropriate, and a pretty good read (awesome if you contrast it to the last few in this series). Go check it out. First heads-up came from Mumbly JoE, last night.

Pallor points out today’s edition of GU Comics, commenting on the Halo 2 piracy issue. Sounds about right…