Plenty of new content over at Halo Babies – a new strip, of course (it is Friday), plus new concept art, and a nod to MC and Cortana, another comic strip that’s recently come back online.

Looks like there was ANOTHER Xbox.com article I missed last month – this one is called One Chief to Rule Them All, and it looks at what makes Halo stand alone in the field of Xbox titles. Not a bad read, overall.

GhaleonEB posted a link containing a list of all the EB Games stores (sorted by state) that will be open at midnight on November 9 to sell Halo 2. If you want to be sure you get started playing at the earliest possible moment… check this list for a store near you.

Ms. Man created a collection of multiplayer trick movies, back in the day. (None of them, for some reason, are in our Movies database… I’m not sure why.) His website went offline, and the vids were gone… until now. Ducain points out a post on the High Impact Halo forum containing a list of all the movies folks have been able to round up, linked locally. If you’ve never seen any of these, go grab some – they’re pretty fun.

There’s a new article on Halo 2 in the BBC’s Technology section today; most of the info is well-known to hardcore Halo fans, but it’s pretty fun to see such an in-depth article in a mainstream news source such as the BBC. They look at what is known about single-player (not much), how multiplayer has evolved since the first Halo, the chances of a Halo-based big-screen movie (pretty slim)… and what’s next for Bungie. From the sound of things, it’s not going to be Halo 3. Go read!

Recently, a new website put together by the Red vs Blue team went live – The Strangerhood is a new machinima series that uses the Sims 2 engine for storymaking. This is totally unrelated to Halo – except that a team that came together to make Halo-based movies originally is making this. An astounding number of folks wrote to tell us about it, so rather than let this flood CONTINUE, I figure we’ll actually mention it. There are a number of articles about the new series prominently linked on their front page, as well as an intro trailer that can be downloaded. It’s really well done, and if you enjoy machinima, you should check it out – but please, don’t send us news about this, because even though we love the guys involved, it’s not Halo-related. Enjoy!

Man, I don’t know how I missed this one… except maybe because I wanted to. Xbox.com posted an article in their Lifestyle section a few weeks ago that looked at who should be cast in what role if anyone ever made a Halo movie (which, I hasten to say before the next sentence break, they’re not doing). Their first recommendation – Vin Diesel as Master Chief. And it went downhill from there. I like the Xbox.com community folks, because they bring interest stories about Halo to a wider audience… but this was a mistake from the first paragraph.

Xbox.com has posted answers to last week’s Xbox Question of the Week, which was “What would you do for a sneak peek at Halo 2?” After reading the replies they got, I’m thinking that most of the people who answered have also made it into our mailbag…

Want a cookie? Calvin and Halo shows you the bar; raise it for results.

An astoundingly generous fan – who wishes to remain anonymous – has donated some pretty cool schwag for use in a new Bungie.org contest; we’re proud to announce 343 Guilt O’ Lantern, a pumpkin-carving contest. Last year, Bungie hosted their own, and it was pretty successful – our fan wanted to see it happen again, and made sure it would by tossing an Xbox and all the trimmings into the pot. Unfortunately, we can’t ship it to the winner in time to be able to play Halo 2 the day it comes out… but soon after that, the coolest pumpkin carver will have another toy. Go read all the details on our Contest page – and if you ever need to refresh your memory about the rules, or whatnot, the small pumpkin banner in our navbar will be available for clickthroughs until after the contest closes. Start your exacto knives! Update: Gah. Apologies… but it was just pointed out to me that we never specified what format this Xbox was in. It’s an NTSC box… and although I HATE having to say this, I really don’t want to have to ship it out of North America. So the contest is limited to the US and Canada… sorry.

A quick update on the free file hosting service being offered by Brian Towne… the list of sites that can use the service has grown considerably – and a check of the bandwidth usage for the box tells me that there’s an added bonus that I hadn’t expected. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty stingy about bandwidth we offer for fan-made movies; partly this is because there are hundreds of them now, and just the maintenance bandwidth required to keep them online (and being downloaded) is noticeable… but partly because I’ve become somewhat jaded. And that’s where Brian’s service comes in. Until now, if you had a movie that you wanted the world to see, but no bandwidth to serve it with, you uploaded it to us, and we decided if it was new or different or interesting enough to warrant hosting. Now (assuming your movie is under 8 mb, which many are), you no longer have to ask; you can just upload. Yesterday, Hikaru-119 posted a movie called ‘Warriors of the Prophets’ – a 6.8 mb, 2:14 long WMP9 video using existing footage to show the Covenant side of the war. I watched it, and thought, ‘okay, it’s fine… nothing special.’ When I read the comments in the forum thread this morning, though, I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t looking with a fresh-enough eye… because most people liked it quite a lot. Had Hikaru submitted it the normal way, nobody would have seen it, because it wouldn’t have made it out of my ‘not now’ folder… but thanks to Brian, anyone can watch this. <3, Brian. Update: Dennis Powers, of UXB Internet, points out that the Halo Maps website has a pretty lenient upload policy as well, for many kinds of Halo-related files. You can read the submission guidelines to see what’s allowed, and then register (or log in) to be allowed to upload your files.

Getting started late today – apologies. Looks like Halo 2 fever has gotten people thinking about what has brought them here (or, I guess, to ANY Halo site) – there are a couple of threads today on our forum that look at various aspects of this game’s effect on us. Neo-genesis asks “Why are you here?” hoping to get stories about what led you to HBO in the first place. smeginfrell looks at Halo 2, and how it’s infected his brain. What makes YOU keep waiting? Share your thoughts!

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, noticed a new update to the blog of Mat Noguchi, ToolMaster for the Halo 2 team. (I think I heard someone shortening that a bit, at one point…) Sounds like they’re really winding down – we’re close to the Gold announcement! An interesting ‘bit of trivia’, as well: “Legendary is hard. Really really really hard. Adamantium hard.” Hehe – I wonder if we’ll all feel the same way in 2 years?

Looks like Levels4you.com posted a Halo Character Model pack for Unreal Tournament 2k4 last week. Thanks, Hawk7886, for .

A couple of weeks ago, Frankie confirmed to Gamespy that there would be no low-gravity levels in Halo 2 multiplayer. Looks like someone forgot to tell One One Se7en…

Hehe – this is sort of funny. IGN Xbox is running a poll… “Most Anticipated Xbox game besides Halo 2?” If you can’t beat ’em, rule ’em out. 🙂 Thanks, Pete.

E1337 points out a page at Xboxyde with a couple of vids on it; the first is simply a re-encode of a video we mentioned from them last week (if you didn’t get it then, it might be worth grabbing now), the second is a 16 mb, 4:19 long WMP9 showing more Zanzibar gameplay from the TGS game floor. Video quality is good, audio is mostly the Japanese announcer and show sounds. For the collector who must have EVERY video…

12 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today – poems, songs, stories. Go read.

Back in July, we mentioned a teaser for a movie called ‘Halo Revolutions’ – it was footage of Legend, one of the best German Halo players out there, sniping… well, everyone. The full movie has now been released; it’s a 124 mb download (the .rar compression knocked 35 mb off the full size of the movie), in DivX format, and available from ocrana.com, the site of the clan Legend belongs to. It’s almost 10 minutes of kills, set to heroic music. Thanks to Demden and Geiernase for pointing this out!

Victor Andersson has translated the Super Play article (a Swedish magazine) we added to our Press Scans area a couple of months ago – for those of you who don’t read Swedish, you can now see the text that goes with the pretty pictures! Thanks, Victor.