Nil, building on some community speculation, finished off this picture of a new Halo 2 vehicle… but then confirmed that the MC could do worse. Thanks to Anton P. Nym for starting this whole mess.

MrSmiley mentions that Halo Babies has a Fan Strip up today, and wanted to point out that their Avatar contest (ending soon) is now open for voting to members of the site. Check it out!

Finn awakens from his motorcycle-induced slumber (wha?) to speculate about that which must not be named on our forum. Check the Story Page. And hold on to your hats. (Thanks to Milamber for noticing.)

Nafe Rubeus continues his quest for Zanzibar multiplayer footage, with another german website, die-klobrille.de. There are two links; the first is a 103 mb, 19-minute file that will make you nauseous if you watch the whole thing at a shot. (It starts with some footage of the Nightmare-Armor-clad MS rep on the show floor, and then moves on to game footage… the blue flashing really got to me after a bit.) The second is a mirror of the very first clip we mentioned – but you’ll have to copy and paste the link, rather than click it – there’s a typo in the code. If all goes well, we might have something better for you soon…

Boxer continues his Adventures in Disaster series with Episode 3, over at akba.info.

Grenadiac points out FANTASTIC news for the Mac community – bobindashadows has found a way to port Halo CE maps to the Mac. The system isn’t complete yet – it requires modifying the way bitmaps are stored, so they can be tacked on safely to the existing bitmaps.map file (so that multiple mods can coexist) – but he’s got a working prototype, with some great screenshots. Head on over to MacDev and read all about it!

Fluffy, over at HaloPlanet, points out (once again) that they’ve got an awesome, though underused, resource available to all Halo CE modders. They will host your map/mod/website, with unlimited bandwidth (and they mean it – they’ve got the MASSIVE pipes of Fileplanet to back them up), pre-built forums (and other systems), tech support, haloplanet emails, and even pre-built website templates to use. Why would you turn this down? Read their Hosting FAQ, check out the Application, and watch your bandwidth problems disappear!

Wronchi put up a Flash animation at Newgrounds, dedicated to all those who found certain aspects of the Library… repetitive. It’s a bit over a meg, and nicely done. Thanks to Gil27 for pointing it out. (Obligatory Spoiler Warning, for those keeping track.)

nico, the guy behind Red vs Blue’s music, sent along a picture (74k) of his Powerbook, running Halo on the back deck of his family’s house in St. Barths, in the French West Indies, as the sun begins to set. I can’t think of a nicer place to kill Covenant…

The latest Gamespotting column at Gamespot is about upcoming games… and it contains a poll – ‘Which upcoming game will be the greatest?’ At the moment, Halo 2 is in second place… behind Half-Life 2. Hmm… (Thanks to GruntKilla for the heads-up.)

We’ve added last Friday’s Weekly Bungie Update to our Update archive, and maybe made the archive a bit easier to use. I noticed that the full update list was getting a bit unwieldy (260k of text, plus pictures), so I uncovered a part of the search page that’s always been there, but not documented; you can now view updates individually, by date, from the main Archive page. Should make life easier if you want to point out a specific date…

For far too long, the Movie Database has languished, victim of limited time and shifting priorities. Uriel offered to compile much of the data required to build this database, greatly reducing the amount of work needed to create updates; even WITH his help, it took much longer than it should have. However, we’ve passed the biggest hurdle – the horrendously messy collection of videos that were released during E3 this year. The database now runs through the end of June (yes, still a couple of months behind, but it should be MUCH simpler to catch up at this stage), and contains links to all the E3 data we could find (as well as all the movies we mentioned in the month following E3). Stop by and see what you missed!

Today’s One One Se7en shows what a good headset can do to a polite individual… I suppose the real funny would be if that cord behind Cortana weren’t plugged into anything. Oh, wait…

The footage from the Leipzig Games Convention continues to appear… and disappear. The Game7 footage we mentioned on Saturday is offline already (they ran out of bandwidth, it appears), but there are new clips to fill the void. Nafe Rubeus found a thread on a clan forum with a link to a large (but EXTREMELY slow-downloading) video – I have no clue what this one looks like. And Demden, of Halo Orbit, pointed out 5 QuickTime clips recorded with a digital camera on a different clansite – video quality is the best we’ve seen from the convention, but there’s no sound, and the filesize is 5 times what it should be. (This might change.) For folks looking for footage that was online but is no longer… we’re not going to be hosting this sort of footage; there is going to be a surfeit of it in the next few weeks, I’d guess. If you get it, great, if you don’t, grab the next one. Update: Luis Carrillo found a new link for the Game7 video, in a GameFAQs forum thread.

B Ball Master is embarrassingly insistent that we mention that Halo 2 will be playable next month at the Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo in Wellington, New Zealand. Under $15 NZ (per day) gets you into the event, taking place on September 25 and 26. Yet another venue for some Halo 2 lovin’ before November 9…

Oops – haven’t updated the Fan Fiction section since Thursday, so there are 20 new pieces for you to read… Gotta be careful about that. Go get ’em!

On August 2, we got word of a new Halo 2-branded headset, made by Plantronics, that would be coming out this fall. More details emerged a week later. Now, thanks to Team Xbox, we have official word, in the form of a Plantronics press release. Looks to be a classy piece of equipment!

Wow. Talk about dedication. [-TLG-]Madrox and Monoxide got a Hunter to the bottom of the pit in the middle of the underground cavern in AotCR. How’d they do it? They gave him a ride on a Banshee. Vid is 5.5 mb in WMP9 format, hosted by Madrox. I’ve put a QuickTime version up on files.bungie.org. (Both versions are a bit hard to see; vid is a tad washed out. You can certainly get the gist, though.)

Pballwizard points out a new update over at Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod. Map updates, mostly.

Carlo Zottman points out the blog of Boris Schneider-Johne, German Product Manager for the Xbox – he was at the German Games Convention yesterday, and got a pretty nice shot of the Master Chief doing “the hardest job of all time; handing out Halo 2 survival bags to journalists. Contents: energy drinks, deodorants and water pistols.” Glad to see the Nightmare Armor contract in use!