Timboh56 has posted a stop motion movie test with his Halo action figures – just a meg big, but nicely done!

Halo Babies has put up a new fan-created strip. Pottie humor… but then again, it IS Halo BABIES… There is also some new fan wallpaper and a tabloid cover. Go take a look.

Wow. Halo50k3 ended with a bang – Team FFA took the final 4v4 title by beating Team StK in a nailbiter of a match, 50-49. Dolbex promises that games will be rebroadcast soon – keep your eyes on mlgpro.com! There are more news articles and more pictures to see, right now. And speaking of pictures – Rapture uploaded another massive batch of photos yesterday – including some nice closeups of the Nightmare Armor helmets that each member of the winning team took home. (Nice bonus prize, eh?) Check ’em out!

We’ve received more than a few emails about this ilovebees thing, so I’d just like to make something clear in case it wasn’t before: We are not part of this event. We don’t have any secret information; we’re just following along like everyone else. That means we can’t confirm or deny your theories about the page; nor can we answer questions that haven’t been figured out already by someone else. We also probably aren’t going to post that much news about the site, since it looks like it’s going to be going on for a while; we may note major confirmed relevations but we won’t be posting daily updates or every single new tidbit. Which brings us to my point: You don’t really need to email us about your theories or stuff that happens regarding the site. Again, we can’t tell you if you’re right, we can’t give you new information, and we probably aren’t going to do anything with your email anyway. You will get much better results by posting to one of the many forums covering the event; a lot more people will see it that way.

Because of the massive flood of bee-related speculation, our forum has become relatively useless for Halo discussion. (Can you tell that I’m not convinced of the long-term relevance to our community of this whole event|phenomenon|game?) There are interesting posts that are getting buried. Say, for example… this one, from Captain Spark. He took a few more HUDless screenshots of the Spec-Ops Elite skin that Xavier built, and then did some basic image manipulation to them. The end results are pretty cool; I’d put them in the Miscellaneous Art queue, except that 1) he didn’t present them that way, 2) they violate the posting rules for that section, and 3) you wouldn’t see ’em for a while if I did. So check out the forum post, and enjoy these ‘cel-shaded’ elites!

Day One at Halo50k3 has come and gone, and there are all sorts of goodies for you at the MLGPro.com website. The Halo FFA competition was taken by StrangePurple, and the 2v2 matches were dominated by Team StK (half the four-man team took first, the other half took second). MLGPro streamed 250 gigabytes of interview and gameplay to the viewing masses, with 335 people watching during the 2v2 finals. There new articles and new pictures in the gallery. In addition, rapture has added another update to his OWN collection of pictures. If you couldn’t make it to Atlanta, at least you can check out the action! And don’t forget, there’s plenty more to come today.

Rapture, at Halo50k3, has been taking boatloads of pictures, including lots and lots and lots of shots of Nightmare Armor guys with all their gear. Warning: it’s a pretty simple page, with 80-someodd thumbnails on it, so it might be rough on those with slower connections. Check out all the action! (Given the page name, I’m guessing there’ll be more to come.)

The whole ilovebees thing went a little nuts yesterday; folks reading all sorts of stuff into whatever they could find. (The main thread on OUR forum has over 350 responses at the moment, with dozens of smaller threads around it. Other forums are just as bad.) Stuntmutt broke from tradition to put out a special Saturday One One Se7en with some thoughts on the subject. (I’m certainly not ‘in the know’ about all this stuff… but I have to say, it doesn’t feel like a Bungie-driven puzzle. My best guess, at this point, is that this is a Microsoft marketing campaign, selling SOMETHING, but not necessarily Halo 2 specifically. One good suggestion has been something related to Xbox Live. We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose… but I really am a little nervous that if it turns out that Bungie is not involved (again – I’m not in the know; they MIGHT BE), folks who already felt burned by the Enkidu puzzle will lash out. Just something to keep in mind, as you feverishly look for sevens in the ilovebees.com source code…)

Standard web downloads are now available from a half-dozen mirrors for Cody Miller’s 153 mb, less-than-21 minute Library run for the Going Nowhere Fast contest. You can find them (along with BitTorrent links for the first 8 runs, and direct downloads for all OTHER levels prior to the Library) on the GNF Status page. If you haven’t seen it, this is a pretty impressive run; there are a LOT of ‘how did he not die?’ moments.

Halo50k3 kicks off today in Atlanta – more than 60 teams competing for their share of more than $10,000 in prize money. HaloTV will be filming the most exciting parts (though the streams will probably be coming from the mlgpro.com website). Good luck to everyone there! Update: Halo503 is live. New pics, live video, and updated news through the day. Check it out!

Eleven new stories posted in the Fan Fiction section, including new Enkidu Contest Collection entries. On the front of comments, and how to deal with them, Wado has suggested setting up a new forum for Fan Fiction writers here at HBO – plans are underway. In the meantime (or possibly just as a replacement), a couple of people have suggested The Halo Fiction Source Collection – if you want to write, swing by and see if this fits your needs!

This week the Bungie Weekly Update can be found on Bungie’s own Underground forum – improved graphics, squashed bugs, content completion, and icons… it’s all there. Go read.

This was finished a little while ago… but I’ve been dealing with the nightmare that is the HBO forum for a while, and couldn’t post. I’d love to be able to offer a massive QuickTime version of the trailer to match the obscene WMP9 copies Microsoft released today… but I can’t find any tools that will convert a movie that big. (Small consolation for mac users – the biggest version plays back at a data rate of 9000KB/sec, well above what a majority of PCs can handle; many folks who grabbed the enormous one are watching a pretty jerky video.) The best I could do was a 720×405 version that weighs in at 9.5 mb. You can grab it at the bottomless pit that is Mythica.org, or the twisted joint that is Boomerica. (Didja like how I subtly got a knee joke in there without actually saying knee? Cool, huh? DOH!)

Normally, I’d just tack this on to the other comic roundup… but there’s been a lot of news since then, and folks might not look down there. Sector 7 has posted another episode of Marines. You gotta hope they’re not really that dumb…

The really odd thing folks have noticed about the Halo 2 ad looks to be an easter egg or viral marketing ploy of some sort. At the very end of the video, the tiny URL underneath the Xbox logo changes, for a frame or two, from www.xbox.com to www.ilovebees.com. On the surface, this looks like a common website that’s been hacked in some way… but investigation shows that some very, very strange stuff is going on. View the source for some clues in the META tags at the top of the page… and view this forum thread for dozens of OTHER oddities.

As many people have figured out, super-high-resolution versions of the Halo 2 movie ad are now popping up all over the net. litereddonut points out a Fileplanet link, Adam Pavlacka (online content producer for GamePro.com) points out a pair of versions – a 1920×1080 (yes, again, the aspect ratio is off), 5.1 surround sound version (50 mb) and a smaller, 852×480, 5 mb version – at Gamepro, and there’ll be more links as the day goes on (I doubt i’ll keep up). All of these downloads are WMP9 files; that’s what Microsoft is distributing. I’m currently working on finding a way to convert these massive things to QuickTime.

Tocki writes to point out that Halo Orbit is hosting a hi-res version of the trailer (9.8 mb, 640×480 (yeah, that’s not the right aspect ratio), WMP9 format) that they found at MyXbox.at. QuickTime coming soon… Update: Here’s a 640×360 (aspect-corrected) QuickTime version (and a mirror), 5.8 mb. There MIGHT be higher-res versions coming later… if I can figure out how to work with the truly monstrous files Microsoft has sent me. Update 2: Halo Orbit has put up another mirror of the QuickTime version, for europeans who would rather have this.

In an interview at Inside Mac Games, Al Schilling, product manager at MacSoft, takes a break from talking about Close Combat to mention that they’ve done some testing on the latest build of Halo under MacOSX v10.3.4, and haven’t found it to be slower than performance under 10.3.3. (Some forums have seen reports from people who noticed massive framerate drops upon upgrading the operating system.) He did say, however, that he encourages anyone experiencing these problems to send their machine specs to support@macsoftgames.com, so that they can try and determine whether the problem lies in Halo’s code, or OSX’s. Thanks to JotaRota for pointing this out.

No, no, I was right… it’s Movie Day. Hehe – if you wondered why folks thinking about entering High Impact Halo’s The 3 Towers competition were happy to hear that Dark Helmet was a judge, and couldn’t compete… watch this video (15.3 mb, WMV format) showing how it’s done, with s7yle. (For you WMP-haters out there, I’ve ripped a QT version – 16.8 mb.) Thanks to Ash for pointing this puppy out. Update: Gah. Looks like Dark Helmet posted it himself on our forum, last night. Sorry, DH!

Maybe it’s not Movie Day at HBO, maybe it’s Comic Day. We’ve got a bunch to tell you about. Mr Smiley mentions a new webcomic, The Grunt Brigade, that he found a few days ago – but it’s now on a bigger pipe, so you might actually be able to see the strips this time. Then, this morning, he pointed out that Halo Babies Episode 49 is online – I’ve needed something like this several times during T&R. Right here at home, we’ve got Miniature Halo Episode 23 – in which Sarge goes a little wild with an FRG. The latest One One Se7en tells it like it is, with respect to the Bungie Weekly Updates (let’s see how Frankie does this evening!). And Halo: Resolution, which has been ramping up to this episode all week, bows out. It’s been a good run – 129 episodes, spaced over 10 months – but Fuzzy and DIMagic have decided to call it quits. Give this one a read, and say goodbye.