I think it’s gonna be Movie Day here at HBO. There are quite a number of new films, available at other websites, ready for your downloading pleasure. RaiL sends word of a video he’s made of his clan (Clan IP) showing off their Blood Gulch Multiplayer skillz – you can find a link to the 15.2 mb .mp4 on FileFront. beytah writes to point out Invisible People Suck, a 54.7 mb, 6:56-long QuickTime vid showing gameplay and situations, characterized by the quick-cut style made popular by music videos. And That Weasel lets us know that the next episode of Grunts are People Too!!! (Episode 7 – Mission Im-Chuck-Able) is now up, in both WMP9 and QuickTime6 formats, at the GaPT website, along with three MP3s of Mother’s Tooth’s original music (check the Episodes 6 and 7 pages for download links). There’s more coming in a bit – but this should hold you for now, no?

One of the most hotly-anticipated Halo Custom Edition maps to date, New Mombasa from Mrs Doublefire and crew, is now available for download. It’s 9.6 mb of HaloCE goodness, and there are currently 8 EP Gamers servers running this map. (In fact, there are over 30 different servers hosting this map already, with two of them, at this hour, being full – a heartening situation.) Links for downloads, and some direct server IPs, can be found in this Gearbox Forum post from Mrs Doublefire. If you’ve held off downloading Halo CE, or if you’ve stayed away from the scene for a bit… now might be a good time to check out what’s going on. (For those who’ve kept up on development of this map; this is New Mombasa Classic – it uses standard HaloPC weapons and vehicles. There is a version that will be integrated tightly with NiTrOuSoXiDe’s Halo 2 mod, to provide an experience something like what was seen in the E3 2003 trailer… but this isn’t that. It’s stuff you’re used to, in a gorgeous new setting. Go play.) Thanks to everyone who wrote – it looks like DHalo was first (though there were three within 30 seconds of him – yes, this one was HIGHLY anticipated 🙂 ).

The next level in the Going Nowhere Fast competition, Two Betrayals, is now available for download via BitTorrent. Taylor Jones spends a relatively quick 25 minutes whipping through this level – his handling of a rocket launcher is a joy to watch. He gets a vehicle through the broken door in an amazingly no-fuss manner… but my favorite moment comes at around 22:20 – you get a quick glimpse of how tough Legendary can really be. My vote for best death in a run, period. This puppy is is 182 mb – open that BitTorrent client and grab it!

][-][awaiian pig whipped up another 5 Red vs Blue ‘Set Pieces’, after the great response he got to his first set. These are bigger, by request. Update: The variants on Megabattles just keep coming. Valence tries out an animated one.

Slothboy posts his non-winning pics in the Mountain Dew contest (and a link to a thread on Bungie.net that has pics of the winning entries)… all I can say is, these guys drank a LOT of Dew.

Dan Chosich reminds everyone that today is the last day folks are able to submit content to the Fan Art section of the Making of Halo DVD. If you have content you want the team to consider, send it today or you’re out of the running!

ShotgunGoBOOM found a Flash video called ‘Halo Delight‘ on Flashplayer.com. MC gets down to the 80’s hiphop sounds of the Sugar Hill Gang. Surreal.

Update on yesterday’s elite skin, from Xavier – he’s found a way to make ALL Spec-Ops Elites black (some were coming out with a blue layer over the skin); the downside is that it changes the blue of the regular Blue Elite. Information and the new ppf can be found on the Halo: Modding Evolved forum (and I’ve added a local copy of the ‘fixed’ ppf here).

Dolbex writes to point out that all 61 teams registered for this weekend’s Halo50k3 event in Atlanta are listed up on the MLGPro.com website. If you aren’t sure if your buddies are going, check this out!

I think all of us who’ve suffered over bad internet connections can sympathize with Calvin and Halo today… and I’d like to take this chance to mention that Warbow has chosen to take the rest of the summer off; there won’t be any more Warbow-generated Calvin and Halo strips before fall. (It’s unclear whether Blackstar will continue posting one per week, on Thursdays, or whether he’ll double his output to two per week, to keep up the current schedule, or whether he, too, will take a break, giving Calvin himself a rest for a couple of months. More when we know it.)

A tad later than usual – but never fear, we get to stuff eventually. The Direct Download links for the sixth Going Nowhere Fast video (343 Guilty Spark) are now posted on the Status page. If you aren’t one of the 900 or so BitTorrent downloaders, go grab a copy of this 49.4 mb run via http!

The Comments function for the Fan Fiction section has been turned off for the time being. Shame how the actions of a few can ruin it for the many. (Before anyone who actually USES that section goes ballistic on the individual who caused most of the trouble, be aware that IGNORING THE SITUATION would have made it stop a lot sooner (and likely wouldn’t have gotten someone spoofing ME, which is what set this off).) Stories will still be posted, you just won’t be able to comment on them until someone suggests a better way of maintenance.

Captain Spark took a couple of very nice pics of the Xavier/Tina Leyk Elite skin on AotCR today – check ’em out!

Wow – that’s unique. ][-][awaiian pig has taken the Megabattle screenshot technique in a new direction – he’s reproduced ‘set pieces’ from Red vs Blue episodes. Don’t think I ever would have thought of that one… (Attention to detail is amazing.)

So the big news of the morning is that Microsoft has made a small version of the Halo ad currently showing in Loews theatres available to the public. The astoundingly frustrating part of this is that the page is viewable ONLY on a PC – Macs can’t even see the teaser. This seems unreasonable, for content that was designed to be advertising in the first place. Even on a PC, the video is only available in a streaming format – and only, in fact, on Internet Explorer. Halo Orbit has made a downloadable version of this footage available – but it’s in asf format, and it’s a tad funky (the time data is wrong; Windows Media Player thinks it’s about 15 seconds shorter than it really is… it’ll play the whole thing, but the progress bar gets pinned at the end for the last third of the movie), and this screws up the program I’d normally use to convert this to a mac-friendly format. (It’s also not readable as is in the MacOSX version of WMP9.) Because of all this, I grabbed a local copy myself, from the MSN page; you can find it (2.1 mb, QuickTime format) on files.bungie.org. Here’s hoping a larger version, more cross-platform-compatible, will be released from on high.

WOW. Xavier, a newcomer to HBO, pointed out a new skin he created, based on some fantastic Tina Leyk artwork, posted at HaloMC.com. (There was some trouble earlier getting to that forum, so if you can’t see his post, he started from this picture, and ended up with this guy (a second pic is here). A local copy of the ppf is available here (145k). To apply this, grab a copy of Extion’s HHHT application (a local copy is here, 532k) and apply this ppf to your copy of bitmaps.map (in the MAPS folder). From here on out, any instance of a Spec-Ops Elite (they occur naturally on Two Betrayals, Keyes, and the Maw, and can be injected into any OTHER level) will now have this skin. I took a couple of pics (one | two) after the cafeteria on the Maw – they’re not great, but it was a way to see how easy it was to get this skin into the game. I gotta say… this rocks. All around.

Looks like the Bravo network is picking up One One Se7en next season.

Halo: Resolution posts the second half of its farewell teaser… the marines get a language lesson from a Cov Elite.

TotalVideoGames.com has a story today that Microsoft Game Studios has just confirmed that the Limited Edition version of Halo 2 WILL be sold in Europe. Given that Bungie confirmed this very fact 2 months ago, I’m struck by the alacrity of the Microsoft marketing juggernaut…