Heh – did you know Geoffrey Chaucer had a blog? And that he played Halo? Me either. Thanks, Anton P. Nym.(Louis Wu 21:59:52 UTC)

watchwood sent word that Halo Wars Heaven has opened – it’s a Halo Wars fansite. (The first?) Check it out – they’re already running a fan-fiction contest. Update: Ducain reminded me of Halo Wars Central, which we mentioned back in early October. Where’s that WD-40 for my steel trap? (It seems that Halo Wars Central isn’t online at the moment – a fansite started and abandoned well over a year before the game’s released? Ouch.)(Louis Wu 21:57:39 UTC)

Wow. Remember last week, when the World Series of Video Games announced that they’d made a deal with CBS Sports to broadcast Halo 2 gaming on the network? Yeah, well… the WSVG finals are this weekend, and four top MLG teams were supposed to be competing. All sorts of conditions had already been agreed to (they will be wearing MLG shirts during the tourney, and their gamertags will all be prefaced with ‘MLG’)… but things got ugly when the WSVG asked the players to sign a release allowing footage of them playing to be broadcast at a later date. (Read GotFrag’s take, or Amped’s take.) MLG told them not to do it, and for a little while, it looked like the MLG players might be locked out of the tournament. The GotFrag article has an update that suggests the two sides have come to an agreement… but it’s interesting to read the player reactions in the Amped article; many of the mid-level players feel betrayed by MLG for daring to make money in a different venue, while the top players seem to think it’s WSVG that’s pulling something shifty. We’ll see how it actually plays out, later today…(Louis Wu 12:06:14 UTC)

Red vs Blue Episode 85, ‘Yellow Fever‘, has been released for sponsors (free versions should be up by Sunday) – Grif tries to do the right thing with his sister, but he might have misjudged a little. Thanks to LX925 for the heads-up (and for the oh-so-true observation in that forum post).(Louis Wu 03:52:59 UTC)

Rob Oplawar stopped by to point out a new teaser trailer for his ambitious project Bridge CE (a working title only). Swing by and grab a copy – looks pretty cool!(Louis Wu 03:22:31 UTC)

You haven’t heard a lot from PraetoriaGuard in recent months (well, until a week or two ago) – but that’s not because they’ve been slacking. They haven’t been. They’ve put together a slick little promo vid to ramp up towards 2007 – you can grab it off their servers in QuickTime format (6.1 mb) or WMP9 format (1.8 mb). There’s a lot coming – hold on to your hats!(Louis Wu 03:18:16 UTC)

Up on Bungie.net, you’ll find the latest Bungie Weekly Update – it’s got an interview with Ed Ulbrich, president of Digital Domain’s commercial division, who answers some questions about the Halo 3 ad, and another with Stephen Dewey, the Sound Designer and founder of Machine Head, who did the sound design for the ad. And oh, yeah, a spooky Mister Chief. (Is that George Clooney in the visor reflection?) You can, as usual, find a searchable version of this update in our Weekly Update Archive.(Louis Wu 02:57:28 UTC)

There are lots of questions people still have about the Halo 3 commercial… but here’s an answer, hard and solid, directly from Frank O’Connor at Bungie. With respect to the children shown at the start of the film:

“Those kids are real actors. Not CG or MoCap. Even the grass is real in that shot.”

More of your questions will be answered soon – Bungie’s got an interview with Digital Domain that will go live before you’re as grey as I am. (Louis Wu 19:51:38 UTC)

This morning, we got word from Shaun Escayg, who was involved in an animation project over at CGSociety.org. The short video he pointed us to (5 seconds, about 6 mb) was fantastic – but I didn’t want them to suffer from a bandwidth hit if we front-paged this, so we’re making the video available here (with Shaun’s permission, of course). Feel free to toss your two cents into that thread at CGS… but grab the video from us. (It’s available in its original H.264-encoded QuickTime (5.5 mb), as well as a Sorenson3-encoded QuickTime (3.9 mb) and a WMP9 version (5.7 mb).) It’s not long, and it has no sound – but the grunts are GORGEOUS. Model was done by Ben Falcone, animation by Shaun Escayg, and rigging by Mikkel Grosland (with Anna Terekhova supplying the Needler model). Amazing work. Grab a copy!(Louis Wu 19:31:37 UTC)

When studio funding for the Halo movie pulled out a couple of months ago, some people speculated that Microsoft wouldn’t have any trouble funding the development themselves. In an interview recently, Robbie Bach said that this would not happen – Microsoft was not getting into the movie-making business. Today’s One One Se7en suggests a reason why.(Louis Wu 19:25:02 UTC)

Camboy45, a member of the Red vs Blue community, sent along a shot of his new Halo tattoo. Nice work!(Louis Wu 18:48:58 UTC)

Fifteen new pieces for you in today’s Fan Fiction update – well, not quite, because someone thought that because they’d mislabeled a series name, they should RESUBMIT the series, in its entirety… but you get the idea. (In the future, please don’t do this.)(Louis Wu 18:04:25 UTC)

Mark MacDonald and Luke Smith (of GameVideos.com/1Up.com/Electronic Games Magazine) have their own deconstruction of the Halo 3 commercial; what’s different about theirs (aside from the fact that these guys get paid for this sort of thing) is that it’s in video format. They walk through the commercial, conversing about all the juicy tidbits as they go. This is available at GameVideos.com – it’s 13 minutes long, and you can either watch it in streaming format on their site, or download hi-res versions (more than 200 MB) to your computer to watch at your leisure. (Louis Wu 07:59:31 UTC)

Normally, The Halo Humpday Challenge is a series of three games between Bungie and a community team. Normally, Bungie gets their collective rears handed to them in a majority of those games. This week was no exception, really; Bungie had a team of two (because everyone else was either too busy or too stupid), and PraetoriaGuard simply cycled in 3 pairs of the six people they brought to the party. Two of the games were predictable; Bungie’s team of Frankie and Lars went down HARD. The third… the third was so unusual that this week’s Halo Humpday Challenge focuses ONLY on that game. In this game, Frankie (FRANKIE fergoshsakes) pummeled clan leader LordGideon and faithful sidekick SteelValor so mercilessly, so thoroughly that his score was more than double their best score, and his deaths were half of their least-killed player. His medal count equalled their TEAM’S medal count, and the number of headshots he scored was greater than the sum of all players on the PG team. To put it simply… he kicked ass and took names… and then wrote those names on a chalkboard and fed the chalkboard to a bear. And then he sicced that bear on Steven Colbert. (Wait, I might have gotten that part wrong.) LordGideon, we hear, has not come out of his room yet. (The game was played almost 36 hours ago.)(Louis Wu 07:19:02 UTC)

Mitchell Moore sent word of Outside the Box, whose current storyline is Halo-related. And yeah, I think I’d respond like the second girl…(Louis Wu 22:38:32 UTC)

Jordan117 did some creative writing. Heh.(Louis Wu 21:13:51 UTC)

A couple of weeks ago, Pinkuh finished a new piece of art that had been commissioned for an upcoming contest (a signed, framed print of this piece will be available to be won) – I hadn’t posted it in her gallery because I thought it was supposed to be exclusive to the contest. Today, I was corrected – the print will be exclusive – but the digital version is available for all to enjoy. So Enjoy!(Louis Wu 21:00:12 UTC)