Voting is now closed for the 7 on the Seventh Soundtrack contest; I’d post results, but I need to leave for a bit. I’ll put something up later this afternoon, I hope. Although a number of the finalists had more than one entry in the final 49, the top 7 vote-getters were all from unique submitters, so no fudging will be needed! More to come…

Stuntmutt looks at the post-game carnage report in today’s One One Se7en.

We got email from Michael Yates, over at Machinima.com – he wanted to point out a fully-devoted Halo channel with over 150 machinimas. They also have great tutorials and plenty of pros to answer questions, if you’re looking for help in making your own. Check ’em out!

This Spartan Life is now iPod-friendly – swing by their website for iPod-compatible downloadable versions of all their episodes. w00t!

Eleven new dialogue snippets got posted by Captain Spark today; you can grab the zipfile from his website, or you can browse them in our Dialogue Databank. Good stuff!

Allmusic has put up a page for the Halo 2 Soundtrack Volume 2 – no review yet, but there are easily downloadable track snippets. Thanks, Funkmon.

Wow. There’s so much new content on the Halo-related blog Dead Man’s Hand that I can’t even list all the new articles, much less summarize them. The most recent item is an interview with Stuntmutt that’s definitely worth a read – but there’s plenty of other stuff; I liked the Legos to Halos rant, for example. Check it all out – and thanks to Dweezle86 for dropping by our forum to let us know it was there.

Interesting juxtaposition of articles; at the same time that Gamasutra posted an earnings report on Microsoft, in which it reported that Microsoft officials admit that even today, at the end of their lifecycle, “…the first generation Xbox consoles continue to have negative margins”, IGN put up a piece discussing ‘The Xbox Effect‘, which talked about how the Xbox was a success, primarily because of… well, Halo. I guess you don’t have to make money to be successful…

A quick note – if you haven’t yet voted for your favorite images in the 7 on the 7th Halo 2 Soundtrack contest, go do it now; I’m going to close voting late tonight or early tomorrow. There are some funny pics in there – help their creators to win a free signed Halo 2 Soundtrack!

Kenneth Wan points out a fundraiser tournament over at 2Old2Play; they’re raising money to send a team to MLG Dallas next month. Swing by and read the details – and sign up!

This isn’t Halo news, but it’s the longest ‘groaner’ thread I’ve seen in a while. It’s like the whole forum is channeling Stuntmutt or something. Mothergoat pointed out that the Nintendo Revolution has gotten it’s REAL name (Revolution was a working title)… and the forum community sort of… tore it a new one. Ouch. Maybe Nintendo should reconsider.

We usually leave the Halo tricking to High Impact Halo these days – but there’s a cool vid over there that’s worth pointing out. A bunch of guys got underneath the air vents on Foundation – insanity. The video is encoded using WMP9 Professional audio, which will give Mac users a headache… so we’re providing a QuickTime version (32.6 mb). If you CAN watch the WMP9, though, you should, because the quality is higher. Thanks, Ducain.

Monthly gaming parties at a hotel in downtown Toronto… fun stuff. 🙂

No pictures yet, but Stephen Loftus found mention of the upcoming Series 9 Halo action figures – details are in this forum post. Battle-damaged Ghost… mmm.

Ewen dropped us a note about a tabletop RPG adaptation of Halo he’s working on called “Halo: The Covenant War.” You can find some sample artwork for the miniatures in this blog post. Great start!

Roger Wilco noticed a great article at Gamasutra, discussing storytelling and game design (and how they’re inter-related). Halo 2 is held up as a ‘mixed success’ – some of the storytelling is done in-game, but some of it is done via ‘agency-violating cutscenes’. Go read!

The Halo2Forum montage contest deadline is fast approaching, and a goodly number of montages are coming in at the wire. Today ArKiVe’s 3rd Montage was released – some serious sniping action. Swing by and grab a copy! (94 mb, WMP9 format.)

AJay created some Master Chief contact boxes to use on MySpace profiles (if you have one, you probably know what a contact box is, if you don’t, don’t worry about it) – check this link to grab one (and the code needed to use it). If you want to see one in use, check his MySpace profile.

Today’s One One Se7en refers to a forum thread that blew up last week; it started with a simple question, and ended with some gaming philosophy. (Trust Stuntmutt to boil it down to a bad joke.)

Wow… only four hundred of you voted for the entrants to the 7 on the 7th Soundtrack contest yesterday… c’mon! We need more than that! Swing by, check out the pics, let us know your favorites! Thanks.