SteelGaribaldi noticed that Halo showed up in today’s Foxtrot. Heh.

Gah – and even one MORE! (Last one of the night – I promise. I have some green beer to drink!) enigMa sent a link to this YouTube vid – it’s a Halo dream animation he made for class. Pretty nice work!

And in case you’re not movied-out, you can swing by Halo2Forum, and grab a copy of shook on3’s montage. Really, REALLY heavy on the effects… but the sniping’s quite good, and there are a couple of very cool clips which use great machinima techniques in a pretty unique way, as far as montages go. 103 mb, WMP9 format. (5:33 long.) First heads-up came from shoeler, but I don’t generally post H2F links unless they come from Z (which this one did, eventually). Update: There’s a QuickTime version here (61.3 mb) for anyone who needs it.

I was totally wrong when I said the movie night was ending; there are more. Dennis Powers pointed out a St. Pattys Day tribute from EchoZuluFilms that I didn’t get to in time… go grab a copy now. 16.6 mb in WMP9 format, 18.3 mb in QuickTime format.

The Red vs Blue crew has been busy – Episode 76, ‘Two for One’, went up for sponsors a few hours ago. (That means freeloaders can grab a copy on Sunday, probably.) Sarge proves he’s not the pointiest chevron on the sleeve, Tucker is… well, I can’t tell you, and Caboose is sad. Very, very sad. Eight and a half minutes of RvB goodness round out this Friday movie night here at HBO! Thanks to Psychophan7 for the heads-up.

Halzred submitted a montage trailer he’d created for Frantic to the MPRRS – and the reviewers liked it. You can grab a copy in WMP9 format (21.5 mb) or QuickTime format (23.8 mb)… the final montage should be pretty cool! (Side note: hisTALLness, check your email, wouldja? I’ve now sent three emails to you about YOUR montage, with no response… and you clearly want it posted.)

Wow. Bungie’s Weekly Update is certainly worth reading this week… they’ve announced what looks to be a pretty darned spectacular product, coming this summer… a Halo Graphic Novel, put together by some amazing names. Go read it; I can’t do it justice with a news post. (It’s at B.net, of course, but it’s also local, in the BWU Archive.) If you’re wondering about that link name… check this forum post from earlier this afternoon. Moral of the story – Frankie can be petty, don’t cross him.

Elnea (who’s known around here for her artwork, and around Red vs Blue for her funny journals) and OboeCrazy (who’s not known around here at all, but is pretty visible at RvB) put together a trailer for an upcoming machinima that does what hasn’t been done yet, that I know of – it incorporates footage from Halo, the Sims, and World of Warcraft (and in fact integrates them, so a Sims character is talking to a Pelican pilot who’s flying over a WoW landscape, for example); this is pretty cool stuff. You can grab a copy in a whole bunch of different flavors:

• MedRes – 540×360: QT (28.7 mb) | DivX (20.6 mb) | WMP9 (30.9 mb)
• LowRes – 360×240: QT (11.6 mb) | DivX (11.2 mb) | WMP9 (11.6 mb)

Actually, the large WMP9 is 720×480… but I was too lazy to cut it down. (The 540 versions actually look better, in my opinion.) Go grab one… and then let them know what you think of the idea!

Dennis Powers points out that you can now play all the Halo PC campaign levels in HaloCE; all you need to do is download one of the custom UI files that supports the ‘Campaign’ menu function (like this one, or this one, or this one), and then grab the Single Player levels off this page, and you’re good to go! (He warns that the campaign level conversions have not undergone strict quality control, so while each one has been played through successfully, you should use at your own risk.)

Okay – I’ve STARTED to get through some of the backlogged dialogue snippets. Real work calls, so I need to stop here… but be aware that there are still almost 350 snippets in the queue from Hellhawk. In the meantime, check out batches from Bloodpuppy (29 snippets) and RibsMaster (18 snippets). There are some funny ones in there!

Stuntmutt gets frisky in today’s One One Se7en. Luckily, Cortana’s there to cool him off.

Nineteen new pieces in the Fan Fiction section today – check ’em out!

A bunch of new dialogue snippets from Captain Spark got posted today – you can grab them off his site, or browse them in the Dialogue Databank. And yes, there are still a bunch of submitted clips in the queue; I’m really sorry about that. Today, if all goes well…

Bungie recently hired a new mission designer – and Frankie took some time out to interview him. What it’s like to be a mission designer, where he came from, what you need to be wearing in order not to get your ideas rejected. That sort of thing. I’d love to tell you someone else was first… but I can’t.

Well, I haven’t gotten EXPLICIT approval, but he’s linked to it from his Red vs Blue profile… so I guess he’s okay with it. If you visit Red vs Blue for anything other than the videos themselves (that is – if you avail yourself of the community tools provided by the website), you’ve almost certainly run across Luke McKay, a regular there who creates a lot of very cool avatars and images for people. I asked him about the possiblity of consolidating his Halo-related work in one place… and he said sure… so swing by his gallery page here at HBO, and check out some of his work! There are caricatures of RvB characters, comics, and random Halo-related stuff. Nice!

Swing by This Spartan Life for Episode 3, Module 2: Travelogue. It’s a really quick overview of some glitches accessible in Halo 2 levels. If you’re a regular at High Impact Halo, you won’t see anything new – but the composition is quite nice. There’s another new ep coming soon, as well!

Rockslider continues his Halo Level 2 expansions with Banshee Battle Engineering, allowing you to pick the spots for your battles. Check out his forum post, and follow it to his website!

This has been asked several times and always dismissed since we have seen that publicly viewed ranking systems can be bad things. However, as a movie “watcher” and “submitter” you may find it interesting in what your fellow community members find to be the top ranked movies. This shows the percentage that each passed movie achieved with a link to the associated news post.

This showed up in our forum a couple of days ago, and was quickly debunked by Frankie… but we’re getting plenty of mail right now, so it’s probably time for a front page post. The April issue (April? That month should send up flags) of Game Informer contains a story about Bungie’s next game – or so it seems. Over at Xbox.com, someone went to the trouble of transcribing the entire article, and the website Xboxic reposted it. Sounds really cool… except that it ain’t real. April Fools!