Well, not really… Halo, the GAME, was available on the 9th or 10th of November, 2001… but you didn’t have anything to play it on until the 15th. So for all intents and purposes, today is Halo’s fourth birthday – and what a run it’s been!

SketchFactor posted an update in last week’s Weekly Update (scroll down to the bottom, look for ‘EDIT’) explaining that because of community outcry, they’re NOT going to pull the Big Team Battle playlist from XBL; it will remain, as it is today. (The unranked 16-player playlist they were talking about will not go up right now.) Looks like Anton P. Nym was first.

Stuntmutt takes a look at the Halo script reviewed recently by Latino Review in today’s One One Se7en. This one was supposed to be worked out by c0ld vengeance… but he was otherwise occupied.

Thirteen new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today. None of them were written by c0ld vengeance… but they COULD have been. Go read.

Foo Mo Jive points out that Episode 27 of Podtacular is up – it discusses upcoming playlist changes, the next tournament, and more. (We also missed Episode 26, Customs and Call-ins, which was released on Saturday.You’d think c0ld vengeance would have mentioned it…)

Thanks to Narcogen, who did a nice job over at Rampancy.net of rounding up some reviews of the Mac and PC versions of Stubbs the Zombie, Wideload’s Halo-engined game. Gamespy grabbed the PC version, Inside Mac Games and MacWorld tackled the Mac version, and Gaming Horizon did a more general (probably Xbox-based) review. c0ld vengeance left us high and dry, review-wise.

Marty O’Donnell posted a pretty important note in the Marty Army 7th Column group – some folks have had trouble following this link, so I’m going to post the content here (with Marty’s permission):

If you buy an Xbox 360 – DO NOT play your old Halo or Halo 2 games without getting the update from Xbox Live. Without the update the audio will suck. Without the update you will think that your new Xbox 360 is broken. The funny thing is that you won’t even be able to play any other games without getting the update so the audio suckage won’t be apparent with any other “backwards compatible” games -except for Halo and Halo 2.

As audio director of Bungie Studios I want the fans to have the best audio experience possible. The emulator that is resident on the shipping hard drive and allows Halo and Halo 2 to be played was shipped before the audio emulation was finished. I’d hate for anyone to play Halo or Halo 2 and think that anyone at Bungie intended the audio to sound that way. Feel free to ask the folks at Xbox about this: Xbox 360 BC .

It’s clear that getting the current emulator won’t be very hard – even for folks without Xbox Live accounts – so there’s no good reason not to upgrade before playing. Thanks, Marty! (This message was NOT brought to you by c0ld vengeance – though it IS his birthday today.)

Cybrfrk spent the day at the Arizona State High School marching band competition yesterday (congrats to his son’s band, rated as Excellent at the event!). He was taking pictures with his digital camera when Sandra Day O’Connor High School, from Deer Valley, Arizona, took the field – they performed a program called ‘Halo 2’. He recorded it using the camera’s video mode – so the video is small, but the audio is fine; check out the songs they did! Eight and a half minutes, QuickTime (14.3 mb) or WMP9 (13.7 mb).

Jillybean points out that the Halo Story Page has been updated. Busy beavers over there…

There’s a pretty impressive montage over at Halo2Forum.com – ItWasLuck has released a bunch of full game vids (not montages, but start-to-finish games) with halo pros in them, now you can see some of the highlights of these and other matches. The guy is pretty impressive with a sniper rifle. 83 mb, WMP9 format.

Mintz sends word that Halo: Portable is now online. It’s all about providing Halo content for the Playstation Portable – if you have a PSP, this is a site you should visit! Check it out.

Juxtapose points out that if you’re a Bell Sympatico High Speed DSL subscriber (yeah, you have to live in Canada), you can get a free Xbox or Xbox360 game when you sign up for certain Xbox Live subscriptions. Details can be found on his Arbiter’s Judgement blog.

Wow. Spent yesterday at the Machinima Festival, where Rooster Teeth went home with 3 Mackies (Excellence in Machinima Writing for P.A.N.I.C.S., Best Editing (for Strangerhood), and Best Independent Machinima (for Red vs Blue Season 3), and Chris Burke went home with Best Machinima Series for This Spartan Life. (Since we provide Chris with his movie bandwidth, I suppose you can say that HBO has award-winning bandwidth!) There were lots of other awards; these were the only Halo-related ones. Saw lots of friends, old and new, saw lots of good machinima, got inspired by panel discussions that suggested where machinima might be going in the future. All in all, a fantastic day. Put me a little behind, though, in terms of HBO… I’ll do my best to catch up. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

Wired has an article about the Machinima Film Festival (where I’ll be headed in a few hours, actually) and machinima in general – there’s a brief mention of Red vs Blue, which gives us our Halo hook. (Other Halo projects will be up for awards today – they just weren’t mentioned in the article.) Thanks, bluedude345.

Last night, Chairleg Productions’ Waiting In Line passed the MPRRS – we’d already posted a note about it, and Chairleg said they weren’t looking for hosting… but passing the MPRRS means we’re happy hosting versions the original host isn’t offering – so for folks who’d rather watch QuickTime (and who don’t want to settle for the PSP-formatted version), you can now grab a full-size QuickTime (23 mb) of this video from us. British queue humor, applied to the Xbox360 situation – grab a copy! (And if you’re seeing this for the first time, our news post from Thursday contains a WMP9 link hosted by Chairleg.)

Halo: Blood Covenant is a 2D sidescroller we haven’t heard from since May – but last night Tucker let us know that they’ve released a short (38 second) vid showing some of the progress they’ve made. The last time they released a movie, it killed their servers – so we’re putting up copies of this for them – please download here. WMP is 4.1 mb, QuickTime is 4 mb. Looking pretty fun!

Over at Team3D.net, F13ND sat down with Hotshy to discuss this week’s practice sessions – plenty of interesting stuff for folks who want a glimpse into the pro circuit. Go read!

Bungie’s Weekly Update was posted last night – there’s quite a bit of info about some playlist changes coming in the not-too-distant future, there are answers to basic questions about interoperability between the Xbox and the Xbo360 for games like Halo, and info about how Halo and the new higher-res modes available on the 360 will work, and some weird stuff about Marty in Korea. (Pete’s not as old as Frankie makes him out to be, either.) Go read! Update: Hehe – looks like I missed an entertaining thread about this last night. To TheDaringDuke – don’t worry, Frankie and Shishka are jerks. Especially Frankie.

Stuntmutt found some news about a series of CI-boys figures based on Xbox game characters. He hunted around until he found this – are those cute, or what?

JoeIce dropped by our forum yesterday with a pelican model he’d adapted from a Warhammer 40K piece. Today, he came back – with another dozen images, showing off the Pelican, a Master Chief, and an MC on a Ghost. That Ghost ROCKS!