This week’s Halo Humpday Challenge pitted the Bungie guys against the Cayote Cavegirls – they lost 2 out of 3 (both teams agreed to call the third game a draw). Ouch! Good writeup, though. Frankie continues to hog credit (though at least he’s getting creative with his FIRST subject lines).

Podtacular has posted its weekly Tips show – this episode focuses on Beaver Creek. Go listen.

char pointed out an article over at Gamepro that looks at things that are wrong with First Person Shooters, in general; Halo is held up as an example of how NOT to get it wrong. Go read!

LegendaryMark wrote an article examining why so many players stick with Halo 2, even though the universe of multiplayer games continues to expand. Swing by halowiki.net to read it!

Over at Halo Babies, some of the DOA girls take shots at poor Spartan 458… meanies. Thanks, mrsmiley.

F13ND has posted the next installment of his ‘Noobs Guide’ over at Team3D – this one gives some tips on flanking, with the help of Saiyan. If you didn’t get this the first time around, this guide is NOT for noobs – it’s for anyone looking to improve their gameplay, by focusing on advanced strategy tips. (In fact… it can’t even be USED by noobs, since the descriptions and techniques that are suggested tend to be things that beginners would have no clue about.) That said – these are great reads. Go check this one out.

Looks like you can buy all the Series 4 action figures directly from the Bungie Store. (You can buy them from a lot of places – but the profit from the Bungie store goes towards the World Domination effort.) Thanks, LegendaryMark.

The South Dakota State University Collegian has an article on why Halo 2 might be losing you dates. Duh. (Of course, this doesn’t apply if your girlfriend plays Halo…)

Four new movies at Halo2Forum today – The Last Man Standing (12.7 mb) is a Halo 1 story summed up by its title, and there’s a montage trailer from Domain Productions (21 mb), a demo of a mod that turns Banshees in to X-Wing fighters (28.3 mb), and a montage/gameplay vid from OscarMayerNinja (73 mb), where games are broken into ‘missions’; there’s less cutting, and more fast-forwarding. All vids except the domain productions vid are in WMP9 format – that one is .AVI.

Normally, there’s enough content over the course of a week that the Tied The Leader Halo blog gets a single wrapup mention. We got mail from 3Suns, though, suggesting that a new article, ‘Open Letter to the Timothy‘, deserved a mention of its own. Upon reading, I’d agree. XerxdeeJ points out that not every young player deserves to be lumped in with the screaming ‘Timothys’ made famous by 2old2play – sometimes, having young ‘uns on your (older) team can be a good thing. Go read.

The current episode of Exterminatus Now (a webcomic) contains some game-related wallpapers in the text writeup (scroll down to the bottom) – the Lothar Hex paper is Halo-related. (Pretty cool, too.) Thanks to Hanchen Lu for the heads-up (we heard from Lothar Hex, as well, but he was about 6 hours behind).

Narcogen, of Rampancy.net, was interviewed by Taso, of the High Impact Halo forums, and the result can be found in that same place. Where DID this guy come from, and what does he do now? Go read to find out. Thanks, Ducain.

Today’s One One Se7en takes a different look at Dead or Alive 4… no pining for a curvaceous Spartan this time.

Ash pointed out a pretty fun vid that got front-paged over at High Impact Halo; a live marine, launched up to the double-bridge on AotCR. It got the thumbs-up from Ducain, as well. It tickles my funnybone that today, less than two weeks from the fourth anniversary of the release of Halo, people are STILL finding new things to do with the original game. You can grab two different WMP9 vids in the forum thread that the HIH newspost will get you to, a short one showing just the successful jump and a longer one showing some pretty entertaining buildup – we’re gonna offer you a QuickTime version of the longer one, as well, because… well, because we’re like that. Nice work, SneakyPete!

Podtacular episode 21 is up – this one focuses on clans and community updates. 10 mb, half an hour long. Go listen!

Designation Se7en is a webcomic – that’s devoted its 343rd episode to a Halo funni. Thanks, Coolhand2.

Blow Me Away, the charity auction to benefit hurricane victims, continues to gather eyeballs and bids (to date, the auctions have over 150,000 pageviews and are hovering right around $9000, with four days to go), but if you’re in Auckland, New Zealand, there’s an auction tonight for a different cause. At the Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre, they’re having their annual fundraising gala tonight… and part of the festivities include a charity auction, which includes, among other cool items, a Peter Jackson-autographed Xbox with Halo 2. You can read the details at Scoop.

Joe Staten has written the third installment of his Great Hollywood Journey (the first piece was mentioned here, and the second here) – he’s just returned from touring WETA’s studios in New Zealand, and he sounds positively giddy. Go read. Then yell at Frankie for always hogging the credit.

Stephen Loftus used Guerilla (part of the Halo Editing Kit released for use with HaloCE) to overhaul some of the information in his Uniforms on the Pillar of Autumn article. Go check out what’s there now!

Whoa. Now THERE’S a deal. Australian Halo’ers can buy a Halo 2 Xbox Live Kit – for $99.99 (about $75 US) you get the Halo 2 Limited Edition (pretty hard to find these days!), plus 12 months of Xbox Live and a communicator. Sounds like a great deal! Thanks, AussieXbox.