Okay, so the DOA4 rumor we mentioned recently is true – it’s the new top story at Bungie.net. I’m a little disturbed by the jiggly bits in the image in that story… but then, Frankie’s never been totally couth. There’s still plenty under wraps, but the bottom line is, SOMETHING from the Halo universe will show up in the next DOA game. More as we know about it.

Today’s One One Se7en looks once again at Stuntmutt’s favorite weapon… and its effects.

Must have been a little while since the last update – there are 17 new pieces in the Fan Fiction section today. Go read!

Game Informer has posted an article that claims that a character from Halo will be appearing in the upcoming Dead or Alive 4, and that it won’t be the Master Chief (or a Warthog). At this point, this is in the Wild Rumors category, but if more info surfaces, we’ll let you know. Looks like GhaleonEB was first out of the gate with this one.

The Multiplayer Map Pack is STILL being reviewed – Gaming Excellence posted a thumbs-up yesterday, giving the release a 9.1 out of 10. The extras got mentioned, but didn’t seem to contribute to their scoring of the product at all. (This makes me sad, because things like the interview with the dev team are pretty darn cool.)

PodTactacular Episode 11 has been released – this one’s 30 mb, an hour and a half long, with tips on Backwash and the Battle Rifle (among other subjects). Go listen! Thanks, Spelchek.

Chris ‘CPU64’ Bryan dropped off a new render using new technique (final gathering, which calculates global illumination from rays cast from the object’s pixels rather than from a light source) – the end result is pretty slick!

There are a number of direct download mirrors popping up for the Metal Gear Solid movie we released yesterday (though with reported download speeds in excess of 1 mbps, you might be better off with the BitTorrent links for now) – That Weasel has put up mirrors of both versions, and Roland dropped off a mirror for the WMP9 version. Given that these are out there, we’ll add our own – here’s one for the WMP9, another for the QuickTime. (For those who wonder, yes, we really do like the BitTorrent bandwidth savings; in the 18 hours since this video was released, something over 50 GB of it has been served to the public; HBO accounted for only 30 GB of that. If we reduced our output by 20GB every 18 hours, we’d save almost a terabyte every month. Not too shabby!)

That Weasel points out that although the Grand Finale Awards Ceremony for Rockets on Prisoner is still in production, a ‘pre-release segment of the ceremony’ has been released. Comes in four flavors, two sizes each for WMP9 and QuickTime. Download it, and see who won the Award for Best Trailer!

The next step in montages – now we have trailers for upcoming montages at the beginning. I’m just waiting for the animated popcorn and candy clip… over at Halo2Forum.com, you can download UnReal’s first montage (lots of sniping, lots of sticking), and it comes with a trailer for Halzred’s Montage 3 tacked onto the front. The whole thing weighs in at 94 mb, WMP9 format. While you’re there, you can grab a copy of MADDOG’s Montage Trailer, a mix of Halo and Halo 2 footage, weighing in at just under 38 mb (WMP9 format). Thanks, Z.

Another machinima project is recruiting – go visit The Ark if you’re interested in helping out. They’ve got a script for episode one posted, if you want to see what you’d be getting into.

Wow. Jamie98s has put up a bunch of movies over the last four months – but this one might be my favorite. It’s called Metal Gear Solid, and it’s (as might be expected) a story starring Solid Snake, from the MGS series. Jamie’s plot description: “Solid Snake is deployed to a secret miltary base to disarm a nuclear warhead and destroy a top secret project known as Metal Gear.” Audio is from MGS, video is all Halo (with a few special effects thrown in). Fantastic job – simply fantastic. It’s rather large (107 mb in WMP9 format, 100 mb in QuickTime format), because it’s rather long (32 and a half minutes), so we’re starting it off as a BitTorrent download. You can grab the WMP9 torrent or the QT one – your choice. We’re also providing quite a bit of seed bandwidth (2000 kB/sec per torrent), so downloads should be speedy, and should STAY speedy if early downloaders leave BitTorrent open after they’ve gotten a copy. In a day or two, we’ll provide direct download links, as well, for folks who can’t handle BT. Enjoy it – I sure did.

Elnea has been sketching up a storm since the data loss suffered by Red vs Blue a couple of days ago – there are two new sketches (one is an early version of a piece of artwork already in the collection, the other is crash-related)… and while you’re there, there’s couple of new avatars at the end of the Avatar section. Nice stuff!

Sith went through the current playlists, and broke out the weightings for maps and gametypes on each one. Interesting data!

Gamespot has put up a new article on the Best Launch Titles of all time – and Halo makes the list (at number 5). They had really nice things to say about the game:

With Halo, [Bungie] accomplished the rarest of feats: It broke through to a new audience in the biggest way imaginable and set an extremely high standard for subsequent Xbox games. Halo’s influence is undeniable. The game might have seemed derivative at first glance, but its numerous subtle innovations have been borrowed by countless other games since.

I’d agree with that… thanks, prometheus.

So last night, Ducain pointed out a post he’d made over at High Impact Halo, giving props to WLT, a trickster who managed to put not one, but TWO hogs on top of one of the Blue Beam towers in the level Halo… along with himself. It’s one of those totally useless, totally amazing tricks that just makes you want to giggle. We’re hosting copies of the film, to save on WLT’s bandwidth – you can grab the vid in its original WMP9 format (18.9 mb) or a re-encoded QuickTime (19.3 mb). Halo is nearly 4 years old. Halo 2 is almost a year old. And there are STILL people spending inordinate amounts of time setting up, and executing, new demonstrations of Halo physics fun.

Pinkuh’s new comic, Lost the Lead, has a promo comic up in our forum now. (The full site is still waiting for the coding to be finished.) Go read!

A couple of new pieces over at MLGPro.com – there’s an article on Storm Ventures, an up-and-coming team with promise, and a gallery full of pics from MLG Seattle. Good stuff! Thanks, 3Suns.

Gamespot says the rumor that Halo 3 will be shown to the public at X05 in Amsterdam next week is false. (Whoa, what a surprise.) I suppose I’m glad they came to that conclusion – but I’m really only posting this so folks can stop telling us they said this. It ain’t announced until it’s announced by Bungie – and trust me, the day that happens is a day we’ll make a LOT of noise.

This Spartan Life has added another video blog entry – it’s a dispatch from the Bodyguard Competition (part 1, actually). During the competition to see who’ll make the best bodyguard, the cameraman has a really hard time staying alive – you gotta wonder about a bunch of applicants for a bodyguard position have trouble telling the difference between friendlies and hostiles… Pretty funny – go watch. (WMP9 coming later today, the next couple of parts of the competition coming in the next two weeks.)