Awesomeness. There’s a great article over at Bungie.net, written by Joe Staten, who’s been pretty off-the-radar these past few months – it looks at the origins of the Halo movie script, and how the situation developed to where it stands today. There’s even a sneak peek at the ‘companion’, a jazzed-up “universe bible/style-guide” that is intended to keep the filmmakers on the right track. (No, you can’t buy one.) Go read this if you have any doubts about the outcome of the Halo movie. (You should STILL have doubts after you read it – you should have doubts until you see it on-screen, because otherwise you’re setting yourself up for potential sadness – but you should feel much more assured after reading Joe’s writeup.) Oh, yeah – and this is part 1. Thanks, LegendaryMark.

A new article in Variety contains details about the Halo movie deal – the highlights are that Fox and Universal will pay Microsoft $5 million against 10% of the movie’s gross, that Microsoft is “guaranteed extensive consultation on the project, but won’t have approval over any elements”, and that the final product will hit the big screen during the summer of 2007. (Thanks, Ian White.)

Over at Tied the Leader, XerxdeeJ has recorded a fascinating interview with Steve Downes, better known to Halo fans as the voice of Master Chief. It’s a phone interview, and it touches on many subjects, from Steve’s gaming history to voiceover acting politics to speculation about the Halo movie (and the possibility of Steve’s involvement in it)… great stuff. It comes in three pieces, each 2-3 mb, mp3 format – go listen!

Captain Spark posted another 30 dialogue snippets – all Johnson and Stacker. (He’s worried, though – he might be getting to the end of the line.) You can grab them from his website, zipped, or browse them in our Dialogue Databank.

Wow. TheGhost posted a vid on our forum – he’s modified multiplayer grenades in HaloCE to act a lot like campaign grenades… and he uses them to perform some amazing launches on Blood Gulch. I liked this so much I’m hosting both his original WMP9 version (26.4 mb), and a new QT version (27.4 mb). Grab this and be amazed. I was.

Funky – EB Games is gearing up to sell the Halo Triple Pack – Halo, Halo 2, and the Multiplayer Map Pack, all in one $60 box. Goes on sale in about 2 months. You ask me, they should have done that LONG ago. Thanks, Josh Eppert.

Christopher “Master Chief” Thomas wrote to point out Halo Bunker, a new halo-oriented video host; they’d love to help you get your content to the Halo community. Check out this forum post, sign up, and start uploading!

Dennis Powers wrote to point out that The Halo CE Chronicles Episode 16, Harmony, has been released – the action heats up, and a long-time plot mystery has been cleared up. Go watch! WMP9 (25.4 mb), QuickTIme (29.9 mb), and streaming Flash (9 mb) formats.

Paradox pointed out that there’s a new community bar for Halo – it allows searching with Seeker and HaloWiki. (It also pulls in the HBO RSS feed…) Give it a look! Requires Firefox and Windows.

Thanks to DSmooth, who pointed out Episode 7 of 2old2type, 2old2play.com’s bi-weekly podcast. This one is about an hour long, weighs in at 28 mb in mp3 format, and covers their recent lanfest, as well as upcoming stuff and other stuff. And stuff. (They’re also finally on iTunes, so you can subscribe from there.) Go listen! (I wish the volume had been punched up a bit…)

Been out all day… get ready for a flood of news! We’ll get started with the funnies… ÜberChief posted Episode 16 of his Resolute comic – a perfect example of how unstressed people can be until THEIR stuff gets trashed.

Stuntmutt puts forth an alternate speculation for why a couple of the Halo 2 characters ended up working together in today’s One One Se7en.

HollywoodHalo’s Update 7 passed our MPRRS last night – go watch this for updates on sites like Bungie.net and High Impact Halo. The Pumpkin stuff is a little… odd. Go watch! Just over 30 mb, in either WMP9 or QuickTime formats.

A couple of days ago, Eisen Feuer posted a bunch of dialogue snippets to our forum – high-quality recordings of the various multiple-kill announcements in multiplayer. We’ve finally added them to our Dialogue Databank – one that doesn’t show up in that link is ‘Un-Freakin-Believable‘ which was in the databank before, but in a much lower-quality recording. These are good enough for use in machinima projects, I’d say…

This Spartan Life is hosting a Halo competition on XBL today, at 1pm, EST (that’s a bit less than 5 hours from now). The winner will become a semi-regular character on the popular show, as Damian’s bodyguard. Competitors must be 18 or older, and clearly you must also have access to XBL (and a broadband connection). Full explanations and rules can be found in this post on their forum (registration required to see it). They need email ahead of time – so if you’re interested, sign up and read the post to see what needs to go into it!

The next episode of Nephrons (‘Nephrons – Minus Five’) has been released by ChairLeg Productions – and it’s passed our Movie Peer Review Rating System. You can grab it in PSP-friendly form (368×208, 16.2 mb, MP4 encoding), directly from their site… or in PC-friendly form (standard 640×480 formats) from us; WMP9 format is 44.3 mb, QuickTime format is 40.6 mb. In their words, “a variety of unusual subjects such as thumbscrews and Walrus Kings but still no actual on screen bullets….yet.” Go watch!

The HaloCE community continues advancing the product – Wave of Lag points out a thread on the Gearbox forum where The Ghost demos the first cutscene in the Maw, completely rendered in HaloCE. (HaloCE was released as multiplayer-only; there was no explicit support for campaign play. That didn’t stop these guys, though.) Looks like custom single-player maps aren’t that far off!

Broken Console has posted Episode 3 of The Squadron – it’s called ‘Dinosaurs and Clones’. Pretty nice work, overall! You can grab a WMP9 version (22.6 mb) at their site… and we’re hosting a QuickTime version (21.6 mb) for them (because AnubisUK disappeared before he could get it linked on his own site). Comments can go in AnubisUK’s thread on our forum. Update: The QuickTime is now at their site, as well.

1Up has posted a review of the Multiplayer Map Pack. Well, it’s more than that, really – it’s an 11-page-long strategy guide, with general gameplay tips, weapon respawn times, video clips, map-specific strategies… pretty impressive across the board. Thanks to Sabata for the heads-up on our forum.

Voting is now open to the public in the third annual “Rockets on Prisoner” awards – swing by the site, and vote for your favorite films of the past year! Thanks to That Weasel for all his hard work in making this happen.