After a sizeable stretch without submissions, the Halo 2 Dialogue Databank grows by 22 snippets, from three separate submitters. Captain Spark found a fantastic whiney grunt (forum thread is here), thesaelens tossed us another group of grunt quotes, and Icy Guy sent along the beginnings of our Halo 2 Multiplayer category. Check ’em out! Update: Whoa – it looks like Captain Spark was actually way busier than all that. He recorded another 53 snippets yesterday, in a marathon 11 hour session – you can grab them all at his website. I’ve separated out the duplicates, and added the 46 new ones to our databank – the same link from earlier today will get you there (or this one will get you just Captain Spark’s entries). It’s awesome to hear a snippet from the E3 2000 video in Halo 2!

The Codex Series has released episode 4 – the humans have figured out how they might use the Codex to their advantage, at least in the short term. This one sets up action for the future, more than anything else. Go visit the site! (Apologies for my statement in an older Codex-related news post that incorrectly suggested that the Codex was on Earth – it’s not.)

Tricky points out an episode of Caffeine Online with Halo relevance. Title is appropriate.

The art continues to pour out of the Halo Babies community – tons of good stuff in today’s update. (My favorite has to be the CyberJackal pic – but check ’em ALL out!) Thanks, mrsmiley.

The Bafta Interactive Entertainment Awards were held yesterday and today in London – and Halo 2 went home with the Best Xbox Game award. In every other category for which it had been nominated, however (Action/Adventure, Online & Multiplayer, and Animation), it was beaten out by Half-Life 2. Ouch! Thanks to ICDedPpl, who saw it at Mirror.co.uk.

Afterwar 15 has been posted at Black Arts Studios – with some extra dialogue to explain what accidentally got left out of episode 12. Thanks, Kevin.

Included with the Limited Edition of Halo 2 was a booklet titled, “Conversations From The Universe,” detailing a few choice bits of interactions between various entities within the Halo universe. A number of folks have mentioned this booklet, and some of the information it contained, in forum posts over the last few months. Over at the Halo Story Page, we’ve finally completed a transcription of the text, available on our Resources page for your perusal. Unfortunately, we had a kind of electro-magnetic incident here recently and much of the original text was corrupted. We’ve put up as much as we can at the moment, such as it is, so go check it out and see what you think.

Not long ago, ipushmycar announced the release of BOTD2: Biohazard, a followup video to Beach of the Dead. (The trailer was released in mid-January, to rave reviews and heavy anticipation.) Beach of the Dead 2 does a fantastic job of telling a classic zombie tale with no dialogue at all (beyond the narrator’s voiceover at the start). This is really well-made machinima; great camerawork, great ‘acting’ – it hooks you early and holds you right through the end. The initial release was WMP9-only, and came in two flavors; a high-res 640×288 version that weighed in at a whopping 84.7 mb, and a low-res 320×144 version that was still a hefty 40.3 mb. In addition, both of these suffered from pretty heavy interlacing issues. ipushmycar went to the extra effort of reencoding to fix the interlace problem, and sent us a version we could turn into nice QuickTime releases; again, there’s a high-res (640×288, 45.5 mb) version (mythica.org | bungie.org) and a lowres (320×144, 24.3 mb) version (mythica.org | bungie.org). If you still need the original WMP9 versions, the links for both flavors are in ipushmycar’s forum thread. Watch this one! Update: (30 July 2006) A recent forum thread reminded me that TrickingIt.com no longer exists – which means the WMP9 versions of this film are no longer linked anywhere. Here are some local copies (hires, 640×290, 42.4 mb | lowres, 320×144, 26.4 mb).

The actual strip in todays’ One One Se7en is quite funny – but the title pun makes me want to tear my eyes out and beat Stuntmutt with them.

You might remember a movie called Tainted Love – 12 minutes of Halo 2 gameplay, presented in Widescreen format. The Tainted One wasn’t satisfied with just presenting this to you in a web-sized box; he decided that folks should be able to see this in full wide-screen, DVD-quality goodness. To that end, he created a couple of HUGE versions; they measure 840×480 in screensize, and weigh in at 2 or 3 Mbps (depending on the version you choose) – be careful, because if you want to play the WMP9 version on a PC, you’re gonna need a real processor. (The QuickTime is a bit more forgiving, but still looks pretty darn impressive.) Because of their massive size, these are available ONLY as BitTorrent downloads; Please be patient at the start, and once you’ve grabbed a copy, leave your BitTorrent window open to share the love. The QuickTime version is 207 mb, the WMP9 version is 283 mb. Behold one man’s obsession with good-looking Halo footage!

A couple of weeks ago, Phoenix_9286 posted a link to the start of his new ‘comic’ (I’m not sure it can be called that; it’s more of a storyboard tale, or something – he creates it by combining in-game screenshots and comic-style dialogue balloons). I forgot to mention it – but recently, he posted a link to the fifth episode – and the writeup below that contains links to the first 4. He’s cranking them out at a Stuntmutt-style rate, and there’s a plot, even, so it’s time to mention this. Go read ’em over at DeviantArt.

Stephen Loftus continues his in-depth analyses of the structural underpinnnings of the Halo universe – tonight, we have a treatise on how he’s determined sizes of various objects and creatures. A good read, with great graphics. Check out his Halo Scale Comparison!

Mike Miller’s Legendary Walkthrough grows by another chapter – Delta Halo is now posted. Sixteen vids will help you get through this gorgeous level in style. (Be sure to check the main page, as well; there are a few updates, most notably the Sword Flying information added yesterday.) Mike’s not sure whether he’ll make the Tuesday deadline for Regret… but whenever it comes out, it’ll be worth the wait.

A couple of years ago, folks sat down and timed the respawn intervals between various weapons and items on various multiplayer maps in the original Halo. We posted the findings in our Miscellaneous section. Now, MurderDog and some friends have done the same work for all the Halo 2 maps; for folks wondering how long they have to wait for that Rocket Launcher, this should help.

Alan James continues his work on a Master Chief suit – the main body piece begins to be formed. You’ll find the progress shown on his suit page.

Fans ROCK. An anonymous one just sent me one of the coolest Halo gifts I’ve ever received – a Nightmare Armor helmet (shot 1 | shot 2). It’s stuff like this that will finally get me to build a Halo display area in my office, I think. My week just got better.

Saint has updated the Library with all of the I Love Bees wav files. If you’ve never listened to these, and never felt like looking for them, they’re nicely organized in one place. (Hint for folks announcing stuff on our forum – you’ll get more readers if you actually provide a LINK to the new content. Or even just to the site you’re talking about, generally.)

Jump Tactics has announced a Jump Tournament – show off the best jumping skills, win stuff like controllers, T-Shirts, video hosting. You can read all the details at HALOChat, or on our forum. Competition starts in less than three weeks – get practicing!

Wow, cool. OxYgEn, over at the Gearbox forums, has announced a new Halo CE map based on (of all things) a piece of Tina Leyk artwork. Check out the starting phases of Installation 07. Thanks, MasterGrief.

Brian Jarrard, aka SketchFactor, is still in Asia on a promotional tour for Halo 2 – he recently gave an interview to the DigiTimes.com, in Taiwan. It’s a general piece, introducing Taiwanese readers to the phenomenon that is Halo 2. Nice little sketch of Sketch, though!