Ever wonder why Bungie scrapped its from-the-ground-up physics engine in Halo and incorporated an existing middleware solution known as Havok for Halo 2’s physics requirements? Wonder no more. Bungie’s put up a sizeable article over at Bungie.net, explaining exactly why they moved to this solution, and what it means for you, the player. There’s tons of info – and a glimpse into the life of a big-game programmer or 3. Check it out!

MLGPro.com has news of a contest, hosted by MTV, to find the Best Gamer On Campus. Some more details can be found here. (Well, the actual contest page is up, as well – that’s got lots of info.) See what you’ve got!

Not long ago, we received a widescreen trailer for an upcoming machinima series, the Dauntless Spartans. I liked the footage a lot – though the voice acting needs a LOT of work; hopefully, this can be addressed before the first episode is actually released. We’re hosting both the original WMP9 trailer (8.5 mb) and a re-encoded QuickTime version (10.5 mb) – it’s not huge, so give it a shot! (Thanks to logan for sending this in.)

trigger119 writes to let us know that Episode 3 of Outpost: Coagulation has been posted, to go along with their new website, Tree Skunk Productions. Weak point is voice work; it’s pretty hard to understand some of the dialogue. Past that, though, this episode introduces a new character (well, two), and brings O:C even closer to its RvB roots. WMP9 format, 22.1 mb.

Ever feel like you can’t identify where a teammate is when he’s shouting urgent directions? Today’s One One Se7en provides one possible solution. (I wouldn’t suggest counting on this one too often, unless you enjoy hearing your teammates swearing at you.)

Team Scoog, previously known for a fantastic Halo movie, Out for Blood, has created ‘7he Bridge’ – a 2v2 Spartan vs Covenant battle to control a bridge. It’s a bit dark at the beginning – but quality improves later on, and the camera work is just great. The announcement (with a comcast link to the original WMP9 film) can be found here; we’ve mirrored both that version (17.9 mb, mythica.org | bungie.org) and a new QuickTime version (16.5 mb, bungie.org | mythica.org)… grab the one that works best for you.

Halo Babies starts a 3-part series today, outlining the secrets to Bungie’s success. This joke is much funnier if you know some older Bungie games. Looking forward to parts 2 and 3!

For some odd reason, it’s not on Bungie.net yet… but an hour ago, Frankie posted a note on our forum pointing out a new Halo Humpday Challenge writeup. Bungie played the US Army… and lost pretty badly. Well, they actually lost pretty gracefully, if you read the writeup – they were beaten by a huge margin, but (in Frankie’s words) ‘in a strangely acceptable way’. Nice. (For what it’s worth, these games were found this morning – and identified as Humpday Challenge games – by folks using the awesome power of the B.net stats system.)

Tina Leyk recently posted a new Fur-Lo guest strip on her weblog; with her permission, I’ve added this (‘Pink’, by Fugiri-Shi) to our Fur-Lo archive mirror here at HBO. Gotta watch those flags!

Halogen, the Halo mod for Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, has been updated again – new vehicles and buildings. Thanks, Logical2u.

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!