Interactive Civilian took some photos of the Kubrick Master Chief that all Japanese Halo buyers were entitled to (it was finally delivered this week). Pretty cool – I’m guessing the hardcore Halo schwag collectors are gonna be scouring eBay…

The StK Ogres have a new montage vid out – you can grab it off the ComboVideos.com Halo videos page. 50 mb, WMP9 format (almost 11 minutes long). Some really nice moves… I learned stuff from this one. Thanks, BlazeD, for the heads-up. Update: ComboVideos went down last night – excessive bandwidth. HALOChat has put up a BitTorrent – you can grab it here. Update 2: Looks like HALOChat linked to the wrong file. Sorry, folks; don’t bother downloading this one, it’s just Ripp0n’s montage all over again. If this gets fixed, I’ll post again. Update 87: Whee, isn’t this fun? There’s a new torrent file available from our server – along with a little bit of starting bandwidth. Hopefully, enough folks can chime in to make this work!

Wow. Didn’t think it was going to happen – but I’ve cleared out the desktop queue again, and updated the Wallpaper section. Almost a month’s worth of submissions – there are 23 new entries, but if you count all the variants (color, size, etc) there are over 50 new images. Check ’em out!

Wow. Frogblast has taken the time to compile a list of almost all the death cameras in Halo 2. What’s a death camera, you ask? When you die, the camera jumps to a preset angle, depending on where you were and which direction you were facing. Froggie’s pinned these down. Go look; as he says, this could be pretty useful information for egg-hunters.

Jillybean continues to work on this beautiful Sunday – check the Halo Story page for a pair of tidbits to advance your understanding of the Halo backstory.

I meant to post this yesterday – things got away from me. We mentioned a new contest being hosted by ICDedPpl on Friday – by Saturday, the prize list had grown sizeably. Go visit the contest page to see what’s up for grabs at this point; there are now 7 prizewinning slots, with a pretty hefty collection of schwag for the top ones. If you have any skill whatsoever with an image editing program, you should enter this!

Walshicus has finished his conversions of the Hall of Mural tablets from the originally submitted black and white versions that 7he One sent us in late January to full-color, larger renderings – you can find the last 3 in this forum post or on our Hall of Murals page. Nice work, all around!

A bit ago, Eric Oxenberg submitted a movie he’d made for an audio engineering class in college. It’s something a little different; it’s footage from the E3 2003 trailer, with all new sound effects, music, and dialogue. It contains over 100 SFX queues. It’s not for everyone (the video hasn’t been altered at all, it’s just new sound), but it’s well-done and fun enough that I thought we’d offer a copy. It’s available in QuickTime (13.9 mb) and WMP9 (14.2 mb) formats. Check it out!

Red vs Blue Episode 49 has been released for sponsors… and for long-time Bungie fans, this one’s fantastic. (It’s great for everyone, actually – but the Marathon nod is awesome.) This is one of the funniest episodes I can remember; I think I like it when the whole team is feverish while recording. If you’re not a sponsor, it’ll be up for everyone on Monday. Go watch!

Walshicus continues his work on coloring the Hall of Mural tablets; he’s redone the third tablet (basically just a recoloring of the Prophets’ headdresses) and finished off the fourth. You can find them in his forum post, or on our Hall of Murals page.

Last week, a movie showing Ogre 1 participating in a KotH game on Lockout and racking up an amazing 41-0 kill record started making the rounds. It crushed Boomerica.com for the month, in less than a day. It looks like if you haven’t seen it, you can grab a copy off of Halo-Pro.com – thanks to GM KASH for the heads-up.

Week 13 of TalkXbox’s Halo 2 Strategy Series covers Colossus CTF. Thanks again to 3Suns for the heads-up.

Dennis Powers writes to point out that Episode 4 of the Halo CE Chronicles is now online at Halo Maps. Conceived as a showcase for Custom Edition works, this flash-based series is pretty different from most Halo-based machinima… it’s a lot less violent, for example. This episode continues the development of the Spartan and AI characters.

AGoldElite points out that W00tness (a comic we’ve followed in the past, and one we’ve unfortunately helped to take offline occasionally, due to bandwidth overages), has a new episode out – and Halo once again features prominently. It’s a serial strip, so you might have to go back a while if you haven’t been reading it.

Yesterday evening, Bungie posted its weekly What’s Update – general answers to common questions, with a few oddities tossed in. A hint that a cheating fix might not be too far off, details on when you can and cannot use Halo-related artwork, when downloadable content is NOT coming out (Feb 14), and more. There’s also the best Mister Chief artwork I’ve seen, I think. (Frankie didn’t draw it.) Go read!

KingFarnox and the rest of Chronic V1RU5 Studios have created the first episode of a new machinima series, Delta Squad. Episode 1 is called ‘Zanzibar: Hostage Rescue’. Camera work is very nice; has the feel of wartime journalism, at least at the start. Nice timing, nice moves. Originally a 23.7 mb WMP9, I created a 22.1 mb QuickTime as well. (The WMP9 is higher-quality; if you can view it, do so.) Both are 640×480, 4:18 long. Almost a week ago, Farnox posted a low-res QT version on our forum – this one is high-res, and far more polished. We’re providing two mirrors each for the WMP9 (mythica.org | bungie.org) and QuickTime (mythica.org | bungie.org). Give it a look-see!

Hehe. Stuntmutt took his inspiration for today’s One One Se7en from today’s Halo Babies – how often do you get a chance like this? Made me laugh, anyway.

18 new pieces in the Fan Fiction hopper today – clears out the week. Go read! The weekend’s coming.

ICDedPpl is hosting a new contest – Photoshop Halo into a real-life picture, win cool schwag. (Okay, you don’t need to use Photoshop – any image editor will do, including MS Paint. But the Halo part has to be there.) Go read all the details – including the $250+ in prizes – over at his website. Get cracking – submissions are due by March 4!

On and off, folks have talked about ‘custom gametype collections’ – websites where folks could get (and share) custom game settings for entertaining multiplay. Halo2Customs just opened its doors – and in addition to maintaining a reader-expandable collection of custom gametypes, it’s gone one step further; it’s offering Action Replay downloads of the most popular gametypes. (It remains to be seen how this works out in the long run; without some sort of real ranking system, it’s conceivable that the useful gametypes get buried in a flood of ‘standard slayer on Coag but with ghosts only’ type submissions… but the potential is there.) Check this out – add your own, and if you have Action Replay, download a few custom gametypes to try!