Okay, that’s it. We killed another account with Ripp0n’s Montage… so I’m doing what I should have done at the start… and putting up a BitTorrent seed for it. If you wanted to get this earlier today, and couldn’t… get it now.

Bizarre. SirDougOfUsbek made a film in which one of his party members just… fell asleep during gameplay. Proximity voice let everyone nearby hear the guy snoring… they messed with him for a while. Mantis posted a link on our forum; nof has mirrored a director’s cut (somewhat longer). Take this as a warning; fall asleep during a game, you WILL be ridiculed, publicly. (6500 people have downloaded this film from putfile.com; I don’t know how many mirror downloads there’ve been.)

Tourney in Wayne, NJ, this coming Saturday; 2v2 Team Slayer, $500 cash prize. Details in this forum post.

Holy… so there are tons of skill vids out there, and as I’ve said before, there’s ALWAYS someone better than you… but this was pretty amazing. Ripp0n posted a link to a montage vid he put together from his XBC (Halo 1) gameplay, and man… that guy can stick. There are some grenade throws that will make your jaw drop. Vid quality is… well, crappy. Certainly good enough to see what’s going on, though. Vid is 6:23 long, 50 mb, WMP9 format. Hosts are (apparently) spotty. (I had no trouble grabbing the file from the first mirror, but someone else in the thread last night mentioned they were both down.) Composition is quite good; the whole thing suffers only from low video quality. This is certainly Halo gameplay at the peak of its form. (It’s a fantastic example of why n00bs don’t really enjoy playing on XBC… guys like Ripp0n make you feel really… inadequate.) Update: Bah, that was quick. Vid is down again. If anyone’s got a chunk of bandwidth they want to devote to this, drop us a line. (It’s a big video, and it’s making the rounds, sitewise, so if you’ve got less than 50 or 100 GB of bandwidth to offer, it’s probably not worth it.) Thanks! Update: Thanks a million to linus, who’s provided another mirror for this file. Get it while it’s hot!

Whoa – more awards possibilities. The Game Audio Network Guild is hosting the 3rd Annual G.A.N.G. Awards, to be held this year on March 10 during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Halo 2 is up for:

• Audio Of The Year
• Best Cinematic/Cut-Scene Audio
• Music Of The Year
• Best Live Performance Recording
• Best Interactive Score
• Best Original Instrumental Song (for “Earth City”)
• Best Original Vocal Song – Choral (for “Ghosts Of Reach”)
• Best Original Soundtrack Album
• Sound Design Of The Year
• Best Dialogue

WOW! Thanks to Music 4 Games for the heads-up.

Randomhero has started an Art contest; entries can be almost anything (as long as they haven’t been seen before), and you’ve got until Feburary 28 to submit. Full details, including a prize list, can be found at his 7th Column Group.

We mentioned a couple of movies yesterday that have updates in availability… lessee. DementedPuppy has posted a QuickTime version of Vehicular Pwnage; it’s about 17 mb. (The WMP9 version is, of course, still available.) And HALOChat has put up a copy of the DivX version of the Codex Trailer – it’s always good to have extra help with hosting! If you missed either of these yesterday, go grab ’em now.

A week or so ago, we mentioned the Interactive Achievement Awards – they were given out yesterday. Halo brought home 4 of them; of the 6 it was nominated for, it missed only Game of the Year (to Half-Life 2) and Outstanding Achievement in Game Design (to Katamari Damacy). Not too shabby!

Last night, we posted links to a trailer for The Codex, a new machinima production. Their server melted. They moved to a new host, and the links are back online, with smaller downloads (which means more people can view them)… and to make sure it doesn’t happen again, we’ve tossed up mirrors on mythica.org and files.bungie.org.

• DivX (12.0 mb): Home Site | mythica.org | bungie.org
• QuickTime (12.2 mb): Home Site | mythica.org | bungie.org

Go grab ’em!

For those waiting breathlessly… it’s Tuesday, so it’s time for another chapter of Mike Miller’s Legendary Walkthrough. This one looks at Outskirts… and the bane of Legendary in general – jackal snipers. Go read, go watch. (8 new movies.)

There’s another interesting article linked from Rampancy.net over on TheHollywoodReporter.com – it’s an interview with Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT and a gamer. It brings up some pretty salient points about video game violence, and why we as a society seem to target it as a cure for our ills… and why this might not be very effective. A solid, thoughtful read, one that anyone affected by the hype over game violence should look at.

Verdafolio posted a note on our forum a few days ago about a movie called ‘Vehicular Pwnage‘ – it’s almost 20 mb, in WMP9 format, hosted over at DementedPuppy.com (thanks also to WhoKnew). This shows footage of the HBO Lekgolos doing some… well, check the title. A QuickTime version should be coming soon.

A couple of days ago, Xboxter posted a note on our forum – the links in that first post are funky, but the concept is there: he remixed the Last Spartan track off the Halo 2 Soundtrack to recreate the music you hear in the Return to Sender cutscene. I think he did a pretty nice job; you can download his remix from our server (mp3, 2.8 mb), and you can download a version of the cutscene that USES his music, to compare to the original, from his own website (WMP9 format, RAR-compressed, 7.6 mb). Give it a listen!

The MLGPro website was having a bit of trouble yesterday… this news isn’t on their front page anywhere yet, but Gonzo sent us the details of last weekend’s MLG DC event; looks like OGRE 2 took the FFA competition, StK was first in the 4v4, and Walshy and OGRE 2 teamed up to win the 2v2 Halo Side Game. I’m assuming a full writeup will be available on MLGPro.com soon. (Gonzo also mentioned that last week’s AGP/LoJo event held last week in Knoxville, TN ended up with first prize in the $8500 tourney going to Team Pony, and the FFA title was taken by KillerN (of Team Pony).)

And still more stats tools come on the scene. LunarShadow posted v1.06 of his Halo 2 Online (H2O) Stats reader – details and links are on our forum. (I couldn’t get it to work, but I didn’t check and make sure I had the latest versions of Microsoft’s Visual Basic stuff.) And Todd Houser pointed out Query Spree, another downloadable program. (I haven’t tested this one; it said it couldn’t continue because ‘some system files were out of date’ and did I want to let Query Spree update them?) The field continues to expand… Update: Just saw this post on our forum; Aymeric has another online option for you.

New tourneys – Slothboy mentioned one in Oregon; the Frag Fiesta will be taking place in Newberg (south of Portland) on February 12… and Kin Hulamm wrote to us about a 4v4 tourney to benefit UNICEF coming up in Greenbelt, Maryland on February 16; no website, but you can email him for details.

Jillybean let us know that there are a couple of small updates on the Halo Story page (one that mnemesis put up a few days ago, but we missed, another she posted last night)… go read the latest!

New video to watch – a preview of things to come. The project is called ‘The Codex‘, and the trailer is a bit over 3 minutes of tight camera work, beautiful edits, and great coordination with the soundtrack. Hard to tell yet how the plot will hold up… but the trailer certainly leaves you wanting more! Visit their Videos page for download links for QuickTime and DivX formats. A thread was started up on our forum, as well… be sure to leave ’em some feedback! Update: As many, many of you have noticed, the Codex website is offline for going over their bandwidth limits. I’ll see what we can do about getting local versions up here to help ’em out.

That Stuntmutt… always finding new angles for One One Se7en. Well, maybe not NEW…