The Red vs Blue crew is at the Sundance Film Festival this week… and the Salt Lake Tribune has found them interesting enough to warrant a feature. A nice general overview… go read! (They see a million downloads a week? That’s… um, like 25 or 30 terabytes or so. Gah.) Thanks, ICDedPpl.

That Weasel writes to let us know that Grunts Are People Too!!! has a new episode up… Project GN? What’s going on? In WMP9, QuickTime, and DivX formats, 7-13 mb, depending.

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, felt disgusted enough by the reaction of the school board decision in Puyallup to block a Halo 2 tournament that would benefit tsunami victims that he’s written a retort. It’s interesting to see WHY he’s annoyed… it’s not the action, it’s the reasons BEHIND the action, and what those reasons might lead to. Go read. Update: Looks like there’s some funkiness in Rampancy’s code at the moment; if you try to read it without being logged in, you’ll get a php error. The solution is simple: visit Rampancy’s front page, and log in first.

David Galindo has made a few movies for the Halo community – they’ve all been received pretty well. He’s made a new one… this one’s called ‘Explosions in the Sky’. This one takes a look at the power of heavy weapons, with some amazing camera work. You can grab it from either bungie.org (QuickTime, 24.5 mb | WMP9, 30 mb) or mythica.org (QuickTime | WMP9). There are a couple of screenshots on the Videos page of David’s The Sights of Halo 2 website.

Thanks to Cody Brigan, who notified us that the Mister Chief contest being run by misterchief.com is now over – with the winners announced! Some pretty cool stuff came out of this one. (Mr. Brigan, not totally coincidentally, was the grand-prize winner, with a funny Flash tidbit.) Go watch. (Warning: Stuntmutt’s entry might be considered unsafe for work. Or at least scary.)

Yesterday (well, 2 days ago by this system clock, but trust me, it was yesterday), (GT)Juggler posted a note on our forum about a new movie he’d made. GT 14 – You Slay Me is 4 minutes long, and 26-31 mb large, depending on the version you get. It’s a departure from his last few vids – no modding, just gameplay and nice effects. The initial rush should be over; it was announced on High Impact Halo yesterday… but for folks who haven’t grabbed it yet, there are a few options: Halo GT has a bunch of links to the original MPEG-4-encoded version; that one weighs in at 31.3 mb, and is best viewed with a current version of QuickTime. We’ve re-encoded it as a more-compatible QuickTime, as well as in WMP9 format (both about 26 mb) – if the MPEG-4 doesn’t work for you, go ahead and grab one of these. While you’re checking out gameplay vids, our forum was hit with a few other links today: WaLKa posted his Halo 2 Montage, and quertykd posted TheSkills. Must have been the weekend for polishing the movies! Update: trigger119 just pointed out ‘Bullets’, a new vid from his clan, Vypers. 22 mb, WMP9 format.

The 2004 Winter Pentathlon is over… and the writeup has been posted at Bungie.net. A masterpiece of spin, written by Newbies and Middle-schoolers attempting to downplay the TOTAL CARNAGE that was Old-School this year… it’s a fun read. Check it out. (I gotta say, though, the Karaoke vid starring Cher O’Donnell is… disturbing.)

Bungie has continued their long-dormant series of ‘what’s it like to work here’ articles, this time with an interview with Steve Cotton, one of the lead multiplayer map designers. Interesting read, though Steve sounds a bit… brainwashed. Or maybe it’s just hogtied. Thanks, Frankie.

Captain Spark has updated his collection of dialogue snippets – you can grab a new batch of 48 zipped files over at his website, or search for them piece by piece in our Dialogue Databank. (The reason ours says 45 results and his says 48 is because there were a few that were improvements on existing clips.)

Yesterday, High Impact Halo posted a note about a new jumping vid from Kahai_maluu and the Jump Tactics team; is this a new sport? (Some of the atmosphere reminds me a lot of skateboarders, actually.) The movie is a monster – over 50 mb for 15 minutes of jumping hijinx on Lockout – and it’s some pretty amazing stuff. Amazing, as in you had no idea how far the Bungie physics could be pushed before now. Duke’s note put a serious strain on Mythica’s servers (they spiked somewhere near 120 Mbit/sec last night), so HALOChat has tossed the file up at Filefront, as well as made it available via BitTorrent – grab the links from his forum post. WMP9 format; folks who can’t view that can save themselves the huge download. I dunno… this is just gonna make me MORE frustrated when I fall off a ledge on Lockout… these guys would have just jumped across to another walkway, or something. Go watch.

Friday’s GU Comics uncovers the secret of Halo 2’s spectacular sales numbers. Thanks, Meg. (They have a very cool little feature where you can search for comics by Game… in the past, they’ve looked at I Love Bees and Master Chief’s PR skills, as well as the pirating issue that already got a news post.

Today’s One One Se7en takes a shot at… well, someone. I’m not sure who, though.

A few days ago dude 69 pointed out that Gamespot’s Readers’ Choice Awards for 2004 had been posted. We were on-and-off following their Best and Worst of 2004 stuff – it started on December 18, and Readers’ Choice was day 7; I’d have assumed that the Reader’s Choice stuff was posted on Christmas Eve Day (or maybe the 26th, if they took Christmas off). I passed on the news tip. Then, today, I got ANOTHER one, this time from 3Suns; I went looking. Google cached THEIR version of that page on January 8, so it’s been up for at least 2 weeks… I can’t tell you how much longer than that. I CAN tell you we didn’t report the results before – in fact, we didn’t report ANYTHING past day 3. (Halo won nothing in the Genre awards, the Platform awards, or the GotY awards, so most of that is understandable.) The readers at Gamespot liked Halo 2 better than the editors, though – the game took home Best Xbox Action Adventure Game, Xbox Game of the Year, and Overall Game of the Year. Power to the people!

Couple of tourneys we heard about yesterday – over at High Impact Halo, there’s a 2v2 Tourney being set up; sign-up is on the forum, and a small subsite has been put together for rules and participants… and Halo HQ is running a 2v2 doubles tourney, as well: signup for THIS is on THEIR forum, with a separate Ladder News post giving rules and details. Check ’em both out!

Music from the Movies has reviewed the first volume of the Halo 2 soundtrack – you can read the details on their website. The writeup is predominately positive; the reviewer liked it, both as a soundtrack to a video game and as a standalone CD. (The rating was 3.5/5, somewhere between ‘recommended with reservations’ and ‘excellent’.)

The Weekly What’s Update has finally been posted over at Bungie.net… Frankie sounds a little harried. It’s got some fun info – lots on cheating (and how they chose who to ban), info on why it’s as short as it is (something to do with the Bungie Pentathlon… sounds like Frankie’s team might be losing), a few other tidbits. Go read!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a chunk of mail about the next series of Halo 2 action figures from Joyride; up to now, it’s all been text-based, and we’ve passed on making it news. Littlebigman found a website with a picture of the Series 3 toys, though – and posted about it on our forum. I suppose we also ought to mention the text descriptions of Series 4 and 5, as well… no pics yet, though.

teh Havoc modded a Halo 2 LED flashlight (no longer available, sadly, at the Bungie Store) to end up with a Halo 2 USB flash drive. Nice work!

As I sit here surrounded by 18 inches of snow (with more on the way), and some pretty heavy winds, I notice there are 17 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section. Nothing better on a cold, blustery day than reading by the fire!