Fluffy, over at HaloPlanet, points out (once again) that they’ve got an awesome, though underused, resource available to all Halo CE modders. They will host your map/mod/website, with unlimited bandwidth (and they mean it – they’ve got the MASSIVE pipes of Fileplanet to back them up), pre-built forums (and other systems), tech support, haloplanet emails, and even pre-built website templates to use. Why would you turn this down? Read their Hosting FAQ, check out the Application, and watch your bandwidth problems disappear!

Wronchi put up a Flash animation at Newgrounds, dedicated to all those who found certain aspects of the Library… repetitive. It’s a bit over a meg, and nicely done. Thanks to Gil27 for pointing it out. (Obligatory Spoiler Warning, for those keeping track.)

nico, the guy behind Red vs Blue’s music, sent along a picture (74k) of his Powerbook, running Halo on the back deck of his family’s house in St. Barths, in the French West Indies, as the sun begins to set. I can’t think of a nicer place to kill Covenant…

The latest Gamespotting column at Gamespot is about upcoming games… and it contains a poll – ‘Which upcoming game will be the greatest?’ At the moment, Halo 2 is in second place… behind Half-Life 2. Hmm… (Thanks to GruntKilla for the heads-up.)

We’ve added last Friday’s Weekly Bungie Update to our Update archive, and maybe made the archive a bit easier to use. I noticed that the full update list was getting a bit unwieldy (260k of text, plus pictures), so I uncovered a part of the search page that’s always been there, but not documented; you can now view updates individually, by date, from the main Archive page. Should make life easier if you want to point out a specific date…

For far too long, the Movie Database has languished, victim of limited time and shifting priorities. Uriel offered to compile much of the data required to build this database, greatly reducing the amount of work needed to create updates; even WITH his help, it took much longer than it should have. However, we’ve passed the biggest hurdle – the horrendously messy collection of videos that were released during E3 this year. The database now runs through the end of June (yes, still a couple of months behind, but it should be MUCH simpler to catch up at this stage), and contains links to all the E3 data we could find (as well as all the movies we mentioned in the month following E3). Stop by and see what you missed!

Today’s One One Se7en shows what a good headset can do to a polite individual… I suppose the real funny would be if that cord behind Cortana weren’t plugged into anything. Oh, wait…

The footage from the Leipzig Games Convention continues to appear… and disappear. The Game7 footage we mentioned on Saturday is offline already (they ran out of bandwidth, it appears), but there are new clips to fill the void. Nafe Rubeus found a thread on a clan forum with a link to a large (but EXTREMELY slow-downloading) video – I have no clue what this one looks like. And Demden, of Halo Orbit, pointed out 5 QuickTime clips recorded with a digital camera on a different clansite – video quality is the best we’ve seen from the convention, but there’s no sound, and the filesize is 5 times what it should be. (This might change.) For folks looking for footage that was online but is no longer… we’re not going to be hosting this sort of footage; there is going to be a surfeit of it in the next few weeks, I’d guess. If you get it, great, if you don’t, grab the next one. Update: Luis Carrillo found a new link for the Game7 video, in a GameFAQs forum thread.

B Ball Master is embarrassingly insistent that we mention that Halo 2 will be playable next month at the Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo in Wellington, New Zealand. Under $15 NZ (per day) gets you into the event, taking place on September 25 and 26. Yet another venue for some Halo 2 lovin’ before November 9…

Oops – haven’t updated the Fan Fiction section since Thursday, so there are 20 new pieces for you to read… Gotta be careful about that. Go get ’em!

On August 2, we got word of a new Halo 2-branded headset, made by Plantronics, that would be coming out this fall. More details emerged a week later. Now, thanks to Team Xbox, we have official word, in the form of a Plantronics press release. Looks to be a classy piece of equipment!

Wow. Talk about dedication. [-TLG-]Madrox and Monoxide got a Hunter to the bottom of the pit in the middle of the underground cavern in AotCR. How’d they do it? They gave him a ride on a Banshee. Vid is 5.5 mb in WMP9 format, hosted by Madrox. I’ve put a QuickTime version up on files.bungie.org. (Both versions are a bit hard to see; vid is a tad washed out. You can certainly get the gist, though.)

Pballwizard points out a new update over at Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod. Map updates, mostly.

Carlo Zottman points out the blog of Boris Schneider-Johne, German Product Manager for the Xbox – he was at the German Games Convention yesterday, and got a pretty nice shot of the Master Chief doing “the hardest job of all time; handing out Halo 2 survival bags to journalists. Contents: energy drinks, deodorants and water pistols.” Glad to see the Nightmare Armor contract in use!

Uriel points out that the Leipzig Games Convention website already has a Best of Show page up… and guess what took ‘Best Xbox Game’? Go on… guess.

Hehe – d3fault_dot_xbe has taken one of Roger Wilco’s concept models and begun to insert it into Halo CE. Nice! Heads-up goes to MasterGrief, who found it on the Gearbox forums. Remember – Roger Wilco created those models more than 2 years ago. Wonderful!

Wow. I’ve seen sleazy before, but this is pretty audacious. Some slimeball on eBay was selling a digital copy of Zoe’s farewell wallpaper; he removed Zoe’s signature from it (though not the bungie.net watermark), and was selling it (in DIGITAL FORM, it’s not even a print) as his own work. (He cancelled the auction this morning, ‘because of an error in the listing’ – but it’s still online.) In case it gets pulled, we’ve put up a local, static (no working links) copy here at HBO. Remember that you can get this for free (from the legitimate artist) over at Bungie.net. Make a note of the seller’s name, and be really, really careful what you buy from him. Thanks to Fluffmiester for finding this.

Art Vandelay found a nice thread over at the TeamXbox forums (though it would have been better if he’d actually added a link to the original information) – AcidSnow spent some of his precious playtime in a recent Halo 2 event TESTING the game, rather than just playing. Biggest tidbit: laying a plasma grenade on top of another one actually increases the blast damage (rather than having the second one thrown off when the first one goes, as happens in Halo). Interesting stuff! Go read. Update: More hands-on comments on our own forum, from Tempus Fugit. Remember, when you read his (and others’) comments about ‘roughness’, that everyone’s playing the E3 build – a build finalized over 3 months ago. And remember that the Bungie boys and girls have been working 100+ hour weeks for a while now.

VALENCE has taken Adult Swim soundtracks and Halo CE video and put together a film called Aqua Chiefs Hunger Corps. Decide for yourself whether it works. Video is WMP9 format, 7 minutes long, 9 mb large, hosted by Halomods.

Trigun sends word that a new Halo on Vacation comic is up at The 7th Revolution. Maybe it’s me, but it seems like Halo: Resolution did that joke. A few times.