Calvin and Halo is hardly Halo-related at all today; I don’t think this is a trend (at least I hope it isn’t), but it was a great strip when it was new, so go and check it out.

Gutupio did some playing with green-screen effects; the end result is a movie he calls ‘Halo 2: DDR Remix‘. Not ever having played DDR, the joke is mostly lost on me… but reaction seems to be positive. Hosting has been handled by COERCE.net. The vid is 3:32 long, 14.1 mb big, and is a DivX-encoded AVI. Check it out! (A comment thread is here.)

Much general-interest modding info over at Halomods recently… there’s a downloadable copy of Blood Gulch with Hunters, Elites, and human snipers (a movie showing the action can be found here, the mod itself is in this thread), the outside portion of Keyes is now available as a multiplayer map (with a movie in this thread), and Two Betrayals is now ALSO a multiplayer level (the movie, this time, is linked in the same thread). While the HEK would make all of this stuff more fun (you wouldn’t need to substitute existing multiplayer maps out for these), it’s still fantastic to see the modding community bringing new content to the Halo experience.

That Weasel, of That Weasel Television, writes to say that after running for 15 days, the TWTv Poll asking about your favorite RvB character has come up with Caboose as the top choice (266 votes) with Church (156 votes) and Sarge (107 votes) running a distant second and third. A new poll is up, asking about your favorite kind of Halo movie. Check it out!

Once upon a time, HBO participated actively in the distributed search for extraterrestrial intelligence – and the Halo SETI Marines continue today, though at a much slower pace than when they were front-page news here every day. A year or so ago, Ross Mills started the HBO Researcher team at grid.org, aimed at using distributed computing to help find a cure for cancer. Today, P_71W has started a NEW team, this one ALSO at grid.org; they’re called ‘Team H.B.O.‘. If you have extra CPU cycles going unused in your home or workplace, you can put them to use fighting cancer, or helping with smallpox research, or combating bioterrorism… and do so banded together with other HBO fans. Grab a client, and get crunching!

…they all would know, he’d lose all his street cred. This is getting totally out of hand. I blame Sep7imus for starting it… and Stuntmutt for making it much, much worse.

It’s April 7, which means it’s time for another update of the One One Se7en Archive… we’ve got 12 strips for you today. Things will be changing soon… but for now, enjoy!

One One Se7en brings the venerable knock-knock joke to new lows.

Halo: Resolution gets back to a slightly damaged piece of machinery today.

Halo Phenom, a website we mentioned once, has decided to hang it up. G’Night, guys…

Not sure why it takes me so long every week… but last week’s Bungie Update has finally been added to the Bungie Updates archive. When you want to know whether Frankie has mentioned Zoe or Lorraine more… we’re here for you. (Lorraine wins this one, hands down – 8 to 4.)

The CAL Season 1 Championship aired as planned on haloTV last night – but most of the 500+ people who tuned in to watch had to be turned away. (They had no idea how popular it would be!) The haloTV crew capped the viewer list at 50, but a higher-res, edited version of the match will be available for download in a couple of days. Nice opener, guys!

Halo7 (with some help from Owm109) points out a page on IGN’s Playstation 2 site that contains a list of ‘official titles being shown’ at E3 this year… and Halo 2 is on it. No word about what SORT of ‘show’ we’re talking about…

You gotta love it when the editor of the largest Mac magazine decides to write an editorial about how fun it is to play Halo (and how you can join him next weekend!). Gives you that warm fuzzy feeling… (thanks again, Ghôlsbane)

A couple of days ago, eddie m noticed a page at IGN that mentioned that a ‘formerly integral member of Bungie’s development team on Halo’ is now at work on EA’s Goldeneye II. He wondered if anyone knew who this was. According to this Gamespot article posted today (thanks, Ghôlsbane), that former Bungie employee is Dan Orzulak, a designer on the original Halo team. Isn’t it nice to know we love the company so much that we stalk its former employees?

The dialogue man himself, Captain Spark, turned in a huge collection of Stacker quotes a couple of weeks ago. Using HaloPC, turning off extra sounds, and carefully planning who was onscreen during the filming allowed him to get pretty amazingly clean recordings of almost 200 new quotes, including some really funny ones I’ve never heard before. Go check ’em all out in our Dialogue Databank! (There are still quite a number of queued sounds to be added; this isn’t all there is.)

Today’s Calvin and Halo focuses on some little-known Covenant species…

I missed this, three days ago, when it went live, and I didn’t even pick up on the references when shunji alluded to it on IRC yesterday… but Rampancy.net noticed it, so I got it on the rebound. Mat Noguchi, tools/sound programmer for Halo and Halo 2, has written a technical, but understandable-to-the-layman, explanation of why Sound is such a big deal in games, and why it will continue to be a thorny problem for a while yet. Go take a look! (It uses Halo as an example, which is what makes it relevant here.)

haloTV, in beta, goes live. A venture led by cookedGamers synide and rapture, haloTV will be broadcasting Halo movies in streaming format for those interested in a quick fix. You can watch existing movies, but the strength of the format will show in examples like today’s CAL Season 1 Finals (8:30 pm CST, which is actually 2:30 am UTC tomorrow, with pregame show kicking in an hour earlier), broadcast live as they happen. Good luck, guys! (Public heads-up came from RIDIK, on our forum.)

SexyJosh points out a couple of writeups (and a movie) of some local Halo tournaments his group participated in; you can find the writeups, and a link to the movie (13.8 mb, 5:44 long, QuickTime format) on their site. Toys-R-Us tourney + Halo freaks = potential for Barbie abuse…