Grenadiac stopped by our forum to point out a new movie for download at Halomods.com; the MC has been replaced by a Grunt. Great music choice. 8 mb (.rar-compressed), WMP7 format. Dance, boy!

Nice find by Ross Mills; there’s a Special Edition Halo Soundtrack now for sale, from Sumthing Else Music Works. It comes with a bonus DVD that contains trailers and videos of Halo 2, plus Surround Sound versions of new music. (This is the soundtrack Marty mentioned about a month ago, during a Music 4 Games interview.) Grab it now – Amazon’s selling it for $14 (though they say they’re not shipping for a month…)! Update: Thanks muchly to Adam Leyland, who points out that the ‘Buy‘ link at Sumthing Else points to the original soundtrack at Amazon.com; it doesn’t appear that the new one is available yet. You might want to wait to place that order…

We mentioned the new MacSoft Halo page a couple of days ago, and others have pointed out the Games page over at Apple… but travis brought to our attention that Halo is not confined to gaming pages any more. On a page devoted to extolling the virtues of the G5’s video capabilities, the screenshot at the top of the page is (once again – remember 1999?) a shot from Halo. We’ve archived it here, in case it gets switched at some point. Yep – when you wanna show how powerful the new G5 really is… Halo is the testbed of choice.

Missed it when it arrived, but SeeMePlayMe is hosting a kickoff party for its new Platinum Plus Gamer account. They’ll be giving away 5 lifetime gold accounts, 2 lifetime Platinum accounts, and one 1-year Platinum Plus Gamer account. This newest account not only allows you to set up a custom server on the fly… but that server will be open to the public (not just those that know its IP address). (More details on the account are here.) The party happens this Friday, November 28th, at 7 pm Central time. There’s also a bunch of other giveaways planned. Check ’em out!

Couple of Blue’s News-reported reviews for you: AllOutGames gave it 89% (though the front-page mention was quite a bit harsher, and even the reviewer made it clear that the 89% was because 90% is their cutoff for a ‘stamp of approval’), and Ferrago gave it 84%, complaining about the clunky console-born interface and the ‘stuttering framerate’. Ah, well…

Last week, a bunch of HBO regulars (and some new friends) got together at nof’s place to celebrate the second anniversary of the Xbox (and Halo) with 14 hours of lan play. nukedude filmed the whole shebang. This isn’t your standard lan footage; the actual gameplay takes a back seat to the event itself. (It might not be for everyone.) 34 mb, 9:15 long, WMP9 format. Again, nukedude is hosting it. And speaking of nukedude, a few people asked if a QuickTime version of the Pillar of Art fest film he put up a few days ago could be made available; the quality’s not quite as good as the WMP, but for those who can’t SEE the WMP, it’s certainly watchable. 32 mb, at Mythica.org.

GreenMJOLNIR’s Guest One One Se7en strip was written a couple of months ago… but the joke’s still there.

AGAIN with the updates. Finn, this time, picks out some of the juicier morsels from the Halo Story mailbag (and a forum post or two) to peel another layer of mystery from the onion that is Halo. Go read.

Bungie.net‘s transfer over to .NET (and the use of .NET Passports) is complete. If you have a Passport already, simply log in, then link your existing Bungie.net account to your Passport. If you don’t have a Passport, create one, and link it. Finally, you can link your Passport to a new Bungie.net account. Existing functionality doesn’t change very much… but future stuff will be pretty impressive, I’ve been led to believe.

Several days ago, we mentioned that the backlog of strips for the One One Se7en Guest queue was getting out of hand, and described what we thought would be a reasonable solution for the problem. Well, maybe folks didn’t understand what was being offered… because we had exactly two voluntary submissions. Added to that are a pair of Stuntmutt submissions and some auto-submissions, for a grand total of 7 strips (!!) – but unfortunately, it didn’t reduce the Guest queue by even one day. So: go visit the new Archive. Check out the 7 strips. Laugh a bit. If you’ve got a strip in the queue, reconsider whether you’re interested in Archiving it instead of waiting out the queue. (Next Archive date is December 7 – less than 2 weeks away. You can mail us at 117@bungie.org.) If we don’t get a bunch of submissions, we’ll go through the Guest queue ourselves, and pull out the strips that meet the ‘Automatic’ criteria as described in the original post. (Truth be told, Stuntmutt has already identified a number of strips that are ready for Archiving; I asked him to hold off, hoping the authors themselves would choose this option.) One way or another, we’ll reduce that queue!

After a really long hiatus, Fire Team Charlie is back, with episode 9. It’s available in DivX-encode AVI format (and QuickTime, as soon as they link it), and weighs in at about 40 mb. It’s high-res (640×480), for EVERYONE – though members of XboxOttawa.ca can download it directly, while everyone else needs to use BitTorrent. This episode ties together quite a bit of the previous pieces – even pieces that didn’t seem to be linked. Sound quality is a tad rough, but the humor is great. Check it out!

Wow. Master Chief Cutter has put together a full size rocket launcher. It doesn’t actually shoot… but that’s probably a GOOD thing. It’s over 4 feet long, and there are a bunch of blurry pictures on his website here. (I grabbed local copies, so someone should drop me a line if this dies; we’ll put up a mirror here.) The lengths fans will go to… Update: Local copies are here.

mnemesis has once again dipped into the Halo Story page mailbag, and pulled out some tantalizing tidbits. (There’s even one from forum regular Jillybean… hmm, I thought I told him to throw all of those away.) Good stuff.

Heh. Stuntmutt takes one final shot at the absurd length of the Guest queue in today’s One One Se7en. (Later today, the Archive will open, and SHOULD take care of that problem once and for all.)

There were 22 pieces of Fan Fiction submitted this weekend… get to it.

• Merick’s Journal’s: Episode 3 1/2: The Poem, by John Kitchen
• Halo The Respawned – Book One, by md
• Fight for New Tatley (Chapter 3: Bank Withdrawal), by CoLd BlooDed
• Brutus, The Spartans, Two AIs and the Pirate Fleet (Part 5), by Traumatised Marine
• A Series of Wierd Events – Sequel, Part One [STERFRYE], by Hunter_Killer
• A Series of Wierd Events – Sequel, Part One [WALKER], by Hunter_Killer
• Halo: The Recovery: Part 1, by witelancer
• Halo: The Recovery: Part 2, by witelancer
• Halo: The Recovery: Part 3, by witelancer
• Fight For Her, by CovieKilla
• The Offensive Retreat, by teemus
• Homeworlds XXIV, by Mainevent
• Everyone Dies, by CoLd BlooDed
• The Final War: Chapter Four: Battle for Installation 02 Part One: Operation: Firestorm, by Awacar
• On A Pale Horse: The Gates of Hell, by Silent Hunter
• Last of a Dying Breed-One Night, by hornet34
• The Harvest Campaign Chapter 2, by Fleet Admiral
• Fight or Flight: Chapter One, by teemus
• A Series of Wierd Events – Sequel, Part Four [HUNTER_KILLER], by Hunter_Killer
• Pirates: UNSC Nemesis; Chapter Two, by Steele
• The 7th Column: Betrayal, by Mainevent
• Attack on ERISTOCK Part 16: Nothing, by xitWOUND117

Words, words, and more words…

Noobs and guns… they don’t always mix. Halo: Resolution looks at one reason why not.

343GS.com has put up the third episode of Echofournineteen – this one called ‘April Cruel’. (Check the Downloads section.) I’m not sure I get it… Thanks to Madda Cheeb for the heads-up.

The Best of The Best competition took place last night (it ended up being a ‘Best of HBO’ contest, in the end), and according to stan, the winner is synide. Details are in the forum post – full stats, comments, you name it. Congrats, synide!

I keep forgetting to write it up… but here you go. Ciarán Walsh has spent a chunk of time overhauling the search mechanism of our Forum archives; the new version of the search now relies on MySQL, rather than perl, and so can handle MUCH bigger searches. All posts not on the current forum are searchable from one form at this point, with some added search options thrown in for good measure. Visit http://library.bungie.org/ for details. (We’d like to stress that 1) this is a beta version of the new search mechanism; we’re looking for feedback on features, and reports if you find problems, and 2) we have several major new features planned for future iterations of this mechanism, if all goes well.) Please – drop us a line if you have trouble, or have comments. Thanks!

nukedude finally compiled a bunch of footage from the Pillar of Art showing/lanfest last summer in New York City; it’s about 10 minutes worth of commentary, gameplay, and artwork from the Selkirk Gallery in lower Manhattan. The movie is in WMP9 format, and weighs in at 32.8 mb. nukedude is hosting it, but if things get out of hand, we’ll probably toss up a local copy, as well. I found it pretty interesting – but then, I was there. Check it out!