Wow. Keyes exploration… it might not be what you think. (I’m still waiting to find out how he got through the loading zones…)

Pallor sends in another Halo sighting:

The latest movie to hit theaters for kids has the cards stacked in favor of Bungie’s Halo. The stars in the movie Ryan Pinkston and Robert Vito have come out publically to state its their favorite game. That carries over to the movie itself: Inside the game they are playin in the movie, Juni meets a quartet of beta testers (Ryan James Pinkston, Robert Vito, Bobby Edner and Courtney Jines). They join his quest to find Carmen, who is stuck on level four. When Juni discovers a river of molten lava, he asks, “How come every video game has lava in it?” “Technically that isn’t true,” another player says. ” ‘Halo’ doesn’t have lava.” So Halo is now a pop culture icon garnering references in childrens films. I suppose its decent to say they have started to invade Hollywood.

Halo fans… They’re everywhere.

Doug Radcliffe has returned – and is asking for submissions, once again. (For those with short memories, Doug is writing the official PC Strategy Guide… he stopped by in late June, to ask for suggestions about bonus material, and again a couple of weeks ago, to solicit multiplayer tips.) If you’ve got some good campaign tricks (that you haven’t already sent to him) email them to him! (Alternatively, you can post them to this forum thread… but he’d rather get email.)

Nice. Gearbox has announced that they’ll be running a team competition during their workshop at the CPL Summer Event – if you’re a registered attendee, you can play 5-on-5 Halo PC from 2-5 pm on August 2 against Gearbox and Bungie employees, with the chance to win prizes from Gearbox, Bungie, and NVIDIA. Props to kappa, who noticed a writeup at cached.net.

Funky Keyes… Oh, yeah, baby. (Also with a new, improved soundtrack.)

Three Miscellaneous entries by BOLL, over the past week – all have been posted to our forum, but they all have a permanent home here now at HBO, and some organization has been applied. In no particular order:

• Halo Clock 2 – BOLL reinvents an older Flash animation in an eminently watchable toy.
• Sentinels – Looking almost as though they’d come from a dev kit, here are several animated views of Sentinels, opening and closing for you. (Javascript required.)
• Mapping Halo – A very high-quality look at the map tiles Bungie used to create the Halo itself; lays to rest several questions about the accuracy of the ring, as you can see it in various places.

If you missed these when they first came through, check ’em out now. If you were impressed once, pass the URLs on to your friends, and watch THEIR jaws drop. BOLL proves, several times over, that his Halo-induced creativity is awesome.

That Weasel becomes the latest mirror for c0ld vengeance’s Predator spoof – he’s posted the 21 mb QuickTime version. Thanks, TW!

Last week, Jamirus99 submitted another dozen snippets for the Dialogue Databank. We’re finally getting around to putting them up now. I also added one I grabbed recently, during a runthrough of the Pillar of Autumn – it made me laugh, and in fact, after some recent comments posted on our forum, has prompted me to think about something we haven’t done for years… a poll. Gimme a little bit to put it together, and then we’ll have a dialogue-related question for you to toss your two cents into.

Dinky has posted a two minute WMV of shakeycam footage from Gencon, showing Halo PC play – you can find a link over on the forum of Battleground: Halo. Format is WMP7, size is 5.2 mb. Gives you an idea of what the booth looked like.

guy who doesn’t post….too often has set into motion a rather ambitious project – C.O.E.R.C.E. The Conglomerate Of Established Resources Cooperating Efficiently will attempt to combine the movie-hosting abilities of several small sites into one seamless mirror – you follow the link, the page decides who serves you the movie. The more mirrors that join up (check this forum thread for details), the better it’ll work. The hope is to be able to serve a small (sub-10-mb movie) movie to as many people who need it, as often as is necessary. First up is the intro for Black And White, a Red vs Blue -inspired film. 9.8 mb, QuickTime format. Give it a shot! (And to all the hosts participating, our heartfelt thanks for the effort! The Halo fans love you.)

Lion has released two trailers for a new series, Oddballs. You can find download links (both WMP9 and MPEG) on his Truth and Reconciliation forum. The actual series is coming soon!

Almost made it to 14 Fan Fiction pieces today… looks like we owe a lot of that to the Foutch brothers.

• A John Before Halo: Part 5, by J-117
• Buried Treasure(7), by Frensa Geran
• Earth, A Place for Death. Part 1: NYC, by FuManChu
• Halo 2, an Elites version, by FOrunnER
• Return to Earth (Chptr 7: Final Finish), by CoLd BlooDed
• The Empire (Episode IV), Truths & Dreams, by Jon Michael Marlowe
• Halo: The MCconto Cronicles 1, by JCDenton
• (Part 4) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• (Part 5) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• (Part 6) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• Project: Shadow Spartan, Chapter 9, by Agent Shade
• (Part 7) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch
• (Part 8) M31: First Blood, by Greg and Wes Foutch

Go get ’em!

Another episode of The HBO Weekly Review went up today. Looks like every bad word said on the forum this week made it in. Got some belly laughs out of me, though… absolutely, positively worth a read.

We didn’t want to announce this on the front page before there was some backup… but now there is some backup. c0ld vengeance (who did a pretty amazing job with Haliens, once upon a time) is back with Predator, a remake of (a chunk of) the movie Predator, in the Halo engine. Some very, very nice touches. It’s available in two formats; a 48 mb DivX-encoded AVI (it’s almost 7 minutes long), or a 21 mb QuickTime 5 version. (Both are roughly the same quality, though the QT version is a tad darker in a couple of places.) You can find the .avi at c0ldvengeance.com (thanks to BOLL), doughmainename.com (thanks to gwdp…to), and FilePlanet. The .mov is currently only available at c0ldvengeance.com. Viewer comments can be found in this thread. As an aside, I find it rather amazing how many movies we’ve announced today, given the current bandwidth crunch…

This originally came in a while ago, but got missed. XBConnect is holding 1v1 and 2v2 tournaments – signup is $10/tourney, and the top 3 winners will take home prizes (yet to be determined). Info is here, signup is here. Thanks to Pulser for the (persistent) heads-up.

We just got word of a new movie called ‘Out For Blood’. It’s not really like anything else out there; it’s all action. Great music, great choreography… really well put together. (Spectacular ending.) Team Scoog, and member Phatcorns, are responsible. It was originally posted on the Gearbox forums – phatcorns is hosting a version. Blade, our newest bandwidth angel, jumped in and put up a copy, as well. It’s 9 minutes long, in WMP7 format, and weighs in at 20.6 mb. Any mirror offers for this one would be greatly appreciated… I’m afraid we’re going to swamp the two existing links.

DarthTyler has asked that we mention his Halo forum, The Halo Elite.

The Bad News: XboxOttawa.ca seems to have gone down; no word on how long, or why. The Good News: Blade has mirrored both Episode 4 and Episode 5 of Fire Team Charlie’s vids at his Team Ice movie mirror. We’ll continue to update you on the movie situation… there are a lot of people trying to help fix the problem right now. I’m hopeful we’ll have good news soon.

PC Envy? Likely. Xbox MC disses PC MC on today’s One One Se7en.

WorthPlaying.com put up a Halo PC preview on Friday – they got in on the gameplay we saw at IGN and GameSpot last week. 10 new screenshots, all at 1024×768 size… nice! Pretty PC-oriented (as in, anti-Xbox)… but then, it IS a PC preview, so what the heck. Heads-up came from Konrad9, on our forum.