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.

Wow, Monday, and we STILL haven’t mentioned this week’s Red vs Blue vid. It’s not a standard episode – it’s a look at how the Blue team makes it to New York for last week’s Film Society of Lincoln Center presentation. (If you ask me, they were FAR too cavalier about the teleporter.)

The continuing saga of a group of our forum regulars and the bizarre events centered around a particular game…

I promised last night to try and shed light on the movie hosting situation here – I’ve put up a page explaining where we currently stand. Suggestions are always welcome… we’re definitely in a bind at this point. Thanks for your patience!

Fire Team Charlie released their 5th movie yesterday; you can find it on their website. Sound quality is vastly improving, and humor quality remains quite high. 16.5 mb, DivX 5 format (though I’ve got a 9.4 mb QuickTime version that I’m going to try and get to them)… go grab it!

Oh, yeah, before I forget – there’s a Sunday One One Se7en for you today. You have to have a long memory, though.

It seems like every time I go on vacation, some crisis erupts around here. Like there’s a Halo god who doesn’t like to see me unchained from my desk… I’ve been made aware of the Mythica-related movie hosting situation, and have seen a lot of emails from people wanting to help, and people wanting more information. It’s a bit too late tonight (i’ve been on the road – literally – for almost 12 hours now), but tomorrow I’ll write up a short description of the current situation, so that people offering bandwidth know what they’re getting into, and what they can do to help. I’m hopeful we can come up with something without bankrupting anybody. Meantime, I’ve got almost 800 emails to go through, and well over 3000 forum posts… dunno how long it’s gonna take to get through all of it. Anyone waiting for a response… please be patient! (Sending another note, asking whether I’ve gotten to your mail, will NOT help the problem.) A great big shout-out to the rest of the crew around here, who did a bang-up job this week – they all rock.

Ah, Saturday. A perfect day to head out to the back forty, tall glass of lemonade in hand, to your favorite hammock. Relax, enjoy the cool breeze, prop up the ol’ laptop and settle in to some light summer Halo reading.

• A long hard day of killing humans, by FOrunnER
• Halo 2, not what you’d expect, Part One, by Hunter_Killer
• A Marine Named Peters: To Kill A Pegasus, by GLADIATRRR3000
• Halo Zero 2 /p8/ Medula’s War, by nicholas
• Return to Earth (Chptr 6: Boarding the Ship), by CoLd BlooDed
• Halo from the Flood’s Point of View: Enter the Norah, by Simpsons Rule
• The second genocide (Halo 2: Chapter 9), by Shadowrunner

Brian Towne was at GenCon yesterday, and he checked in here with a report on Halo PC and how it played under large, networked tournament conditions. Some interesting info in there, go give it a look. Mmmm, overheating fuel-rod guns… 🙂