Having a hard time keeping up with the forum? Can’t quite manage to read the 350+ posts per day? Aren’t named Louis Wu? Well, never fear, the Weekly Review is here! After over a year’s hiatus, the Weekly Review has returned to summarize the goings on in our forum. If you can only read one post and one post only, better make it this one.

ben informs us that Fire Team Charlie challenges you to add a voice track to their first video. Check out their site for details.

Over at the Junkyard, Evergreen98 has written a couple of interesting articles on the upcoming Halo PC/Mac release. The first two are up now, with the third along in a few days. Thanks to both vector40 and MrFluffyPants26 for pointing this out.

Break Point writes to tell us of his site, bphalo.com. Go check it out!

Last of the Half-Life trilogy on One One Se7en. Pax.

A few days ago, The Invisable O posted a challenge on the forum: Has anyone ever mapped the entire inner surface of Halo? BOLL took him up on it, and managed to capture some great images of the ring, which he posted in the original thread, along with additional images and explanation. Every time someone declares tricking dead…

Subnova, one of our primary movie mirrors, and who also shoulder some of our server-side processing, has run into trouble with their SQL server. The shared news search feature should still be working, but all movies hosted there are down. Unfortunately it looks like this will be a long downtime, as the message says. (If you’d like to help shorten it, the Donate button still works…)

What is the hidden significance of the seven pieces of fan fiction?

• D-Day II, Part One, by Hunter_Killer
• Return to Earth (Chptr 1: Attacked), by CoLd BlooDed
• Delta Squadron: Chapter One; Delta Squadron, by Steele
• Its Just One of Those Days (Prologue: 03), by Elfster
• A John Before Halo: The Invaision Begins (Part 3), by J-117
• Halo Zero /p6/ Brute Force… Quite Literally, by nicholas
• Halo Zero /p7/ The Prophet Meeting, by nicholas

One last movie, before I go: This one’s from MaverickJ, and it’s called Oddball Tactics, part 1. It’s 9.9 mb, in QuickTime format. (You can also find it, in WMP9 format, on Maverick’s Project Spartan site.) It shows you a bunch of slick tricks you can use to gain the upper hand in a Team Oddball game. Beautiful! As of right now, I’m on vacation, and the site is in the capable hands of Count Zero, mnemesis, and Ding. Any mail sent directly to me will not be seen for a week; if you have info you want posted on HBO, send it to halo@bungie.org. Enjoy yourselves – I certainly plan to!

We’ve put up a mirror page for the Sidewinder Saga, because it was getting confusing figuring out where (outside of the Halogamers.com home site) you could get the various movies. Thanks to Team Ice for their mirroring help – as an aside, Blade has also posted the Halo 2 Announcement trailer and The E3 Demo trailer on their video page.

Xbox Ottawa has put up #4 of their FTC vid series. Ex-Special Ops, huh? Current version of this one (3:38 long) is 23.6 mb, in DivX 5 AVI format… but they might have a slightly smaller QuickTime version up in the not-too-distant future.

Four Miscellaneous Art pieces for you – there’s no one-liner I can think of that describes them all, so just go look.

A couple of interesting (and colorful) desktops today in the Wallpaper section. Check ’em out!

11 Fan Fiction bits for you today.

• Running Riot- Part 1, by Simon James
• Shadow Spartans, Chatper 4: The Running Prophet, by Agent Shade and Arinoth Koby
• The Homecoming – Part 1, by Tim Ricciardello
• Running Riot-Part 2, by Simon James
• The Fall of Fate: Raid (10), by ‘Nosolee
• A Final Shot – Part 2, by James
• Chapter 1: Key to Survival, by Shinai Purugganan
• Oblivion Chapter 5, by Reclaimer
• A Marine’s Tale: The First Days, by pj-NYkr90
• Project: Shadow Spartan, Chapter 5, by Agent Shade
• Buried Treasure(4), by Frensa Geran

Read ’em, make the authors happy.

After a long span with no entries, we received another submission for the Halo 2 disk cover collection. Good to know folks are still thinking about cover art!

Derek Brown is starting up a new site called haloevents – he’s hoping to create a database of upcoming Halo events around the nation. Visitors will be able to search this database for events near them. This requires input from you; the more events submitted to this site, the more people who will come to search it for information relevant to them, which will make the pool of event-submitters larger, which will help the database grow, and so on, and so on. In addition to events, there will be reviews of multiplayer gear, suggestions for LAN party hosting, and multiplayer setups. Go visit, and submit content!

IGN PC wraps up its week-long Halo PC coverage with two new articles; a general one is available to all readers, and gets a few last answers out of Randy Pitchford, and a more specialized, Insider-only one contains a 78 mb, 7:48 video interview with Pitchford. There’s a lot of feel-good discussion about Halo, and a bunch of info which has come up elsewhere… but the mod info (which was touched on in the free article) is, once again, really positive. Good news for low bandwidth multiplayer users: 56k modems will definitely be supported, and able to play against LPBs. Thanks to Da Loaph for pointing this out.

voX has put up the first of 5 pieces of a new series, called The Two Betrayels (sic) at his site, Halo². The trailer is quite short (33 seconds), but sets the stage for another nicely filmed movie. (5.3 mb, DivX 4 avi) I’ve gotta say, I really appreciate what Red vs Blue has done for the Halo moviemaking community – all this storytelling is fantastic.

Jake ‘Evergreen98’ Billo, over at the Junkyard, is taking a pretty close look at the PC version of Halo, comparing what’s in it to what’s in the Xbox version, and helping you decide where YOU want to be playing once it’s out. It’s a three part article – Part one is up right now. Thanks to vector40 for the heads-up.

Never got a movie up at Mythica yesterday, and dang, if the bandwidth usage didn’t drop below 7 Mbit/sec. The inside of the pipe’s gonna start feeling lonely – not enough bits passing through! Next up is a movie we should have posted a while ago; it seems to have gotten slightly lost. This film is a trailer for the Ninjas on Fire Forum Exclusive XBC Tournament. Nothing in the documentation sent with the movie (or at the NoFF Tournament website) gives an actual date (or dates) for this gathering… but the vid is nicely put together. It’s only 6.4 mb, in WMP7 format. I’m a little surprised at some of the misses… but hey, everybody’s got off days, right? This was submitted by zhakahunterDARK, and more information can be found at the Ninja Tournament website.