Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo… do the Hustle! (Thanks to Steener.)

Thanks to both Simon Hill, via email, and Brandon Tyler, on our forum, for the heads-up on Xbox.com’s newest Halo Picture Story. It’s not viewable on a mac, or on some PC configurations, it seems… but the audio works fine. If anyone can get screen captures, we’d be most appreciative…

Not sure how I missed this last night… but Dinky, from HaloJuggaloProductions, has not only posted the HNC final segment for download, he’s sent along a new URL for a flash-based Halo design, and would love feedback on it.

Some mirrors for you: DeaDSwiTcH has made the entire Halo National Championship set available – Round 1, Round 2, and Round 3. At some point, I’ll even add these to the Movies database…

Looking for a challenge? This sounds like fun.

Got a problem with Halo? Red Loser does…

A little sooner than I’d planned to post it – but as I said, I’m headed out. We’ve got the third and final chunk of the Halo National Championship, as televised by G4Tv, up and ready for download. 8:04 long, 31.7 mb big, in QT format. The final 8 play a 50-kill, no-shield slayer match on Blood Gulch… you gotta love that spawn point sniping! Once again, it’s available at Mythica.org (which has spit out a quarter of a terabyte worth of files for you guys in the last 6 days, I might add). Just in time, the Psyjnir Complex Hotline server comes back online, and we’ve tossed all three segments there, in the Halo Movies folder. (Shouldn’t be hard to find, since the section got completely wiped out in the recent outage – but Psyrixx is hoping to have a backup in place sometime today. If that happens, search for g4hnc files.) We’re thrilled to hear of other mirrors – but I won’t be able to post them for a while; I don’t get near a computer again for at least 12 hours. Enjoy!

Warbow posts Round 2 of his Hide and Seek contest – the rules are a bit different, so check ’em carefully. 5 images this time. Get to it!

It’s possible that more Fan Fiction will be submitted later today, but I’ll be on a plane. For right now, we’ve got Domitri Giovanni’s Starship Daybreak, part 1 for you. Domitri wants to make sure he should submit the rest of the parts, so be sure to comment!

A dark desktop from Professor Keo – check our Wallpaper section.

As much as I realize this might sour the Halo experience for some of you, I feel obligated to post it. David S. notes that the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine has an article on Justin Timberlake, of ‘NSync – apparently, he hurt himself, and he’s been sitting around the house a lot during recovery. Doing what? Yep, playing Halo. Hey! It’s still a cool game! No, come back! Wait…

A couple of days ago, we posted a wallpaper from Lexicus, which also acted as a teaser for the trophy for a then-upcoming fragfest. The contest is now over (won by Nate)… Lexicus has sent in an image of the trophy. Nice!

A couple of weeks ago, we reported about a Covenant model for the game Jedi Knight II – and yesterday, Darth Epy0n sent in a few in-game shots of this mod in action. Check ’em out to see what a Cov elite might look like in a different game…

Ross Mills, putting together the work of three forumgoers, posts the solution to Warbow’s Hide-and-Seek puzzle mentioned a couple of days ago. Read Warbow’s confirmation here.

Dan Chosich, who has already proven his abilities as a Halo filmmaker, has decided to release another teaser for his upcoming Halo50K trailer. You can find links in this forum post.

Geez, forgot… Dinky has mirrored the second Halo National Championship Semifinal, as well – you can find it on HaloJuggaloProductions.

Sunday morning Fan Fiction:

• Rebirth – Shadow’s Prologue, Part 2, by Shadow/Archangel’s Blade/KnightmareWolf/Spartan415
• Swords of Deception, by Jahan
• The Legend of Kazak’-Dun, part 4, by Kane172
• The Battle Within, by Gasmask
• Fallen Angel, Part 3, by Gruntkiller/Covert
• Starjacked Part 2, by Dispraiser

There’s more stuff in the queue (artwork and stuff), but I’m headed out for some sledding… be patient.

Part Two – with a side of fries. The second (of 2) semifinal round of the Halo National Championship is now online. 6:53 long, 26.9 mb big, in QuickTime 5 format… 8 more competitors, plus Chris Carney and Hamilton Chu from Bungie, giving you some background on the game. Major props once again to Bigsauce, who brought us the hi-res mpeg version of this episode of G4’s Arena!

Okay, the plan had been to release one segment of this program every couple of days; the first one was released on Thursday. However, yesterday we were contacted by one of the competitors, Bigsauce, who provided us with much higher quality mpeg versions of the films. (G4 provided these files to all competitors.) I’m currently in the process of converting these to a more web-friendly size… but it’s slow going (there’s a lot of crunching to do). Likely what will happen is that later today we’ll release segment 2 (the second semifinal match) as planned… but with the new versions as the base, rather than the original VHS-ripped versions. At the end of the cycle, we’ll re-release the first segment, for those who strive for completeness; folks who just wanted to see the vids can pass on it. I must say that getting a hand from one of the sixteen finalists (he placed 4th, overall, out of the more than ten thousand competitors who played in the HNC) simply rocks. Okay, back to re-encoding…

Seen over at Battleground: Halo – a new Halo site has come online. Halo World is still under construction, but the content is beginning to fill in. (There hasn’t been a Halo website by that name since Cyberbob’s German site went under more than 2 years ago.)