On our forum, Harabek announced a new machinima series: Pre-Game Lobby. Interesting bunch of characters, an ongoing Matchmaking-based storyline. This first episode is 19 minutes long, viewable on YouTube in two parts, or downloadable from Filefront in hi-res (almost 300 mb). This one shows potential!(Louis Wu 11:43:00 +0000)

While we slept last night, news on a whole lot of machinima crossed our desks. First up: Spriggs Episode 8 was posted. The storyline’s getting more serious (though it’s still pretty lighthearted in tone) - and my view of Spriggs is changing. 12 minutes long, downloadable in AVI format or streamable on YouTube. Go watch!(Louis Wu 11:40:10 +0000)

Sigafoos let us know that The Riot 92 is now up - 21 minutes, 9 megs of community news, map discussion, and a discussion of lolcats pics… without the actual pics.(Louis Wu 16:20:33 +0000)

Yesterday, I asked for stories of people who met (or just played with) their significant others on the Halo battlefield. The thread started off really slowly… and I was afraid it was a bust. (The first couple of posts were dumb jokes, and the next series was totally off-topic.) However, I woke up this morning to a whole bunch of exactly what I was looking for - swing by the thread and check out folks who found their love online, who introduced their love to Halo (and then saw that blossom into more than tolerance), who find Halo as a great way to interact. If you’ve got a similar story - chime in! This stuff is great.(Louis Wu 14:07:00 +0000)

Wow. I think we might have weathered the storm. Last night, we helped Bungie host “Our Favorite Things”, a trailer that should pump you up for the Heroic DLC (whether you have it or not) - We served nearly 25,000 copies of it from three separate pipes in the past 12 hours, eating almost a terabyte and a half of bandwidth. I know that some of you went away empty-handed - I’m sorry about that. The load on all three servers is down a bit right now, and the YouTube version Bungie posted last night did, eventually, show up. For those who watched it - what did you think? If you haven’t seen the Weekly Update yet (which provided great new pics of Avalanche, details on when you’ll hear more about the third new map in the upcoming Legendary map pack, a reminder that Team SWAT is going strong for the weekend on LIVE, and a link to the new Bungie podcast, featuring Chris Butcher, in addition to the movie itself), you should visit Bungie.net and do so (or read it in our Weekly Update Archive). Crazy night!(Louis Wu 13:46:00 +0000)

Okay, this is just a quick post because there’s some confusion about the Heroic trailer being linked to in tonight’s Weekly Update, over at Bungie.net. We’ve put up three separate mirrors of the videos - grab the one that’s the right size and filetype for you:

QuickTime 360p (17 mb): files1 | files2 | files3

QuickTime 720p (93 mb): files1 | files2 | files3

WMP9 360p (42 mb): files1 | files2 | files3

WMP9 720p (94 mb): files1 | files2 | files3

Don’t hurt us too bad!(Louis Wu 01:55:40 +0000)

Hawty McBloggy continues her ‘Friday Caption Fun‘ series - she’s got results from last week’s pic, as well as a new pic for you to caption. It’s great to see what people come up with!(Louis Wu 11:11:58 +0000)

trigger119 stumbled on a trailer for Contamination, an upcoming machinima vid from rtidwell. Nice cinematography!(Louis Wu 14:56:23 +0000)

Ducain sent along this link to a video done by SneakyPete. It’s been a while since I watched a Halo 1 (well, in this case, Halo PC) trick vid… but man, this guy is GOOD. Check it out - for nostalgia, for smiles, just for the heck of it. YouTube-hosted.(Louis Wu 14:54:00 +0000)

James Center got married last weekend… and he and his new wife are such Halo fans that the wedding cake was Halo-themed! Check it out.(Louis Wu 11:55:40 +0000)