Author: Louis Wu

The Cutscene Library grows with the inclusion of the final Halo 2 scene today; the failsafes of the system are revealed. We have one more release for you – the credits, a rather large (and largely uninteresting to most) vid… but we’ll release the small bit of story at the end as a separate download,…

Yet another Best of the Year award for Bungie – 1Up (the website for EGM, XBN, and CGW magazines, among others) posted their Readers Choice Awards, and Halo 2 took Best Online/Multiplayer, and Best Game of the Year. I got this one from Frankie himself.

Bungie has posted the next in its ongoing series of Weekly What’s Updates at Bungie.net. A long answer to the ‘why is cheating so rampant?’ question (but one that probably won’t assuage the most angry among the players), along with a bunch of other stuff. One rumor we neglected to report this week was that…

Took a little while… but I’ve finally found time to clear out the Miscellaneous Art queue. 20 new items, dating back about 3 weeks. Some of everything – sketches, paintings, digital, traditional, you name it. Go look.

Eep – almost forgot today’s additions to the Cutscene Library – these are the last four scenes before the big finale. The end of High Charity, and the three scenes from The Great Journey. Almost there! (As always, thanks to Sniper 058 for the recordings.)

According to Slashdot, the Red vs Blue crew will participate in a panel discussion on machinima at the end of January at the Sundance film festival, presenting a live demo showing how they produce RvB. Nice! Thanks, full-bore. (The ‘feature in the January 2005 issue of Wired’ mention has to do with Rooster Teeth’s The…

Rampancy.net continues its Halo 2 Impressions series with Sacred Icon – a discontinuity, but not a permanent one. (The two skipped levels will be covered later.) A very nice look at an effort Bungie made to address a major fan complaint about the first game… go read!

Another hidden Bungie inspiration comes to light in today’s One One Se7en. Or something. (Methinks this engagement business is going to Stuntmutt’s head…)

Twelve new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today. At least one long-unseen name, as well…

Termi, of Shaolin Productions, created a Halo 2 trailer recently – cutscene footage and added text and effects. The end product is pretty slick. You can grab it, in its original DivX format, on the Shaolin Productions website (there’s some description and a few screen grabs, as well). You can also get it from files2.bungie.org…

Hehe – TeamXbox put up their own analysis of the Bungie/TXB faceoff that was this week’s Halo Humpday Challenge… it’s not that they’re crowing, or anything, it’s just that they’re… well, crowing. PIctures, stats, even movies. Yeah, they’re milking it… but it’s fun. Go read. Thanks, 3Suns.

There’s a new comic up over at Halo Babies – the end of the Getting Started series. Poor Cortana! While you’re there, there’s a ton of new fan art and graphic novels in progress to see… check ’em out!

Welcome to our latest inmate – Jillybean has joined the Halo Story team. For now, she’s on tea and crumpets duty, until she learns the ropes… but as soon as she gets the hang of things, and stops blaming Cortana for everything, we’ll be letting her play with the toys around here. Welcome aboard, Jilly!

One last one for the day – There’s a new Humpday Challenge Writeup over at B.net. The Bungie Chimps took on TeamXbox… and got their butts handed to them. In small pieces. The first major defeat for the home team (the forum mods don’t really count). OUCH! Go read the gory details for yourself.

A list of ultra-popular Halo movie makers must include Hickadam (and his partner in crime, Dark 72), creators of such classics as A**hole (yeah, sometimes we try to be family friendly), Birds, and Holiday. The films are characterized by liberal doses of humor, tight integration of action and song lyrics, and preternatural timing – but…

We have four new cutscenes for you today in the Cutscene Library, because they’re not very large. This finishes up Gravemind, takes us all the way through Uprising, and starts off High Charity. Go watch!

A month ago, we mentioned a tourney in the UK, run by Vagusnet. Gamesindustry.biz has some more info today – the full prize list for the winner and runner-up. Go see what loot is available!

Bellator wrote to us recently to point out that there’s quite a bit of information about Halo 2 characters over at the Wikipedia – go check it out… and maybe add to it!

The Houston Press profiles Matt Leto, better known as Zyos on the Halo professional circuit. It’s a monster article, looking at Zyos from his early days, through the start of his Halo professional career, through the present day. Fascinating read. Thanks, Rampancy.net and cookedGamers.

There’s an editorial over at TeamXbox that holds up Bungie’s Halo 2 stats system as a model to be emulated by the rest of the developer community – and to back up what is written, the clan that wrote the article is putting out an open-source stats package that runs on php/mysql in the near…