Author: Louis Wu

Three new cutscenes for you in the Cutscene Library – Objects in Mirror are Larger Than They Appear (accidentally released a couple of days ago for a brief time), Shooting Gallery, and That Old, Familiar Feeling (the end of Sacred Icon). Get to downloading!

Today’s Calvin and Halo makes you think a lot about the uproar over the Rumble Pit Reset a few days ago.

TricKy points out that Xbox Gamers has announced their 2004 Best Of awards, and Halo walked away with quite a few: Best First-Person Shooter, Best Xbox Live Game, Best Soundtrack, Best Story, Best Multiplayer Game, and Game Of The Year 2004. It also won a runner-up award for Best Graphics. Not too shabby!

The Junkyard’s Bungie Tribute Poetry Contest has wrapped up – the winners have been posted. Swing by to read all the details (and the poetry itself). First heads-up goes to Jillybean, who got a cookie.

HALOChat points out that the CyberAthlete Amateur League is starting its Halo 2 season – maps, gametypes, and preseason schedules have been posted. Get your game on!

WINBIG24 sent word about a trailer for download over at HaloMods. It was created by ShadowX, and it uses our Cutscene Library (and a War of the Worlds trailer) to paint a grim picture of invasion. 5.9 mb, in WMP9 format. (Might have been better to keep the widescreen aspect of the originals, though…) Update:…

Tom ‘Darkphibre’ Mathews has created another Halo 2 statistical tool – this one sucks up all the data from a particular game (everything, down to the GameViewer), and dumps it into an Access database. He’s got some examples of how the info can be used, as well as download links for the beta version. Swing…

The ‘sell Halo-related stuff at auction’ phenomenon is exploding. Here’s what we’ve heard of in the past day or so: A repainted Warthog, in ‘Special Ops’ colors (currently $45, 3 days left) – thanks, Penguin080Another resin statue MC (currently $25, 6 days left) – thanks, HeliosAnother 6-foot MC statue (Buy it now price of $1200,…

Frankie posted an update to the Rumble Pit Reset issue last night; they’ve decided to put stats to where they were before the January 1 reset. That means all the games played SINCE January 1 (through about 4 hours ago) will be wiped – but they decided that was preferable to resetting 2 months of…

Jade8704 wrote to us to point out that the large Master Chief statue selling on eBay we mentioned a few days ago has sold, for $710. The smaller one has about half an hour to go on its auction – it’s currently sitting at $257.49. And the resin model is at $305, with almost 4…

Looks like the Rumble Pit reset a couple of days ago was a mistake… Bungie’s looking into possible solutions. (There’ll be more info tomorrow, it seems.) Check Frankie’s note at Bungie.net for details. UPDATE: Frankie posted an update explaining that rank resets were caused by a glitch in the system, and that ranks will be…

Okay, first off, a removal – I’ve replaced three of the four downloadable versions of the ‘Ladies Like…’ cutscene with a single ‘delta’ vid that contains just the changed content (similar to what was done for the Helljumpers scene). I’ve also added two new scenes – the final one from Regret, and the opening scene…

Stuntmutt submitted a New Year’s Strip recently – but someone fell down on the job and forgot to post it. We’ll pretend this never happened, and you can read it as today’s One One Se7en. Poor MC…

That Weasel writes to say that Episode 17 of ‘Grunts are People Too!!’ has been posted. I don’t get it. 🙁 (You can download it in QT6, WMP9, or DivX formats, though.)

3Suns writes to point out that TalkXbox has posted Week 8 of their Halo 2 Strategy series – this one focuses on Ivory Tower Assault.

Goose241 writes to mention that the Halo 2 Wiki started up recently now contains a section for Campaign strategy tips; visit to add your own, or see what’s there.

A few Halo 2-related stories out there today:Ve3d.com reports the results of their Halo 2 vs Half-Life 2 poll… and Halo 2 lost miserably.ZDNetIndia reviewed Halo 2. (Pretty standard likes and dislikes.)Marin Independent-Journal picked their top 10 choices for 2004 games – Halo 2 came in 6th, behind such notable blockbusters as Spider-Man 2.

Last year, we hosted a comic series called Halo: Resolution. It closed its doors in July… but recently, Fuzzy (one half of its creative team) released 6 sheets of sprites used in the strip. See what you can do with them! UNSC (13K) or PNG (17K) Master Chief (21K) or PNG (26K) Various H:R Backgrounds…

Rampancy.net has put up their impressions of Regret – a beautiful, but narrowly playable level. Read the whole piece for full details.

Another pair of cutscenes have been added to the Cutscene Library – Testament reveals some of the Prophet’s plans in Regret, and Objects in Mirror gets us started in the Quarantine Zone. Go grab ’em! (I’m gonna have to reformat the page soon… too many images for a single page.) Update: Oops – looks like…