John Rivas also points out a Christian-perspective review over at Plugged In Online. (It’s linked off the right side of the front page at the moment, the title is “‘Halo 2’: Save the World; Lose Your Soul?” – but it opens in a popup window; the full URL to the article, missing site navigation, is here.) This one suggests the game can damage you:

The heart-pumping action that makes Halo 2 so engaging comes at the cost of (potentially) reducing the value of real people in the real world.

Eh. I pretty heartily disagree with that assessment… but it’s certainly an opinion.

Tons of articles today are looking at Microsoft’s bottom line, and how it was bolstered by Halo 2. The LA Times has a piece showing that Halo 2’s $300 million in revenue helped the entertainment division post a gain instead of a loss. (Total sales were $10.8 billion for the year; $1.4 billion of that was in the entertainment division… so a bit more than 10% of Microsoft’s income comes from Entertainment, and one fifth of THAT came from a game that was released with less than two months in the year remaining. Not too shabby! Halo 2 accounts for almost 3% of Microsoft’s overall revenues!) Other articles: BBC (thanks, Shinesevens), Gamespot. Update: Oops, forgot one; TeamXbox put up a story, too (thanks, John Rivas).

New Halo Babies comic is up – a wry look at a contentious issue. Good stuff.

goweb reminded me that I neglected to post a note about a cool prize won by Flashman in a contest over at Xbox Resource. Very nice… he’s not TOUCHING the wrapping on that!

I’m definitely behind on news… yesterday was a pretty rough day for me. MrJukes updated his website again; Jump Session #5 has been posted. Between Jump Tactics, synide’s Lockout tips, and this vid, you should be able to jump through Lockout like a master now! (This vid also contains Waterworks and Zanzibar footage… and an appearance by another pretty amazing jumper.)

Wonga. Another ‘Work at Bungie’ article is up – this one covering Marty O’Donnell, Audio Artiste Extraordinaire (yeah, I’ve used something like that before… Hi, Matt!). Frankie asks Marty lots of questions, gets a few answers. Go read!

Today’s Calvin and Halo shows me what I missed in grade school… I guess it’s just as well.

Hehe – looks like the Bungie Boyz managed to find a team they could beat. This week’s Halo Humpday Challenge was against Tips & Tricks Magazine… and the final score was 3-0, Bungie. (The first two games were relatively close, however.) You gotta wonder a little about the fable… go read.

WhitebeardedGnu pointed out that G4TechTV’s X-Play had their ‘Best of 2004’ episode on last night (next showing is today, 4pm ET/1pm PT). Halo 2 was nominated for Best Shooter and Best Game of 2004; it lost the Shooter award to Half-Life 2, but won the Best Game award. Nice!

Gamespot readers were asked to pick the best commercials of 2004 – results came out today. According to this Business Wire article, the Halo 2 ad from last fall was the overall Commercial of the Year. Kudos to ICDedPpl, who found it at Yahoo Finance before Google found the Business Wire article.

In early December, SEspider kicked off a Miniature Halo art contest – deadline was January 31. He’s just extended it a month, because there haven’t been that many entries. Go check out the rules, and the prizes, and get to work!

Gamestyle has put up a Halo 2 review – or at least the online portion of it. They gave it a 10/10. Thanks, Garry Webber.

A few days ago, we mentioned a ‘Halo 2 Montage’ by WaLKa – but the bandwidth ran out pretty quickly. A number of people on our forum were hoping someone would rehost this; we’re pretty tight on bandwidth this month, so we couldn’t put it up for you. However, the community has come to the rescue once again. GloryFish, a fan who wanted to give back, offered a monthly chunk of bandwidth for the cause – so we’re putting this vid back online, if you haven’t seen it. One thing that sets it apart from other vids of its type; the competition is predominantly professional. Check out some of the names in the ‘You sniped __’ and ‘You stuck __’ text… you might recognize them from reports of national Halo tourneys. This vid is 24.7 mb zipped (that’s how WaLKa served it), in WMP9 format. Thanks again to GloryFish for the hosting!

Jillybean and mnemesis are both jumping all over the latest discussion popping up all over the place about Halo story snippets; you can find their latest thoughts on the Halo Story page. The Age of Speculation is upon us!

One of the tidbits that never made it into Halo 2 was a series of images created to show the progression of the Covenant civilization. A cutscene showing these images was included on the Limited Edition DVD – but Joe Staten explained that they were too info-heavy, and needed to be cut. 7he One did a nice job of getting viewable versions out, and posted them on our forum – and with a little help from Walshicus, some reasonably-sized versions were created. We’ve added them to our Miscellaneous section for posterity.

Over at MLGPro.com, synide has put together a Lockout/Colossus tips video – jumps, grabbing items through walls, general strategy. Definitely worth watching if you’re gonna be playing in a competition. It’s available via their Video On Demand service (for-pay on-demand streaming), or free, in rotation, on MLG-TV. Swing by and give it a look!

brokenwatch and UNEXPECTED62 have been working on a pretty cool ‘Halo 2 Advanced Stats‘ page; drop in your gamertag, and get a WHOLE lot of info (over time). Because of the demand for this, if you add your tag today, it’ll be a day or so before you show up on their pages. After that, though, it’ll track you, even through purges. A tiny subpiece of this an emblem checker; put in a gamertag, it spits out that person’s emblem. brokenwatch released this code on the Bungie.net forum – we put a little input script on the front of it, and you can find it here. (We’ll toss a link up in our forum, as well; that’s probably one of the most common places people would WANT this.) It’s unclear how long all of this will continue to work; it relies on Bungie’s good will in allowing other sites (like ours) to leech off their resources, and the thread above has an ominous post from Achronos about that very subject.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Marty O’Donnell and Jay Weinland would be speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference this year. Yesterday, Cybrfrk tipped us off that Chris Butcher and Bart House would also be there; their talk is called ‘Recreating the LAN Party Online: The Networking and Social Infrastructure of Halo 2‘. A little MORE digging around turned up some other talks – Mat Noguchi is speaking on ‘Content Management for Halo 2 and Beyond‘, Damian Isla is discussing ‘Managing Complexity in the Halo 2 AI System‘, and Marty is on a panel (with Nile Rogers and others) to talk about ‘How To Produce and Promote a Game Soundtrack Album‘. Sounds like it’s gonna be a heck of a year to be at the GDC!

Major Nelson’s blog contains an interesting tidbit today; The Mystery Gamer will be playing Halo 2 this evening, after 7 pm ET. If you get in a game with them, and win… you get a T-shirt. More info (or not) can be found in the blog post. Thanks, Cybrfrk.

Littlebigman found a page containing large pics of all of the Halo 2 Series 3 action figures, and prototypes of a couple of the Series 4 figures. (The Ranger Elite looks pretty cool!) He also notes that the page labels Tartarus’ hammer as ‘The Fist of Rukt’ – as far as I know, that name hasn’t made it out of Bungie before now. Go look!