Compassghost, deprived of his ability to post his cool flash stuff on our forum, has asked us to point out two new Pelican-related pieces over on the Halo Babies forums. Pretty nice work!

Xbox.com has updated thier Halo 2 Readiness Guide, with Part 2 (Enter the Halo Universe) and Part 3 (Tips from the Halo 2 Beta Testers) now online. The first gives you a nice list of appropriate books, movies, and music to help get you in the mood – the second gives you tips from beta testers on gameplay strategies. Good stuff in both. Early props go to MELEE, who sent this in last night.

Stuntmutt takes a look at potential casting pitfalls in today’s One One Se7en.

Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod, has lost their home temporarily because Gamespy’s dynamic servers are down – so they’ve got an update posted over at the Junkyard. Today is Covenant day, it seems. Thanks to Mhaddy for the heads-up.

Wow – two WILDLY different audio submissions today – actually, one came in this weekend, but I didn’t get to it (sorry, guys!).

• Welcome to Halo was created by Kil and Lox – it’s a Halo-themed version of the Welcome to Atlanta remix from Jermaine Dupri. Guns and rap – they just seem to go together, don’t they? 3:21, 4.6 mb mp3
• Death of Cortana Sample is another Mothergoat creation – don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers here (at least none that Mothergoat knows of); he came up with the idea after reading First Strike. A moving piano piece – I’m looking forward to the full version. 1:36 long, 1.4 mb mp3

Grab them both – or pick the style that appeals to you.

Wired News has a great article on the I Love Bees phenomenon – a look at what’s behind it, and how it’s affected people. The whole shebang comes to a close on November 9, just in time for Halo 2 – I can’t WAIT for the summaries after that. This particular game, while not a product of Bungie, DOES tie in to the Halo 2 storyline, and will provide quite a bit of useful backstory for folks interested in the entire Halo universe. Just a few more weeks! The final quote in the article is priceless. Thanks, Stephen Smith.

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, has taken a long, hard look at the whole piracy issue (specifically with respect to the Halo 2 leak), and has blown out a few myths, and dispelled a few unreasonable rationalizations. It also looks at WHY the community has reacted the way it has. Definitely worth a read.

In early September, Fire Team Charlie released FTC13b as a member-exclusive movie. This saddened many people who wanted to see it, but didn’t want to (or couldn’t) pay the $10 membership fee. Well… now you can watch it anyway – just visit the site for details. Thanks, Ash!

Today’s Penny Arcade might, or might not, involve a game you’re all familiar with. You’ll have to crack the code to decide. Thanks, KP.

I’ve turned off the Fate of the Forum poll – the ‘Yes’ percentage is almost exactly 77.7% of the total vote, and that was too good to pass up. 😉 (It’s been hovering around this point for the last 18 hours or so, but I wanted to give it a little longer last night.) Four thousand or so of you have weighed in on this – and 3/4 of you want the forum shut down, to avoid spoilers. We talked, behind the scenes, about opening the forum back up in a moderated form – you could post, but your post would be queued until a moderator approved it. This would eliminate the chance for spoilers on the forum – but would 1) slow down conversation dramatically, since posts wouldn’t be viewable until a moderator got around to approving them, and 2) would guarantee spoilage for moderators. It was a narrow vote, but the ‘keep the forum closed’ voices won in the end. So – that’s what we’re going to do. The forum will reopen on November 11; if you’re actually playing the game, we’d recommend you come back even later than that. (Once you’ve STARTED playing, it’s totally up to you to keep your nose out of the forum; we can’t be your willpower FOREVER, you know. 🙂 ) In the meantime, we’re going to try and upgrade the forum software; you may or may not notice the visual differences (depends on the viewing mode you use, I suppose), but hopefully you’ll notice the under-the-hood tweaks by how much easier they make some things. And if you really miss community conversation, there’s always our IRC channel; the moderators are pretty brutal when it comes to spoiler chat, so you’re reasonably safe there.

Daily Game has posted Duke’s Diary – the story of a controller’s visit to San Francisco to play Halo 2. Yeah, you read that right. Now go read it.

Wow… very nice. If you visit nilerogers.com, you can listen to a 1:45 long snippet of the Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix – composed by Marty O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, with guitars by Steve Vai. It rocks. Thanks, palatine. (The Flash popup that goes with the song is pretty nice, but if you’re having trouble with it, the music is here.)

Gah. I wrote this up this morning – but forgot to post it. Credit goes to Rampancy.net, which is where I found it. Over on MTV.com, there’s a story about “the Halo 2 Council”, a group of ‘7’ (if you count each of three bands as ‘1’) who receive a specialized xbox/screen combination and a copy of Halo 2 before November 9. It’s not at all clear 1) how this list was compiled, 2) WHY this list was compiled, or 3) why Bungie allowed these 7 discs out of their hands when nobody else is getting them… but that’s the way celebrity is, I guess. (I’d be pretty unhappy if I were a member of Breaking Benjamin – I’m one of three popular bands to be featured in the game, and the OTHER TWO get Pelican cases? Ouch!) Thanks to the dozens of people who wrote pointing out that we missed this story.

Yesterday, we pointed out a story on Xbox.com in which an editor of OXM stated that they’d have a world-exclusive pre-release Halo 2 review that covers Campaign play. We got word today from SketchFactor that yes, it’s true, they’re going to have the only published story with a street date before November 9 – but that they did this story in conjunction with Bungie, and they aren’t releasing any plot spoilers for the game. There WILL be new information – but it’s nothing that would ruin the single-player game, and it will be in a special sealed section of the review in any case. If you want to read it, you actually have to rip it open. Bungie still wants you to have a pristine single-player experience (if you can) – they aren’t letting anyone OFFICIAL ruin that.

Stuntmutt’s taken his own (well, okay, someone else’s, repackaged) view of the entire leaked Halo 2 issue in a special Sunday One One Se7en.

Whoa. Ms Man has managed to get to the bottom of Truth and Reconciliation, winning c0ld’s contest and proving me a pessimist. Pictures will be up on his site later today, a movie tomorrow. Congratulations!

More mirrors for yesterday’s high-quality Heart is a Lonely Hunter release – Djof points out that it’s available on the Psyjnir.org Hotline server, and the DJ has put a copy up at HaloImpulse. Don’t miss this one! The next episode comes out in a couple of days. (While we’re mentioning HaloImpulse, they’ve also got the QuickTime versions of last week’s video Bungie Update up, as well.)

Dark Helmet, over at HaloPlanet, has set up the ‘favorite tricks’ votes – go and make your opinion known! There’s a Favorite Multiplayer Trick vote, a Favorite Coop Trick vote, and a Favorite Single-Player Trick vote. The choices you have are the ones nominated and seconded in the past two weeks on the High Impact Halo forums. Update – looks like the polls were broken, or something. A new poll page is up.

A couple of people mentioned that Halo 2 was the subject of a story on 60 Minutes in Australia – apparently, it’s news because it’s looking like November 9 (and the days that follow) will ‘affect the industrialized world’ with the number of ‘sick’ days taken. The web release is here, and a transcript is coming soon. Thanks, Octavian and ragereset.

Churchofhalo found a funny error message on the net – the images are busted, but the text is humorous.