Hehe – Roger Wilco seems to be as tired of a certain buzz-inducer as we are.

Want some Bungie schwag, but thought the Bungie Store was a little expensive? Looks like they’re moving – and having a fire sale on existing merchandise. Everything’s a few bucks off. Buy before August 31, though, because on that day the eCS/Bungie Store closes for good. Read the details on the front page. Thanks to Ross Mills for the first heads-up.

He’th Baskin really enjoyed the monk chanting in the Halo theme, but was frustrated that it was never by itself. So he mixed his own, 3:32, 4.8 mb mp3 version.

I have listened to as much Halo related music I could get my hands on but was always disappointed to find the monk chanting to be limited and always mixed with other instruments. So I set it upon myself to try and mix and match chant music from different Bungie tracks into a track of its own.

You can listen to it, too – we’re hosting it for him. Update: we’ve replaced the original with a new version that has less noise – he’th spent a couple of hours cleaning it up after release.

Wow, must be a day for exceptions. Back in March, we closed down the Guest Submissions section of One One Se7en – Stuntmutt himself created Guest Strip 100, and we said ‘no more’. Today, however, we’ve received a strip from Gruntsbane, the artist behind Halo Babies, and his Guest One One Se7en, a tribute to yesterday’s 200th strip, was too much fun to leave alone – so I’m reopening the Guest Section for this one last entry. Enjoy!

We don’t normally mention new websites on the front page any more – when we automated the Links section, the flood of new links (well over 100 of them) made that totally unfeasible – but there are always exceptions, and today we have one for you. CEAds, the Halo CE Promotion Project, is a website to show off the best and brightest of Halo CE and to help bring more Halo players to Halo CE. The ‘Why Play Halo CE’ page details what makes CE superior to PC, listing a good number of Halo CE’s new features. It’s still new, so content is sparse, but the idea is solid: Halo CE is the future of Halo on a PC, and more people should be playing it. This website will help show you why.

Today’s Calvin and Halo points out that some skills don’t translate well from virtual to real world…

Wow. 200 strips. And that doesn’t count Sundays, or Holidays, or Guest strips, or Archived strips. There are a lot of things you can say about Stuntmutt, but fly-by-night isn’t one of them. Today’s One One Se7en has got to be one of the worst puns EVER. Update: That BOLL just COULDN’T leave well enough alone, could he?

Five new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section… not too rough! Go read.

Gruntsbane, from Halo Babies, took some time out to talk to Dolbex, from MLGPro.com, about the comic strip, and the upcoming MLG Seattle event. Give it a read!

Agony points out a poll on the World Cyber Games site, asking for suggestions for games to be played at WCG 2005. Halo 2 is one of the FPS choices. If you vote, you have to vote for two choices in every category – just a heads-up.

Sparkypinball has posted another in his series of Halo multiplayer guides – this one is for Team Slayer. Swing on by Rampancy.net and read it. (And thanks to Sparky for pointing it out on our forum.)

Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod, has posted another update; Phantoms, Pelicans, FRGs. Thanks, Pballwizard.

Not to be outdone in the tournament writeup arena, cooked Gamer rapture wrote up a description of cooked Gamers’ path through the recent CPL Extreme Halo Championships (they fought back to second place after losing their very first match). Go read, and turn as green with envy as the $11,500 check they’re holding up… We heard about it on our forum.

There is a MASSIVE writeup on last week’s Halo50k3 tournament in Atlanta over at Bungie.net, penned by Dolbex, the man who made it all happen. Give it a read. Good stuff.

Makes me sad that this has to be pointed out… but what’s got to be done has got to be done. Frankie jumped into a thread on Bungie.net’s Underground Forum to flatly deny that Halo 2, or a demo for Halo 2, or anything REMOTELY RELATED TO PLAYABLE CODE will be released on August 24.

Halo 2 comes out on Nov. 9th or Nov. 11th for the UK. It does NOT come out on Aug 24th. You know what does come out on Aug. 24th? Some OXM special which does NOT, and I repeat does NOT have a Halo 2 demo on it.

It doesn’t get any plainer than that, folks. Go back to figuring out the ilovebees puzzle… but leave a playable Halo 2 out of it. (This was the last news post of yesterday’s news day… but apparently Count Zero was a bit too circumspect in his wording; I’ve received 3 separate emails from folks who didn’t notice that it was there at the top of the news page. I hope this is a bit more obvious.)

Frankie finally weighs in in an attempt to quash an incredibly persistent rumor. Can we all stop posting this as a fact now? Thanks to Littlebigman for pointing this out.

Watching (and judging!) 8 hours of video was a non-trivial exercise… but we’ve done it. The judges’ votes for our Going Nowhere Fast contest have been tallied, and a winner has emerged. By a really narrow margin, goatrope’s Silent Cartographer run was edged out by Trefitch’s Maw run – and Tre will be able to practice for the NEXT contest we host on his brand new Limited Edition Halo Xbox. (Kudos, too, to Cody Miller’s Library run, which also garnered high marks from all judges.) Again – you can download all 10 winning runs from the Going Nowhere Fast Status page. Congratulations to EVERYONE who entered – we had a blast watching these, and it was wonderful to see the interest this generated. Even if you didn’t win, just entering puts you in a pretty small minority of Halo speedrunners! (And yes, there is one more movie still coming; a best-of, cool tricks vid. Timing is still unknown, but we haven’t forgotten about it!)

Wow, very nice. Halo Universe has put up a new Halo 2 print ad (German) – it’s 1024×1494, 288K. (Thanks, Marc.) Beautiful! Can’t wait to see this one in US mags…

AngelicLionheart noticed an article on IGN PC about G-Phoria, G4TV’s Game of the Year show. In it is a mention of a playable Halo 2 demo (most likely the Zanzibar level shown at E3). AngelicLionheart wonders if we’ll see some footage of gameplay from someone there… To be complete, it should be noted that Frensa Geran pointed out that Halo 2 would be playable at G-Phoria last week, on our forum. For more on G-Phoria, there’s also an article at Gamespot, including a tiny film with a few seconds of Zanzibar footage (I couldn’t tell if it had been recycled from older releases, though).

The Xtournaments Crew writes to say that registration has been left open a bit longer, because of a mistake last Saturday – and to point out that the Spokane, WA tourney location has moved. Details can be found on the Xtournaments website. (For those just joining us, Xtournaments is a multicity 4v4 national Halo tournament taking place in various iGames locations beginning on August 14, with $15,000 in cash and prizes on the line.)