zerosignal wanted people to know about a double elimination Halo tourney that will take place at the Bottom Line Bar and Grille in Austintown, OH on January 28th – no word on entry fees, prizes, or directions. If you’re interested, I guess you should email him. Update: Looks like another one was announced on our forum last night – 4v4 on an upcoming (so far undetermined) Saturday, in Lititz, PA. Entry is $100/team, top prize is $1000. More details in the forum post. Update 2: And another one, in Groton CT, January 7. $10-$20/person, depending on type of competition, prizes based on participation. Go read!

Merecatfish pointed out that he’s got a new HaloCE map available for download – screenshots can be seen in this Gearbox forum thread, and the map itself can be snagged from HaloMaps. Give it a look!

Over at High Impact Halo, you can find a video tribute to the founder of that site, Ducain, put together by a collection of users and staff. The video’s huge – 130 mb or so – and consists mostly of folks letting Ducain know why they’re grateful to him for his contributions to the community. Go read the thread, and download the vid! Thanks to Faktablad for the first heads-up.

Joystiq has a ‘Five reasons why Halo 2 is #1‘ list – a solid list, I think. Go see if you agree! Thanks, Dt7.

The Squadron, Episode 13, has been released for the public – Durge continues to be bested by the humans, but the tides might be turning. You can grab the WMP9 version from Broken Console’s site (11.2 mb, 4:55) or the QuickTime version from us (11.3 mb).

So there are some button combinations that can give you a leg up on the competition in Halo 2 multiplayer… but what happens when you get ’em wrong? Stuntmutt speculates in today’s One One Se7en.

Jillybean has taken a whack at the overgrown forest that is the Halo Story Page mailbag – you’ll find her latest prunings on the Story Page.

LunarShadow points out that the H2O Stats Reader has a new version out (1.2.0) – a bunch of new features are available (check the changelog for details). Looks nice!

Wow, this is rather… strange, if you ask me. If you visit the front page of Gamespot, in the bottom left corner, you’ll find a list of the Most Popular Games, presumably based on traffic to various Gamespot pages. Number 10 on the overall list is Halo Zero, a fan-made sidescroller we mentioned last week. If you look at just the currently available games, it jumps up to number 6. That blows me away – it’s a fan-made sidescroller, in the middle of the Christmas season. Have you played it yet? (Thanks to LoneRanger 2.5 for noticing.)

Red vs Blue Episode 70, ‘Sneaking In‘, was posted last night for sponsors. (Yes, that means it’ll be out in the next day or two for everyone else – you don’t need to send us mail when it happens.) Tex rocks (yeah, surprise), and she puts a lie to the ‘the SMG is the wimpiest weapon ever’ argument. And Church rocks, too (though I don’t think he’s quite as good with SMGs). This whole season continues to reach new levels of funni – I’m loving it. Looks like DirePhoenix was first with the heads-up.

Team3D dominated as a team again at MLG Chicago – they won the 4v4 finals, though only one of their members placed in the top 4 in the 1v1 event. Threads were started on our forum by 3Suns (1v1 and 4v4), and there’s a bit more info at Team3D.net, as well.

Toby Dillman went to MLG Chicago this weekend – and took a bunch of pics. Go read his writeup! Interesting to see the tourney from the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t do this for a living.

Oliver Stopienski has released “The Halo Revolutions – A New Beginning” – a HUGE (320 MB, 16 minutes) amalgam of styles – mostly, it’s a montage vid (alternately showing the usual stuff like no-scopes and sticks and griping about lag issues), but there’s also a mini-chapter of his ongoing machinima project in the middle. Encoding seems to be DivX5 – but I can’t be sure; I’ve only got one player that will even SHOW this vid, and it doesn’t tell me much about the video stream. You can find it on the Halo Orbit downloads page (it’s the third vid from the top). If you’ve got a large pipe and up-to-date players, go watch!

Jump Tactics is sponsoring another Jump Tournament, coming up in January. Full details can be found on their site. Thanks, JumpTactics.

The PGL is hosting a $10,000 4v4 Halo 2 tourney in Florida in 2006, with the finals taking place in Miami on April 29. You can find more info (including how to register) on their web page. Check it out!

PEZ has added a new feature to halowiki.net – there’s now a Recent Games extension. You can set up a page that keeps track of your recent games – it’s an easy way to see at a glance some of the stats get on Bungie.net, all on one page. Nice!

Foo Mo Jive points out that two more Podtacular episodes have been released – Episode 39 and Episode 40. It’s hard to keep up!

Video Games Live is kicking off again – and IGN has the Halo performance for download – by Insiders. Thanks, Tempus Fugit.

MLG has an intro article up about their Central Conference Championships, which kicked off last night in Chicago. If you’re on a PC, you won’t be able to beat their Video on Demand service for watching games – in fact, you’ll probably get a better view with VoD than you would if you were there! Go read/watch! Thanks, 3Suns.

A small article on Gamasutra points out that the number one game played on Xbox Live is STILL Halo 2. On the one hand, it gives me a warm glow that Halo 2 has such staying power. On the other… when is the next killer online app gonna come along?