Team Tabula Rasa has two new columns on Halo 2 strategy online – Furiont opens his ‘The Making of a Spartan‘ column with a recap of how he got started in all this, and Faewraith113 fires up his ‘Sententia per Antiquus‘ column with a piece called ‘Community of Electrons’, which looks at the growth and evolution of the gaming community over the past 20 or 30 years, and how Halo is helping to bring this to the next level. Go check ’em out!

Overswarm is almost ready to start posting his Strategy guides… but he realized that many of his pieces would be better if he had an artist working with him. If you’re interested in helping out, and have some talent, drop him an email!

Mat Noguchi was one of several Bungie employees to present talks at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference. He was kind enough to provide both the paper and the slides he used for the talk itself (with his notes attached). You can read the paper here, and view the slide show (minus a few real-time demos) here. It’s a pretty fascinating read!

Hehe – when you absolutely, positively, can’t go another minute without your stats… view ’em on your Pocket PC. Thanks to HaloPlanet for the heads-up.

This is highly unusual, but I couldn’t wait… Jason Borne (you might remember the name – we’ve got a pretty amazing piece of artwork of his in our Miscellaneous Art collection) dropped off a new image, and since I have no idea when I’ll get a chance to update the misc art section again, I thought I’d just post this. 1080×609, 213k… gorgeous. Perfect mix of death machine and peaceful forest scene…

For all the folks writing to us – no, there isn’t a One One Se7en today. I think Stuntmutt is angry with me.

Captain Spark posted another 30 dialogue snippets on his website; grab the zip file from there, or browse the new entries in our Dialogue Databank.

Bigsauce is pretty excited about the new MLG Online Store… because the very first player shirt for sale is his. For AR lovers everywhere! (There’ll be other player shirts, with all the big-name Halo pros you’ve watched…)

Bull3tL@g posted a Halo 1 montage on our forum yesterday – lots of nice grenade sticks, and other stuff. 43.1 mb, WMP9 format. Hosted at ods.org.

Thanks to brokenwatch, of H2 Advanced Stats, for sending along the fixes needed to make our Gamertag emblem checker work again after Bungie.net’s tweaks recently. Sorry for the downtime!

dg945 points out the release of Launch Bay X, a Halo CE map created by ejburke. You can watch a gameplay movie (19 mb, WMP9 format) or look at some screenshots before downloading the map (which looks pretty slick!). Check it out! Update: The map is also being mirrored at HaloMaps.org (along with a flash version of the movie).

Ack! Almost forgot. Mike Miller’s next installment of his Halo 2 Legendary Walkthrough, a look at Gravemind, will not be released today – it’s a pretty complicated level, and he wants to make sure it’s done right. We’re shooting for next week; in the meantime, make sure you’re up to snuff on the rest of the finished levels!

Hehe – nice. prometheus has whipped up a Firefox plugin that lets you search HBO’s news archive right from your browser’s search box! We’re flattered. (Well, okay, I’m flattered. I can’t imagine the rest of the staff cares.) If you use Firefox, grab this!

Bonekin posted Noobs Gone Wild 2, a humorous look at silly gameplay (mistakes made both by him and by his opponents – everyone’s speared equally) yesterday. (Download links are in the forum post.) We’ve put up mirrors for his WMP9 versions (hi-res | low-res), and added QuickTime versions that are roughly the same quality as his MPEG versions, but half the size (hi-res, 28.6 mb | low-res, 14.1 mb). Grab what makes sense to you!

Finn points out an update on 7hr33.org, with a list of things that could be fixed in Halo 2 multiplay to make gameplay more enjoyable. Agree, disagree… sound off!

New content up over at MLGPro.com – they’ve posted info about MLG Orlando, a tournament coming up at the end of April, and an interview with Foulacy, of Str8 Rippin, in which Foulacy talks about what happened at MLG Houston, where he thinks the team is going, and some of his strategies. (A good read, overall – if you’re interested in being part of the pro community, you NEED to get inside these guys’ heads. And if you’re not, it’s fascinating to see how they approach gameplay.)

Whoa – almost missed this. Minor spoilers, I guess… but pretty darn funny!

Poop scoop is working on transcribing Earth City, and has created a midi file of it. He’s looking for feedback – check his post and give him your ideas!

I didn’t write it. IcedPitchBlack did. You should read it, though. Update: Wow… this seems to have hit a nerve. 165 responses in 11 hours… there are some dissenters, but in general, it seems a LOT of people agree with the sentiment that Halo 2 multiplay should be about FUN, not ‘leveling up’.

mercury joins the Halo blog crew with The Oracle – his first piece looks at cheating in matchmaking. It can be nice to have a place to post a solid, well-thought-out piece, separate from a fast-moving forum…