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!

A quick reminder; if you are headed for MLG DC this weekend, and you haven’t registered yet… deadline is tonight at midnight, no exceptions. They don’t have your money by today, you don’t play this weekend. Details on the Registration page at MLGPro.com.

Things you always wondered about prophets… or maybe not. In today’s One One Se7en.

12 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today… go read!

TricKy passed on a couple of links for us last night… the Swedish gaming site NordicGamers.se posted their ‘Best of 2004’ article, and Halo picked up Best Soundtrack, but lost Best Action Game to Half-Life 2, and came in third for Game of the Year (behind Rome: Total War and Half-Life 2). Master Chief also picked up Hero of the Year. Then, over at TalkXbox, a new Halo 2 Strategy article has gone up; Week 11 looks at Ascension Team Ball. (This one seems pretty basic, to me. “Stay together, get the big weapons, hide.”)

replay put together a pretty long theory about where Delta Halo might be – an interesting read. For what it’s worth…the ‘Halo Activation Radius’ graphic he doesn’t know who to attribute to was created by PD, and has been in our Miscellaneous section for almost 3 years now.

Devin Olsen wondered if it was just that time of the month for Skill videos… it’s a bit late to be adding his entry to that post, but then, he calls his ‘Not a Skill Video‘ anyway. 2:37, 7.4 mb. I liked the Zanzibar sword-carrier beatdown, myself. Update: Bonekin decided to get in on the ‘no skillz’ action… he put together Noobs Gone Wild, with plenty of clips showing what NOT to do in a Live game. 16.8 mb, WMP9 format, hosted by That Weasel.

Yesterday, Bungie posted a new Cheating FAQ, a collection of information about what constitutes cheating, what doesn’t, and what happens to cheaters. If you’re at all curious about whether that trick you’re exploiting will get you into trouble in the long run, or whether the team that just beat you by stealing the flag from under your nose 3 times in 2 minutes will ever be punished… you should read this. Amusingly, just a day before, some moron chose to cheat in a Team Skirmish game that contained… bentllama. (How dumb do you have to be to cheat against a well-known Bungie employee?) Go read llama’s description of the event… and maybe start a pool with some buddies on how fast this guy’s gonna end up banned. (Certainly faster than if he cheated against, say, you…)

As a cap to a truly spectacular day, content-wise, we’d like to offer you a few gorgeous images. Swing by our Craig Mullins Halo gallery for a full version of the Arbiter and Master Chief image used in today’s Sneaking wallpaper from Bungie. (There’s a more recent version of this image – one that has an energy sword and some beautiful lighting changes – but we can’t release it yet.) You’ll also find ‘Brute Kick’, ad stunning pic of the MC taking out a Brute – and a sketch of that image, in progress. Thanks to Bungie for the permission to post these, and to Craig for the images themselves! Enjoy.

Three brand-new wallpapers have been released on Bungie.net – and man… there’s some classy stuff there. Mister Chief, in a classic WinXP setting… Delta Halo, in all its glory… and a recently-leaked Craig Mullins piece, reworked by Shishka for your screen. (There’s some good background in Sketch’s writeup about this piece.) Go look, go download, go change your desktop.

Mike Miller has come to be known as a pretty amazing campaign player; if you don’t know the name, you haven’t been reading our news. The man has graciously agreed to share his knowledge and skills with the Halo community; we will gradually be releasing a Legendary Walkthrough of Halo 2, created by Mike. It contains general tips, specific strategies, and, because images sometimes teach better than words, video supplements for showing off techniques. Right now, we’ve got an Introduction (with plenty of general hints for Legendary-specific gameplay), and a walkthrough of Cairo Station, complete with 11 individual videos (in both QuickTime and WMP9 formats). Please – grab only what you need; our bandwidth has been hammered pretty hard this month. Thanks! And thanks to Mike, for the start of what looks to be a spectacular resource!

Hehe – over on the Marty Army forum at Bungie.net, Marty posted the following suggestion (you have to be a member of the Marty Army to be able to see this):

The Marty Army members should all demand to see the video of Frankie attempting to “sing” Billie Jean. Talk about price.

FugitiveSoldier has put up a poll on the Bungie.net forums asking whether people agree – at the moment, it’s 7-0 in favor. (Heck, Marty – if you can shoot me a copy of the vid, I’ll happily host it here, in case you’re being blocked by the Online Team…) Thanks to FugitiveSoldier for pointing out the b.net post on our own forum.

OMG Finn’s not dead OMG! Big ol’ update over at the Halo Story page today. Some of this is old stuff to forum regulars, some is not. There’s definitely some grist for the speculation mill! Go read. (Don’t forget to check out Jillybean’s addition from last week; it was just a single tidbit, so I forgot to post news about it… but it’s definitely thought-provoking!)