The online XBC-based neXtournaments we mentioned a couple of days ago are getting underway in two days – the first tourney is Sunday evening at 7 pm Eastern, sponsored by Corsair, and has a pair of 1GB memory modules (and an XBC Pro serial number) for the winner. There will also be hats and miscellaneous accessories from Corsair available. These tourneys will be happening on a regular basis, so check back often! (Entrance is free.)

Fire Team Charlie has released FTC 17, in hi-res AVI format, for members; it will be up in lower-res format for the masses by tomorrow night. (A hi-res QuickTime should be available later today or tomorrow morning for members.) It weighs in at a bit over 12 minutes, and is something of a departure from the norm for the crew. Pretty dang hilarious, if you ask me; these guys get better and better with every episode. Comments can be left in Z’s thread on our forum.

Hey! It’s a comic morning. One One Se7en returns to the Covenant alphabet developed for the Halo2.com website… and runs into a problem we’ve probably ALL had at one time or another.

New strip over at Halo Babies – takes a practical look at a gameplay question, and comes up with the right answer. Nice artwork!

The Bungie version of the Halo Humpday Challenge between Bungie and EGM was posted yesterday evening – Frankie writes like a broken man. It’s almost sad to see…

GIjoe2 points out his new vid Special Fred, a tribute to grenades and fusion cores, set to Stephen Lynch’s eponymic song. WMP9 format, a bit under 5 megs. Funny stuff!

It’s not up at Bungie.net yet… but it looks like Bungie took another lickin’ in this week’s Halo Humpday Challenge from the guys at Electronic Gaming Monthly. Dan Hsu, known as Shoe in Clan EGM, and a participant in last night’s game, wrote up a short post on the activities. This one wasn’t even close. Thanks to Ryan Croson for the heads-up.

Wow. There’ve been articles out there before about how wives and girlfriends are ‘widowed’ by Halo… but I’ve never seen one like this. Well-written… but FULL of stereotypes. Originally in the New York Observer, now a cover story for the Charlotte Creative Loafing. It’ll either amuse you, or anger you… but it’s a fun read. Thanks, Rich Cutter.

Joshua Rennert posted a note on our forum about a sequel he and the Tricking IT crew are working on; working title is Beach of the Dead 2, though that won’t be the release title. The trailer, made by ipushmycar, is short (48 seconds) but pretty sweet; high and low resolutin WMP9 links are in the original forum posts, and we’ve added high (5.3 mb) and low (2.2 mb) resolution QuickTime versions, as well. This looks like something to watch for!

Blackstar’s sent along another Calvin and Halo for your entertainment today – having dealt with exactly this sort of kid logic myself, I was tickled. Check it out.

According to this Reuters article, Halo 2 hit 6.4 million in sales worldwide today. (This seems silly; the article was posted at 4:30 am PT Thursday, and states that Microsoft ‘said [this] on Thursday’ – hopefully they meant Wednesday, or MS PR folks are working REALLY odd hours.) If this number is accurate, it means that in the two weeks since the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (where Bill Gates touted the 6.3 million units sold at THAT point), only 100,000 units have been sold worldwide… a significant drop in sales rate. Bah. All these numbers are silly. Let’s look again in March, or something.

Gossip tossed us a link to the Amazon Web Services Blog, and an interview with Eric Neustadter, of the Xbox Live team, at the Amazon DevCon. Gossip characterized this as ‘dry’ – I’d have to agree. There ARE some interesting facts in it, though – Xbox Live increased some of its systems by a factor of 10 to accomodate the Halo 2 launch, and bought an additional 32 terabytes of disk space to handle the new stats system. (They’re not using it all yet… but that’s a LOT of space.) There’s also a question about Halo 2 for the PC – Neustadter was asked if there were plans for a PC version that could play with the Xbox version, and his answer was negative:

The security model can’t be expanded to the PC, so it’s unlikely. Nobody has yet to figure out how to do it without punishing existing customers.

(A quick note about that – while we here at bungie.org believe pretty strongly that it’s unlikely that there will ever be a version of Halo 2 for the PC – that’s not what this question was about; this was about the interoperability of a potential PC version and the existing Xbox version. Nobody at Microsoft, or Bungie, has ever made a definitive statement, either way, about the future possibilities for a PC version.)

Apparently, you can look at the Master Chief while preparing to play Half-Life 2 – there’s a Halo 2 skin for Steam. (A screenshot is here.) Thanks, Samir Patel.

Stuntmutt has put up a new batch of Guest One One Se7en strips on his blog – if you feel like you’re not getting enough corn with the 3-a-week diet here, go visit and see what others are creating! (He also whipped out a nice ‘thank-you’ post to Zzombie13, the guest artist who helped out with Monday’s strip. I’d agree with him about the man’s talent.)

Whoa. Greg Hill and his brothers were visiting Detroit recently, staying close to the Canadian side of town (Windsor Canada is right on the other side of the river). He saw a building he HAD to take a picture of. Look familiar? (He made it easy for you, just in case it’s not ringing any bells.)

3Suns noticed a whole bunch of content over at the Geezer Gamers’ site, related to the recent Halo Humpday Challenge they participated in. They’re all linked from the current front page, but in case things change, here’s what we’ve got:

• Bungie Challenge: Geezer Point of View
• Video from the Humpday Challenge (great stuff – but the big one is REALLY big)
• Geezers Take On Bungie – Humpday Challenge
• Geezer Spotlight Part 1 on Monk
• Geezer Spotlight Part 2 on Monk
• Geezer Gamers Make it to Bungie.net

Go read, go watch – good stuff all around! Update Whoops! almost before I got the thing posted, the video’s been pulled. 🙁 Sorry, folks. Go read the rest of the stuff.

Gamefly, a video game rental company, has posted the top video game rentals for 2004 – Halo 2 was 4th, following Ninja Gaiden (released March 2), Grand Theft Auto (released October 25), and Fable (released September 14). They’re also taking votes for your favorite games for the 2nd Annual Q Awards (you have to join GameFly to vote – free); votes will be accepted until January 31.

Weird – Halo 2 had fallen off the charts in the UK, according to ELSPA (the marketing firm who keeps track of game sales there) – but this week jumped from 27th to 13th, as described by PC Pro. Wonder what caused the surge?

Xtournaments has opened neXtournaments, a site devoted to online Halo 2 tournaments held over XBConnect. There are two types of tourneys – one is free, the other has an entrance fee (but also cash prizes). Go read more details on either website! Thanks, Sick Vic.

Namemad whipped up a Flash-based stop-motion vid showing the MC bustin’ some moves to Jay-Z and Linkin Park. Get down.