Major Nelson is pointing out a Halo 2 Smartphone Home skin on his blog. (I don’t know – nor really care to know – what a SmartPhone is, but if you do, and this is interesting to you, thanks go to Cybrfrk.)

Marty O’Donnell weighed in on the recently-found reversed poetry that’s present on several campaign levels – and teased fans with hints of at least two MORE cool items still left to find. Read his post – and start searching!

UK game retailer GAME auctioned off a 6 foot tall Master Chief statue (different from others we’ve mentioned recently – this one has him standing upright, with guns at his side), with proceeds going to the Tsunami Earthquake Appeal. Final bid was £365 (it closed a few hours ago). (We heard about it from Frankie, over at Bungie.net – who beat US to the punch, but didn’t seem to realize that at the time he posted it, bidding had been over for more than 4 hours.)

Hehe – cool. Even though Joe Staten recently stated that the ‘I Love Bees’ game was NOT canon, with respect to the Halo storyline, it was still an awful lot of fun for an awful lot of people. Looks like someone is using it as the capstone to a new book on Alternate Reality Gaming, due out really soon in electronic form, and next month in a dead tree version. ICDedPpl found this over at Slashdot.

I meant to post this last night, but forgot. There was a large thread on our forum recently discussing the sound you hear on the Zanzibar bridge (the bridge that leads to the plasma sword) – we mentioned the issue here. We got a post from Jay Weinland, creator of the sound effect in question – who apologizes for the bug that makes the sound repeat for some players, and explains why it’s as loud as it is in the first place. This doesn’t FIX the problem (as Jay mentions, he’s ‘an audio guy in a programmer’s world’), but it might make some of you feel better that Bungie employees DO care how their work affects you.

Dennis Powers writes that winners have been chosen for the Halo Maps ‘Create a Halo CE ad video’ contest that ended last month. You can see the winners, as well as the entire field of entries, at Halo Maps. Nice job to all!

We get a lot of questions here at bungie.org – partly because folks don’t read the disclaimer at the bottom of the page, and think we’re Bungie Studios (we’re not), and partly because Bungie doesn’t HAVE a public email address to send questions to (the Webmaster doesn’t count, since stuff sent to him generally gets ridiculed more than answered)… but partly because we’ve been around long enough that folks genuinely want to know stuff about US. Some of these questions get asked a LOT. However – they’re site questions, or personal questions, rather than Halo-related questions…so they don’t really belong in our FAQ. For lack of a better place to put them, I’ve added them to the ‘About This Site‘ link at the top of our navbar. We’ll add more, as demand warrants. (If I’ve forgotten a common one, feel free to let us know.)

At the end of December, TeamXbox posted their Game of the Year Awards – Halo did pretty well. Now, they’ve posted their Reader’s Choice Awards… and Halo pulled down Best First-Person Shooter, Best Xbox Live Game, Best Peripheral (for the Plantronics Halo 2 Headset), Best Graphics, Best Sound, and Best Xbox Game of the Year. In other words… TXB readers gave Halo the same awards as TXB editors did two weeks ago… except they added Best Graphics to the list (the editors gave that award to DOA Ultimate). Thanks, John Rivas.

TalkXbox continues their weekly strategy guides – this one covers Coagulation Assault. Thanks, as usual, to 3Suns.

Captain Spark has recorded another several dozen dialogue snippets, this time all Sargeant Stacker. You can find them on his website, in a zip archive (link is in his forum post), or in our Halo 2 Dialogue Databank, individually. Man, that Sarge has a way with words…

Stuntmutt takes a look at Wideload’s first Halo-based offering in today’s One One Se7en.

Fourteen new entries in the Fan Fiction database today – busy writers over the weekend! Go read.

MrJukes has put up a pair of ‘Mix’ videos containing jumps he missed during his first go-round – new stuff from Ascension, Foundation, Zanzibar, Beaver Creek, Coagulation, Lockout, and Ivory Tower. Go check ’em out!

I was pretty sure one of these was already posted… but maybe not. Over at Red vs Blue, there are two new Sponsors-only vids; a third clip shown at Barenaked Ladies concerts last summer (‘Sublime’), and a look at Red vs Blue in days gone by released on an EGM cover disc at one point. Both are pretty funny. Thanks, Ross Mills.

The C&C Generals TC Halogen has another update on its website – newly-skinned Warthogs, and a Wallpaper (busy, but cool to look at). Go check it out!

Xbox.com is hosting the 2004 Xbox Live Awards, and accepting votes for nominations in 10 categories. Halo 2 is up for Toughest Map, Hottest Ride, Best Game Character, and Best Live Peripheral. Check out the page to find out how to vote. Thanks, World War Seven.

Khas writes to tell us that there’s a press release for ‘Open Rebellion’, a total conversion mod that wil convert all single player maps to an ‘Elite’ campaign for Mac Halo (and Halo PC), over at Macologist. There’s also a report at Inside Mac Games, and an official forum set up by the team. Check it out!

Xbox Solution just reviewed the Plantronics Halo 2 headset. They gave it an 8/10, mostly because it’s expensive – they liked it, otherwise.

The Cutscene Library is now fully complete for Halo 2, with the inclusion, today, of the credits, as well as a separate download for just the small cinematic at the end of the credits. (The credits are available in printed form, in the Manual PDF, from either Bungie.net or Xbox.com, if you don’t want to download a massive movie just for this.) At some point in the future, we’ll be adding the Halo cutscenes to this library, as well.

Marty O’Donnell and Jay Weinland are speaking about Audio Production for Halo 2 at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. A promotional flyer for the conference contained a short interview with Marty – and thesoffish was kind enough to transcribe it on our forum.