Nick Danger sent along a link to an Elite drawing done by his friend Luther for their clan site, The Halo Hangout. Nice job! Comments can go in this forum thread.

Mitch B. sent along a screenshot (91K) of a Halo 2 Flash-based sidescroller he’s working on. More when we know it!

TalkXbox has put up an editorial entitled ‘Halo 2 vs MechAssault 2: Part One‘ – a head-to-head battle between two online giants. They toss up the Gameplay title… but Halo 2 gets their vote for Level Design. Part Two is coming soon. Thanks, 3Suns.

Bungie is getting ready to roll out new guides to multiplayer maps, and they’re starting with Lockout and Ascension. SketchFactor asked for strategies and tips for these maps over on the B.net forums – if you have any cool tips, stop by! Thanks, cptn mexico.

That Weasel and Mother’s Tooth have brought you episode 18 of Grunts are People Too! – in several versions. There’s a regular version (in all the usual flavors), plus a Director’s Cut (slightly different story, some visual tweaks), and a Special Edition (again, a slightly different story, visual tweaks). You can find them all at the GaPT server. Mayhem abounds.

SaloX submitted a few more clips for our Dialogue Databank; one is pretty hilarious. Check ’em out!

Wow. When they’re not running around for PR, those Bungie boys are busy. Two new articles for you over on Bungie.net (since I left for lunch, even): there are 3 new themes to customize the look of your Group pages (I’m pretty partial to Halo Babies, myself), and they’ve got a link up to GamePro’s Reader’s Choice Awards, now accepting votes (Halo 2 is up for Best Combat/Shooting Game and Game of the Year). Go read!

Stuntmutt goes back to REALLY old jokes in today’s One One Se7en… I mean, geez.

clarksbrother points out another Halo2-related eBay item – this one is one of the Halo 2 countdown timers distributed during the runup to the game. Clearly useless at this stage, but possibly of interest to collectors. Two and a half days left on the auction, current bid is under $2.

Twin Galaxies (a site devoted to game rankings) has issued a new collection of ‘bounties’ – cash prizes for gaming feats. One is Halo 2-related: complete Halo 2 on Legendary (faster than anyone else), win $150. Payout date is January 31, 2006, so there’s plenty of time to hone your skills. Full details can be found on their contest page. (The Halo 2 challenge is Bounty (105).) Several people noted this – Jonah was first.

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…