Wonga. Looks like I got interviewed. I hardly even noticed. Ducain, over at High Impact Halo, asked me a few questions about ‘The History of Halo Tricking’, or somesuch… and then wrote up the answers all pretty-like. Go read.

Ouch. The last Fan Fiction update was 6 days ago – 27 new pieces have been submitted since then. Sorry for the delay! (They’re up now, obviously.)

The Detroit Free Press’s Game Master choise Halo 2 as the Free Press Game of the Year 2004 – mostly for multiplayer. (There is a second article with input from other editors, on other games, as well.) Thanks, ICDedPpl.

TheTaintedOne has been working for some time on an ‘end-to-end widescreen process’ – a technique to capture Halo gameplay footage in true Widescreen mode. His proof of concept is a video called Rocket Festival – taking advantage of a funny glitch in how homing rockets deal with a target on a high point of land, he’s melded nice video cuts with great music and an environment that really shines in Widescreen mode. There are two versions – a 7.2 mb WMP9 vid and an 8.2 mb QuickTime vid. (Both are a compromise for Taint – his original movie used anamorphic video (non-square pixels) for true Widescreen – but this requires Windows Media Player 9 on Windows XP to view; the Mac WMP9 ignores the rectangular pixels, and scrunches the film. He re-converted, after changing to square pixels, so that everyone could see the final product.) Comments can go in this (already lively) forum thread.

Three new cutscenes for you in the Cutscene Library – Objects in Mirror are Larger Than They Appear (accidentally released a couple of days ago for a brief time), Shooting Gallery, and That Old, Familiar Feeling (the end of Sacred Icon). Get to downloading!

Today’s Calvin and Halo makes you think a lot about the uproar over the Rumble Pit Reset a few days ago.

TricKy points out that Xbox Gamers has announced their 2004 Best Of awards, and Halo walked away with quite a few: Best First-Person Shooter, Best Xbox Live Game, Best Soundtrack, Best Story, Best Multiplayer Game, and Game Of The Year 2004. It also won a runner-up award for Best Graphics. Not too shabby!

The Junkyard’s Bungie Tribute Poetry Contest has wrapped up – the winners have been posted. Swing by to read all the details (and the poetry itself). First heads-up goes to Jillybean, who got a cookie.

HALOChat points out that the CyberAthlete Amateur League is starting its Halo 2 season – maps, gametypes, and preseason schedules have been posted. Get your game on!

WINBIG24 sent word about a trailer for download over at HaloMods. It was created by ShadowX, and it uses our Cutscene Library (and a War of the Worlds trailer) to paint a grim picture of invasion. 5.9 mb, in WMP9 format. (Might have been better to keep the widescreen aspect of the originals, though…) Update: Seems ShadowX posted a link on our own forum – silly me for not checking first.

Tom ‘Darkphibre’ Mathews has created another Halo 2 statistical tool – this one sucks up all the data from a particular game (everything, down to the GameViewer), and dumps it into an Access database. He’s got some examples of how the info can be used, as well as download links for the beta version. Swing by his forum post for more details!

The ‘sell Halo-related stuff at auction’ phenomenon is exploding. Here’s what we’ve heard of in the past day or so:

• A repainted Warthog, in ‘Special Ops’ colors (currently $45, 3 days left) – thanks, Penguin080
• Another resin statue MC (currently $25, 6 days left) – thanks, Helios
• Another 6-foot MC statue (Buy it now price of $1200, 6 days left) – thanks, Ross Mills
• A customized Halo 2 Central Xbox Jewel (NZ$1.50, 7 days left) – thanks, Sean

It’s buy, buy, buy!

Frankie posted an update to the Rumble Pit Reset issue last night; they’ve decided to put stats to where they were before the January 1 reset. That means all the games played SINCE January 1 (through about 4 hours ago) will be wiped – but they decided that was preferable to resetting 2 months of stats. Thanks to all that wrote to us about this.

Jade8704 wrote to us to point out that the large Master Chief statue selling on eBay we mentioned a few days ago has sold, for $710. The smaller one has about half an hour to go on its auction – it’s currently sitting at $257.49. And the resin model is at $305, with almost 4 days left. (You can see the last two at this link.)

Looks like the Rumble Pit reset a couple of days ago was a mistake… Bungie’s looking into possible solutions. (There’ll be more info tomorrow, it seems.) Check Frankie’s note at Bungie.net for details. UPDATE: Frankie posted an update explaining that rank resets were caused by a glitch in the system, and that ranks will be “rolled back” to their December 31 levels- erasing any stats gathered since then. (Before you send angry emails to Frankie (or us), please remember that rank is not your personal worth, it’s just a number on a web page for a video game.)

Okay, first off, a removal – I’ve replaced three of the four downloadable versions of the ‘Ladies Like…’ cutscene with a single ‘delta’ vid that contains just the changed content (similar to what was done for the Helljumpers scene). I’ve also added two new scenes – the final one from Regret, and the opening scene from Sacred Icon. Grab ’em while they’re fresh!

Stuntmutt submitted a New Year’s Strip recently – but someone fell down on the job and forgot to post it. We’ll pretend this never happened, and you can read it as today’s One One Se7en. Poor MC…

That Weasel writes to say that Episode 17 of ‘Grunts are People Too!!’ has been posted. I don’t get it. 🙁 (You can download it in QT6, WMP9, or DivX formats, though.)

3Suns writes to point out that TalkXbox has posted Week 8 of their Halo 2 Strategy series – this one focuses on Ivory Tower Assault.

Goose241 writes to mention that the Halo 2 Wiki started up recently now contains a section for Campaign strategy tips; visit to add your own, or see what’s there.