A few Halo 2-related stories out there today:

• Ve3d.com reports the results of their Halo 2 vs Half-Life 2 poll… and Halo 2 lost miserably.
• ZDNetIndia reviewed Halo 2. (Pretty standard likes and dislikes.)
• Marin Independent-Journal picked their top 10 choices for 2004 games – Halo 2 came in 6th, behind such notable blockbusters as Spider-Man 2.

Last year, we hosted a comic series called Halo: Resolution. It closed its doors in July… but recently, Fuzzy (one half of its creative team) released 6 sheets of sprites used in the strip. See what you can do with them!

• UNSC (13K) or PNG (17K)
• Master Chief (21K) or PNG (26K)
• Various H:R Backgrounds (22K) or PNG (20K)
• Covenant Characters (10K) or PNG (16K)
• Miscellaneous H:R Sprites (19K) or PNG (26K)
• HaloVehicleSheet (22K) or PNG (34K)

(Comments can go in this forum thread.)

Rampancy.net has put up their impressions of Regret – a beautiful, but narrowly playable level. Read the whole piece for full details.

Another pair of cutscenes have been added to the Cutscene Library – Testament reveals some of the Prophet’s plans in Regret, and Objects in Mirror gets us started in the Quarantine Zone. Go grab ’em! (I’m gonna have to reformat the page soon… too many images for a single page.) Update: Oops – looks like I missed a bunch. I’m pulling the Quarantine Zone one for now – we’ll repost it later. As soon as I can, I’ll put up the One Way Ticket scene that leads to the Prophet on Regret. Sorry about this! Update 2: One Way Ticket is now posted. Again, sorry for the confusion!

The Rumble Pit stats were reset yesterday on Xbox Live, leading to some outraged high-ranking players venting their anger on our forum (and others). According to this thread on Bungie.net, Frankie thinks the reset might have been a mistake. Stay tuned – if it’s fixed, we’ll let you know. (Thanks to all who pointed this out – the first note I saw came from FugitiveSoldier, on our forum.)

Frogblast noticed some updates on Saber-Scorpion’s Lego collection web page… go visit for some really cool Halo 2-related Lego creations!

LD2k posted a pretty nice video on our forum yesterday – I found the rapidshare link in the post to be annoying, so I’ve mirrored a copy for him. 6.7 mb, QuickTime .mp4 format. Heroic gameplay, set to Troy’s trailer music. Nice cuts.

One last bit before I leave for the day: we’ve got the next entry in our Cutscene Library for you. It’s the Helljumpers cutscene, the beginning of Delta Halo, and there are two files: there’s the cutscene itself (2:30 long), and a small composite file that shows the one change that occurs, depending on the difficulty you’re playing at. It’s a very short bit, so I didn’t think it was worth releasing 4 separate versions of the cutscene – it made more sense to simply snip out the difference. As the Covenant guard the ancient ruins, there’s a short clip where a Jackal dances in front of a Grunt – and what the Grunt is doing depends on how hard the game is for you. On Easy and Normal, he’s just rubbing his hand in the dirt. On Heroic, he’s playing with fire. And on Legendary, he’s fiddling with what looks like a Grunt doll – maybe the fabled plushie that never got made! Thanks to BOLL for the difficulty help, and as always, thanks to Sniper 058 for getting this section started in the first place. And that – as they say – is that. I’m gone. Update: Ename nep (among others) pointed out that it’s not just a Grunt doll that Grunt is playing with… his left hand is holding a Master Chief doll! Nice.

There’s a bunch of Halo news out there, on this first day of 2005 – here’s a roundup:

• G4techTV looks at the year in gaming – Halo 2 gets a writeup, and a mention in other writeups.
• The Davis Enterprise looks back on the last couple of months, and how Halo 2 has changed one columnist’s life.
• GameDaily looked at the best games for 2004 – Halo 2 took Best Game of the Year, First Person Shooter of the Year, though it missed out on Best Xbox Live Game of the Year (it wasn’t even nominated). Thanks, TricKy.

I’m sure there’s more to read… but it’ll have to wait. We’ve just finished cleaning up from last night’s gala, and I’ve got a family engagement to make… so I’m almost outta here.

From all of us to all of you… here’s hoping your 2004 was everything it could be, and wishing you the best for 2005!

Working on this New Years Eve Day, Frankie has posted the last 2004 Weekly What’s Update over at Bungie.net – except the link isn’t working for everyone. It’s worth a read when you can get in, though – there’s some good stuff in this one. (The most interesting bit to me, actually, was about Marathon, not Halo:

Dorothy asks,

I was wondering if Bungie still sells that game Marathon. It’s really hard to find now-a-days.

We don’t, but you CAN download it for free from a number of places. Google it. There are even updated versions with fancy new-fangled graphics. Bungie has sorta given its blessing to this kind of thing. It’s not strictly legal, but nobody’s coming after you either.

This isn’t the same as saying ‘you can safely serve copies of the games to people’, but it certainly leans closer to that attitude…) Go read it now, or if you’re getting an error message, wait a bit and read it later. Thanks, Frankie.

A 13 inch, 4 pound metal statue of the Master Chief is now for sale on eBay. Starting bid is $100, but reserve is higher than that. If you bid, notice that shipping will be from Paris, France, so take that cost into account. The fact that Frankie weighed in on the thread suggests that this puppy is real. Thanks, Zerostar.

NINJ4 posted an animated One One Se7en on our forum – not only in line with Stuntmutt’s brand of humor, but it takes a SHOT at Stuntmutt. What more could you want from a One One Se7en?

A couple of days ago, Captain Spark released 62 new dialogue snippets, downloadable in one zipped bundle from his website. If you’d rather pick and choose which snippets you get (or like the ability to search for text), these snippets have now been added to our Halo 2 Dialogue Databank. Happy hunting!

Twenty-five new panoramic shots just got added to BOLL’s HALOrama collection – mostly multiplayer, but some impressive campaign shots, too. Go look!

It’s hard to argue with Stuntmutt’s reasoning in today’s One One Se7en – this is the pièce de résistance in his argument that Halo 2 is a regression to simpler times in console gaming.

VerdaFolio has written up an article on the Dawn of the Dead gametype – but this one covers much more than a simple rehashing of the rules. It looks at what levels are good for gameplay, plus game variants that might be enjoyable. Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for the heads-up.

Rampancy.net continues its analysis of Halo 2 with Impressions of Delta Halo. Again, the things that work, and the things that don’t, areas that are fun and areas that are not. Very well-written.

When we posted the ‘Hot Pursuit’ cutscene (with the Heretic escaping in a Banshee), Jillybean mentioned that whenever SHE watched the scene, the Heretic crashed into a wall before flying away. I’d never seen this – but a couple of other Europeans agreed, that’s the way it was for them. This seems to be a timing issue, based on the PAL/NTSC differences. (I thought Bungie had removed that particular constraint from the game… guess I was wrong.) BOLL was kind enough to send along some footage – I’ve put up small versions of the PAL cutscene (QuickTime and WMP9), so you can see the difference. Weird! Update: At least two PAL users have chimed in to say that the crashing does NOT happen on their Xboxes. Bottom line – we have no idea why he crashes for some people.