In other award news, IGN is now accepting Reader’s Choice votes, though a bunch of the page links are broken from the Xbox Portal. (A little hunting dug up the correct link for the First Person Shooter voting page – I don’t know how many others will bother with this.) Thanks, Spike.

Gamespy posted the Multiplayer section of their Game of the Year Awards yesterday – and Halo 2 took Runner-up position to Unreal Tournament 2004. Ouch! Thanks to many – AltoDarkNight was first.

A custom gametype is sweeping XBL these days – it’s big enough that Dolbex felt the urge to write up a description of it yesterday over on MLGPro.com (and call it ‘the most fun I have had on Halo 2 yet’). It’s known variously as ‘Dawn of the Dead’, or ‘Zombie’, or occasionally something close to that. Dolbex gives a quick summary of the rules. The first mention of this game I can remember seeing was almost a month ago, by Salandarin on our forum – this isn’t new, it’s just becoming popular. Give it a try!

Tons and tons of fan art over at Halo Babies today… go see what you can find! (I’m lovin’ those pics of Linda…) Thanks, mrsmiley.

Two new stories up at Bungie.net right now; not surprising they tried to bury one. Last week’s Halo Humpday Challenge didn’t actually happen until Friday – and when it did, they almost lost to Clan PMS. Read all the gory details, written by He Who Died A Lot (otherwise known as Frankie). You can tell they wanted to hide this story, because the current top story, put up 8 minutes later and bumping the HHC writeup off the visible spectrum, was an article called ‘Getting Started with Halo 2‘ – an article that’s already been the Top Story at least twice. Hmm…

Andrew dropped by our forum to point out that the direct-download links for FTC 16 are now available (to all, not just to members). AVI or QuickTime, a bit over 50 mb each. Go grab ’em!

New contest over at misterchief.com – design and create a Mister Chief Birthday Card (in time for Mister Chief’s 1-year anniversary on January 16), win a copy of The Art of Halo (a place where Mister Chief is notably absent) or one of 5 T-shirts. Full rules and details can be found on the contest page.

20 new stories in the Fan Fiction section, including the second half of Jillybean’s Christmas Wish to the community. (Hopefully, you’ll actually be able to read these; the connection to that server has been tenuous recently. It’s wireless, over a rather large distance (several miles), and is easily disrupted. Deimos is working on upgrading the signal strength; things should be better next week or soon after. For now, keep trying.)

A couple of weeks ago, G4techTV aired an episode of Icons devoted to the history of Bungie. Dan Chosich filmed this for us, but we couldn’t do anything with it until G4 took it out of the on-air schedule. The last show date was yesterday – so if you’d like to grab a hi-res version of this film, via BitTorrent, you can do that. Thanks to Brian Towne, of Mythica, for hosting the seed. (The footage is 20:28 long, 720×480, 192 mb, in QuickTime format.)

halochat has put up a small video that includes the footage of Halo 2 gameplay from the final episode of The Apprentice, aired last week. Pretty cool to see SketchFactor in a TV show watched by millions! (Pretty funny that they ran out of power…)

Speaking of BOLL, we’ve got another 20 panoramas for you in the HALOrama section – some multiplayer, some single player, all gorgeous. Check ’em out!

A couple of weeks ago, we posted some MacOSX icons from Edwin Davis – he’s now created a version for Windows. (I haven’t compared them to the ones BOLL did back when we first posted these; if you’re interested, you’ll have to just grab them all.) They’re available from Edwin’s site, or from our server (368K).

Today’s One One Se7en has spoilers, of a sort… If you don’t get it, you either haven’t played much of Halo 2’s campaign, or Stuntmutt’s just not funny. Hmm… on second thought…

Day 3 of Gamespot’s Best and Worst of 2004 was posted – the Dubious Honors. Halo 2 was eligible for only one of these – Biggest Disappointment. It was beaten, according to Gamespot, by Fable. Next up: Genre Awards. (Halo 2 is up for Best Shooter.)

3Suns pointed out that TalkXbox has been running a weekly column with Halo 2 strategies; there are 5, so far:

• Week 1: Ghost Rush – Warthog Run
• Week 2: Assaulting Burial Grounds
• Week 3: Three Plots at Midship
• Week 4: 1 CTF Fast at Ivory Tower
• Week 5: Colossus TeamBall

Check ’em out!

A couple of days ago, DJ mentioned that Halo 2 has been picked up as an official game during the CPL Summer Event. I told him that we’d already mentioned that a week ago; he pointed out that it wasn’t until Friday that Halo 2 was added as an official tournament. I thought about how to word a news article to explain the difference to people not immersed in the professional scene – and then Rapture did it for me over at Cooked Gamers. Go read his news post to see why this is big news for Halo 2 players.

A quick note to the community in general; occasionally, someone will come up with a glitch that has the potential to be exploited in online play. Yesterday, this happened; we mentioned the ‘spectator mode’ Devin Olsen and friends managed to film. In that post, I said I wasn’t sure I could see how the glitch could be successfully exploited in actual netplay – thanks for all the folks who pointed out ways. (Some of the key features of this mode, once you get it to work, is that while you’re in spectator mode you are invisible and invincible, and once you step out of the warthog, you warp back instantly to where you got in; many people sent films or screenshots showing how a teammate could drop a flag right outside the hog, and the Spectator could step out and grab it, and instantly be warped back to their OWN base.) Clearly, this is a problem – one that Bungie will either have to fix or police. However, I’m writing this news post because I received a rather large number of emails from people suggesting that I should delete all mention of this glitch from this website, and ban people who tried to talk about it. Folks – the only people who benefit from this sort of behavior are those looking to exploit the glitch in netplay. When a potentially game-ruining glitch is uncovered, it’s in EVERYBODY’S interest that EVERYONE knows about it. It’s nearly impossible to cover up this sort of cheating; if you look at the Game Viewer on Bungie.net after you’ve used this cheat, you’ll find that the flag capture is marked as WHERE YOU WARPED TO, not where you picked it up – this makes it trivial for Bungie (or anyone else) to see that cheating was involved, and reporting the offender to them will get them banned from XBL. Doesn’t this make more sense than trying to hide the fact that the glitch exists in the first place? (Thanks, Gil27, for the image.)

Wow. Devin Olsen posted a pair of vids last night that… well, go watch ’em. Bizarre multiplayer glitch leads to some really, really odd (but fun-to-watch) behavior. c0ld vengeance suggests this might have negative effects on gameplay – but I’m having trouble seeing how, at the moment. For now, it’s silly but fun. (WMP9 format; if there’s enough demand, I’ll whip up a QT version.)

Last summer, the Barenaked Ladies were on tour, and before and during the show, they hosted a couple of unique Red vs Blue clips for the audience. Those clips are now available at Red vs Blue – for Sponsors only. If you’ve kicked in your $10, go grab ’em! They’re pretty funny. (Thanks, Ross Mills, for pointing them out.)

The Hi-Res version of FTC 16 is now posted for sponsors, over at XboxOttawa.ca. It’s rather huge (almost 150 mb, in DivX format), and I’ve got a correspondingly huge QuickTime version in the works (should be up later today or tomorrow at the latest) – but man… it’s some awesome work. These guys get better and better. You might have to go back and watch older episodes if you’ve forgotten any of the story threads… but this one is packed with almost 14 minutes of beautiful machinima. The lower-res free version will be up sometime later… but if you can hack the $10 donation fee they’re asking, this large version is GORGEOUS.