Wow, I guess it’s Awards time. As many people might remember, last night was the broadcast of SpikeTV’s Video Game Awards 2004 – Halo 2 was up for a bunch of stuff, but GTA: San Andreas took most of it home. Jason Jones won Designer of the Year for the game, and Halo 2 won Best First Person Action. (An easier place to view the entire list of winners is Australia’s The Age – thanks, Brett C.) Interestingly, Ron Perlman accepted the Shooter award on behalf of Bungie – thanks, Spike. The Gaming Big Boys did awards stuff too, last night:

• IGN’s Best of 2004: Halo 2 takes home Best First-Person Shooter, Best Xbox Live Game, Best Soundtrack, Best Use of Sound, Most Innovative Design (for Bungie.net’s XBL stats), and Xbox Game of the Year, with a Runner-Up prize in Best Graphics. (There’s also some wallpaper to download.) Thanks, Jonathan Rivas.
• Gamespot has announced their Best and Worst of 2004 (the actual countdown starts on Friday), and Halo 2 is nominated for Best Original Music, Best Sound Effects, Best Multiplayer Game, Best Original Game Mechanic, Biggest Disappointment, Best Shooter, and Best Xbox Game. Thanks, KP.

And if all that awards stuff isn’t enough for you, Voodoo Extreme is holding another Halo 2 vs Half-Life 2 poll – I guess Gamespy’s ridiculous months-long one recently wasn’t enough. (Half-Life 2 is currently kicking booty.)

ZATZAi has posted a new contest over at High Impact Halo – decorate a tree on Coagulation, win a hat. (There are really specific rules for decorations – read the post.)

Xerxes writes to point out that he’s begun transcribing the Halo 2 levels – in German. You’ll find the first five levels – on normal difficulty – at Halo Orbit.

20 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today. Lots of words. Read some.

Mr. Jukes has updated his Trick Jumping Guide with a 22.5 mb WMP9 video covering Headlong. Nice work!

Nate sent along a soundfile of the Egg grunt on The Great Journey. (If this means nothing to you, you’ll need to wait for the Eggs page to go up.) We’ve added the entry to the Halo 2 Dialogue Databank.

Weird. The Game with Fame promotion (play over XBL with famous people; previous participants include Willis McGahee and Ben Burnley) continues – with the band Chevelle. Sign up on this page; grand prize winner will get an Xbox and the chance to play Chevelle online on December 20. 100 runner-ups will also get to play (but won’t get Xboxes). An additional 10 people will win a copy of Chevelle’s new album. Thanks to DailyGame for the heads-up.

Last night, we mentioned a new machinima series, Stryke Force. Within a couple of hours, it was dead in the water, a victim of enthusiastic downloaders. Episode One was interesting, and deserves to be seen… so we’re helping out. You can find the original WMP9 version (20.4 mb) at both mythica.org and bungie.org, and a QuickTime version I just encoded (19.9 mb) also at mythica.org and bungie.org. Hopefully, these will lighten the load on the original server, and allow the HTML pages they have to be displayed.

Calvin brings up a pretty good point in today’s Calvin and Halo. Food for thought…

ars technica has reviewed Halo (in general, they stay away from console games). They liked it. Quite a lot. Except the ending. They also liked the Plantronics headset. Thanks, Drake213.

Hmm… yesterday, we mentioned that Frankie had weighed in on the matter of what happens when you collect all the skulls – folks worked pretty hard to figure out what he meant. Then, yesterday afternoon, he stopped by again… and apologized for misreading the original post.

I thought he was talking about beating the Vidmaster’s Challenge. Apply my original post to that.

The thing is… nobody’s even DEFINED a Vidmaster’s Challenge for Halo 2, yet… is it the same as Marathon’s Vidmaster Challenge?

Remember that note on the bottom of the Bomb? The one that goes ‘Thus, I Refute Thee’? Turns out it was put there for none other than our very own Finn, of the Halo Story page. The full explanation can be found over at Team 7hr33’s website.

Compassghost whipped up a pretty slick 550×100 signature for forums that allow them (and allow Flash files in signatures, I guess). You can see it in this post on our forum. (Personally, I’d go nuts after the 3rd or 4th time it repeated… but maybe that’s just me.)

Another vid – this one by Hogmasta. It’s called Retox, and his forum post states that it’s his last Halo vid. It’s available as streaming QT and streaming WMV – the downloadable links either don’t work or point to an Enter the Matrix vid. Pretty standard stuff, overall… but feedback on the forum is quite positive, so maybe I’m getting jaded.

Feenix dropped us a line about a new machinima series known as Stryke Force – a promo video and the first full episode are now posted. Video quality is quite good, and the story is intriguing… can’t wait for the next episode! Take a look. (WMP9 format, 20.5 mb for Episode 1 – the promo vid is DivX format, and 9 mb. The Opening credits are included in the first episode, so unless you HAVE to have the hi-res version of them, you can save yourself the 8 mb download.) And don’t forget to stop by their forum and let ’em know what you think! Update: well, that didn’t last long. We got word about 2 hours after we posted this that the site had gone down for exceeding its bandwidth. (I’d have posted this note earlier had I noticed, sorry.) I can’t do anything about helping out right now – but it’s possible I can get a copy of the vid up later today.

Hmm. A couple of days ago, Mr. Mojo Risin posted a note on our forum about a sighting of a nearly-naked Jason Jones in a cutscene in Halo 2. (Full details are in the forum post.) It wasn’t until today that BOLL managed to snag a decent screenshot of this… and with the help of Tsmola, who pointed out the origin of the image, another Halo 2 egg is fully revealed. (Also, BOLL pulls down the coveted PostTacular with this news item – 4 in a day.) Warning – the thread contains story spoilers, to some degree.

Bunch of new content over at MLGPro.com…

• Policing Ignorance on XBL – ways to deal with annoying players
• Gamer’s Guide – How to survive Halo 2 without alienating your family or coworkers
• Interview with Xena – The best female Halo player out there, according to Dolbex

Get to reading!

In the seemingly never-ending quest to clear the various art queues here at HBO, I’ve posted another 29 desktop images in our Wallpaper section. There’s a pretty wide variety this time around… check ’em out!

Yesterday, we pointed out a thread on the forum where folks were drawing Halo-related Christmas cards at art.com. (There are some really cool ones – if you haven’t checked the thread for a while, go waste some time.) BOLL, as usual, wasn’t satisfied with the normal ‘draw something fun’ directions… and went a little overboard. (He explained how in this post.)