When you’re out of time for a birthday card, do what Jillybean and her sister did… crib. Mum will love it.

A few articles around the net today:

• Winston-Salem Journal – Halo 2 is better with friends
• Biloxi Sun Herald – Multiplayer makes Halo 2 shine
• St. Joseph’s College Observer – an article written just before release, celebrating the idea (thanks, Admiral Death)

Narcogen reminded us that he recently posted a Halo 2 Story Summary at Rampancy.net; it’s not a walkthrough, but it WILL spoil the story for you if you haven’t finished the game yet. If you’re looking for an overview, though – go to it.

Inside Mac Games put up a note a couple of days ago about Mac Halo, and its parity with the PC version. Macsoft is aware that the PC update in November broke parity, and they hope to have a replacement soon. Thanks, Mig.

GruntKilla points out an article at 1UP.com that looks at the road that lead up to Halo 2 – Bungie’s History. For folks not steeped in the lore, it’s a decent read.

Yesterday, IGN posted a post-mortem, of sorts, on Halo 2. They received a ton of reader feedback. Today, they’ve posted some of that. Long read, lots of opinions. Again – beware of spoilers.

Interesting – Icons, a show on G4TechTV, will be airing a show on Bungie, tomorrow night at 10:30 Eastern (7:30 Pacific). Hopefully, someone can record this… thanks, Shorty.

Finn, one half of our Halo Story Page team and a pillar of Team 7hr33, has posted his own musings about Halo 2 (with input from the rest of Team 7hr33). He struggled with the effort to cover the points he considered important without dragging the overall tone down too much – you decide how well he succeeded. It’s a good read.

Last month, Mike Chambers, Product Manager over at Macromedia, held a contest to build a Flash app for displaying Halo 2 stats, based on Bungie.net RSS feeds. The contest ended a few days ago – today, Mike posted a list of all the entrants. The winners are coming soon – but check out the entire field! There are some really cool choices in there.

Hehe – Fever Dream, a webcomic at Keenspace, looks at what doesn’t translate from in-game to real life. Thanks, Quackmoo guy.

Ouch. Penny Arcade mentioned that a piece of artwork donated to their upcoming Child’s Play charity auction was Halo-related… to be specific, it’s a wonderful depiction of Melissa, the Operator from the I Love Bees game. If you couldn’t make it to the auction, this image was available for sale on the creator’s website. Unfortunately, the traffic they sent to that site managed to shut it down. Luckily, I grabbed copies of the pics before that happened – the overall picture is here, and a closeup is here. Maybe once the furor dies down, you can get in and buy this, if you’re so inclined. Thanks to Ross Mills for the first heads-up.

Halo gets a funny mention in today’s episode of 9th Elsewhere, an ongoing webcomic. I think many of us know people like Matt… Thanks, ThorsHammer.

Hehe – I gotta say, I had the same impression as Stuntmutt expresses in today’s One One Se7en… once. This should bring a smile to your face. (Unless you’re just getting out of Botox treatment, in which case you CAN’T smile.)

In various videos and still shots of Bungie employees, a simple (but very cool) T-shirt can be seen – it’s grey, with a simple ‘ODST’ emblazoned across the front. (Jason Jones, for example, can be seen wearing one in this image from the Making Of DVD.) This shirt is not for sale anywhere… but one fan wasn’t satisfied with that. Chris Hamilton made a similar shirt (same color, different font, different text color) and is offering it for sale at CafePress. (It also has a new line – ‘Kill all covie bastards’ – across the back.) He’s not making any money off this; he’s charging the base $14.99 rate that CafePress requires to make the shirt. If you like this concept, though, you’re not going to get one from Bungie – so maybe this is your best bet. Update: Chris has added a second version – this one matches the Bungie version pretty closely. Take your pick!

Squid_squires created a suit of armor recently, and sent the pictures to mrsmiley, of Halo Babies. smiley figured they’d be better off here (we’ve posted a number of costumes like this)… so here they are (pic1, pic2). Fantastic work! One of these days, we’ll have to organize all of these into a section of their own.

A surprising number of people have written to remind us that the SpikeTV award voting ends soon – the ceremony airs in less than a week. (We mentioned it 3 weeks ago.) If you haven’t voted, I suppose you should do so. Halo 2 is up for a number of awards.

There’s a new episode of Halo-Afterwar posted at Black Arts Studios – it’s a little messy this time around. Thanks, R3D L33D3R.

Hikaru-119 went through all of Halo 2 and counted the weapons and bullets he found – and posted the results on our forum. It seems that correcting mistakes draws pretty negative responses from him, so just look at the numbers!

v2 posted a note in our forum about an Elite Drawing Tutorial he posted over at DeviantART. (Be sure to read the commentary below the image, as well.) Definitely cool stuff!

A couple of new Halo articles, courtesy of Google (though the IGN piece got us another dozen emails later on):

• Cnet Asia has a broader look at the effect Halo 2 Xbox Live traffic might have on broadband providers
• IGN has written an epilogue to their Halo 2 coverage, looking at whether it actually measured up to the hype that preceded it. (There are major spoilers here.) It’s well-written, and pretty fairly evaluates the game on its own merits.