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.

Wow, nice. Over on the Gearbox forums, bitterbanana has released a mod that works with both HaloCE and HaloPC – it expands your field of view (works nicely on widescreen monitors) and lets you view yourself from behind (third-person camera). Nice! Thanks, VerdaFolio.

Gamespy has opened its Gamers’ Choice voting for Game of the Year 2004 – make yourself heard. (Halo 2, obviously, is up for the Xbox award.) Thanks, Gothmog117.

It’s time again for another HBO Poll. Thanks to Max Hoberman, Hawaiian Pig, and XLNC for making it happen. If you’re interested in letting Bungie know which Halo map you’d like to see again in Halo 2, follow the link to the right and vote! The poll will remain up for a week or so. (Full explanation on how this came about is on that page.) Update: Apologies – In my haste to get this poll loaded, I left a couple of things off – like IP logging, and a vote button. I put the vote button in a bit too quickly… and a couple of overzealous fans ran up the vote on a couple of maps. I’ve since reset the counter; if you voted in the first few minutes of this poll’s existence, you should vote again. Sorry about that.

Secrets from the inside! Check out today’s Calvin and Halo for the lowdown on bentllama’s inspiration.

Tired of your standard Windows cursors? Looks like BOLL and Stuntmutt teamed up to give you another choice. (No comment on whether it’s a step up or a step down…)

This was posted yesterday – but Dolbex didn’t make a lot of noise about it. Max Hoberman, Multiplayer and User-Interface Lead for Halo 2, answered a bunch of questions asked by MLG forumgoers over on the MLGPro.com website. Info about weapon balance, downloadable content, and Bungie involvement in the community are all addressed – plus lots more. One of the most interesting (and perplexing) answers:

WLT asks: “Why did you guys [take] out the fall damage?”

Unfortunately falling damage didn’t play nice with the energy sword, which made it into the game pretty late. If you lunged at someone below you you’d get accelerated so fast that when you hit the ground you’d die. We had to make a last minute decision whether to keep it like this or to turn off falling damage in multiplayer. We’d been playing without falling damage for quite some time anyway, and it didn’t bother us too much, so we chose the latter.

Go read the interview for much more info.

News from Eric Trautmann, former keeper of the Halo Bible Flame, and author of ‘The Art of Halo’ – there’s a new article at Xbox.com on the book, including several sample pages (though they’re not even close to what I would have picked to showcase the book’s strengths), and there’s an interview with Eric, conducted by Halo novelist Eric Nylund, over at Del Rey Online. Thanks once again, Narc.

There’s a story in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer that looks at the creator of the Excel Worksheet mentioned last week for dealing with Halo 2 RSS stats. When was the last time a spreadsheet created for looking at videogame stats rated a full column in a major metropolitan newspaper? Thanks again, Narcogen.

Wow – there’s a mountain of new artwork over at Halo Babies – including the beginnings of a Halo graphic novel, and a new work in progress by Tina Leyk! (There’s plenty of other stuff in there to see, as well – check every link!) Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for the heads-up; I guess I fell off mrsmiley’s mailing list.

deftangel points out an article at vnunet.com – it looks like Britain’s conversion to broadband might be boosted a bit by Halo 2. Broadband traffic in general quadrupled after November 9 – a statistic that is rather astounding, when you consider how many uses there are for broadband. Looks like ISPs are upgrading in order to keep up with the XBL demand. Update: Bah, I have to learn to read more carefully. Broadband usage hasn’t increased fourfold… just Xbox Live traffic has. Sort of kills my spin, doesn’t it? Thanks, Robin Osborne, for setting me straight.