New guest strip over at Halo Babies – done by Bluestone, of 343GS. Hehe – I’ve seen this a few times myself…

18 new pieces for you today in the Fan Fiction section – quite a few of them are poems. Interesting shift…

Gamespy published its 2004 Holiday Guide – and of course, Halo 2 is among its recommendations. “Great Gift For: Xbox owner who loved the first one, loves shooters, or breathes.” Sounds about right. Thanks, HaloPlanet.

Another Brute joke in today’s One One Se7en. Or maybe it’s not a joke… it would explain a lot of things…

Bentllama has updated his blog with some fascinating sketches – early work he did to teach himself how Elites moved. You want to see where an animator starts? Check this stuff out.

Lothar Hex points out that Gamespy has named Halo 2 its Game of the Month for November 2004. It beats out Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3 for that title. Nice!

Edwin Davis has created a series of Halo 2 icons for Mac OSX – use these to spruce up folders and disks. You can grab them off our server, in .sit format (900k), or you can visit Edwin’s site and grab them in about a million different formats (from photoshop files to .icns resources and everything in between). Update: Not to be outdone, BOLL has submitted a collection of WinXP icons – 32×32, with ‘soft edges’ (unlikely to be supported by older Windows operating systems). 140K.

Articles around the net:

• VNUnet.com – more on Microsoft and modded boxes
• The Gateway – Halo review (no score, but very positive, except for the ending)
• Eurogamer – Multiplayer review – 9/10 (lost points for lack of coop)
• The Scotsman – Multiplayer saves Halo (thanks, kinggun)

This week’s Halo Humpday Challenge pitted the Bungie Frag Doodz against girl gamers the Frag Dolls – a team of talented women who’ve shown themselves to be pretty deadly on the virtual battlefield. The game writeup was great… but the Frag Doodz website had me confused. (The Gamertags listed don’t match the people pictured, for one thing.) Hilarious work, in any case. Go read about it!

A few days ago, we opened a new section devoted to BOLL’s panoramic shots of Halo 2. Thanks to BOLL’s industriousness, we not only have a new set of 15 images for you, but the entire set of images (Halo AND Halo 2) are now displayed by the same system. You can easily jump back to see the older images if you choose to. Man… I LOVE the Metropolis shot.

The traditionally insane ‘biggest shopping day of the year’, the day after Thanksgiving, helped push Halo 2 over the 5 million mark in sales in less than 2 and a half weeks. You can read the press release for more details. Thanks, Dolbex.

I know it seems like pigpiling on Bungie… but it’s not. Yet another hardcore community member has taken the time to write out, coherently, what he thinks is wrong with Halo 2. Mothergoat wrote up a ‘Reflections on Halo 2‘ post on our forum, looking at the little things that (for him anyway) diminished Halo 2 from a GREAT game to a great game. (Tip o’ the hat to Dazza for the distinction.) Before anyone goes ballistic: mothergoat says, clearly, “I love Halo 2 as a video game. Just… not as a Halo game.” Personally, I find it heartening that so many longtime fans are making the effort to try and nail down what it is about Halo 2 that disappointed them; not a single one of the criticism posts we’ve mentioned recently has said ‘Bungie sucks!’ or ‘Halo 2 sucks!’ or ‘I’m never buying another Bungie product again!’ These are people who LOVED Halo, and (for the most part) LOVED Bungie, and want to see them get it right(er) next time. They want to turn the great game that is Halo 2 into the GREAT game that could be Halo 3. (Or whatever it ends up being.)

Recently, Bungie posted two new desktop images – both contained ‘Covenant text’ at the bottom. The code, it seems, has changed a bit since the Halo2.com site went live – but Ain Soph Aur, with the help of Hybrid-X-Ultima, managed to decode them anyway. (‘Jiralhanae’ is the Covenant name for ‘Brute’, according to the Limited Edition manual.)

There’s yet ANOTHER Stats aggregation option now (thanks, Craven); vviperrx, at the Bungie.net forums, has written a perl script to do the basic work for you. I just tested it out (the linux version, which I ran under FreeBSD – it’s pretty generic Unix, actually), and it works nicely. There’s also a Windows version – I haven’t tested it. He’s still working on it, and more details can be found in that forum thread. I’m going to hold off on any NEW aggregation techniques; it sounds like an entire section needs to be set up, and I don’t want the front page overrun with this sort of technical stuff (I realize it’s only interesting to a subset of our readers). You’re welcome to continue sending in stuff you find – but realize I won’t be posting it until I find time to compile a full ‘Stats Tools’ section.

Hehe – you thought the Covenant came to Earth to kill us. Calvin has learned otherwise, in today’s Calvin and Halo.

A few days ago, kornman00, ViperNEO, and Fayt released a movie runthrough of a new level they were working on for HaloCE – called ‘The Engine Room’, it recreates the space from the Maw pretty nicely. (Thanks to MasterGrief for pointing this out.) The following day, kornman00 released a beta version of the map. (There’s another version coming tomorrow, probably.) Check this out!

There’s an interesting news post over at Bungie.net – it addresses some of the fears and desires fans have expressed about long-term stats. Currently, there’s no easy way to archive your old stats when Bungie does a purge… and even between purges, there’s no way to look at your CUMULATIVE stats (total kills in all games, etc). Bungie.net user Clustered Index has put together an Excel worksheet that helps solve these problems – you can read about it (and download it) from his website. Nice! Update: Apparently, the XML tools needed for this don’t exist on all versions of Excel. focused7 sent mail saying you needed “Excel 2003 with a Microsoft Office Professional install” -I hadn’t realized things were quite so spread out on the PC side. (On the mac side, you can buy Office. Period. The version of Excel that comes in it uses this worksheet without problems.) Update 2: Eep, I’m wrong; I can VIEW content, but not import it. In order to use this worksheet, your copy of Excel will need XML Import tools. Sorry! (Thanks again to focused7 for setting me straight.)

Thanks to the 8 million people who pointed out that Bungie has updated the XBL Matchmaking playlists; visit the news post for an overview of what has changed, as well as links to the full list of gametypes.

A few website reviews for you today:

• SignOnSanDiego.com – 4 stars, ‘less repetitive than Halo 1’, but ‘ending is surprisingly awful’. (Thanks, kinggun)
• Wired News – ‘excellent game’ with ‘considerable flaws’ (thanks again, kinggun)
• Gaming Nexus – 7.6/10, a scornful-enough review to be mentioned on Bungie.net (interestingly, the same site did a SECOND review, by a different reviewer, Halo 2 rated an 8.9/10.)

Wow. Buxton has recreated the first episode of Red vs Blue… with Legos. It’s nearly flawless – attention to detail is amazing. So here’s a game (Halo) that was so good it inspired a group of guys to make a movie based on (and using) it… which was so good it inspired someone to reproduce that movie in an entirely different medium. It’s an onion, I tell you. Thanks, Legolaso111.