Wonga. The Major League Gaming website has been totally overhauled for the 2005 season; there is a quarter of a million dollars on the line this year. There’s an article about point and prize breakdowns for those competing, details about upcoming content from Dolbex, and more! Check it all out.

ThinkGeek is gettin’ in on the Halo Lovin’ action – they’re selling a plain black T-shirt with ‘Master Chief’ (in a pseudo-Halo font) on it. It ain’t cheap, neither. Thanks, Jonas.

A week ago, Time Magazine published their list of Top 10 Games for 2004 – Halo was Number 7. Thanks to Excalibur for the magazine scans; you’ll find the article in our Press Scans section.

After taking a week off for Thanksgiving, Frankie is back with another Weekly What’s Update, a service in which Bungie answers questions posed by Halo 2 fans during the course of the week. One question asks about non-flaming ninjas – you can create your own using our new Multiplayer Emblem Generator (if you don’t like those colors, feel free to change them!) – another declares that the cliffhanger ending of Halo 2 was intentional (which is about as close to an admission that the next Halo is in the works as you’re going to get, I think). There are many others – discussion about clipping issues in multiplayer maps, answers about bugs and their fixes, explanations of obscure gaming references. The one thing I didn’t see (that I expected to) was a mention of the ‘Cable modem standby button cheat’ that made the rounds this week; maybe that’s coming. A great read – go check it out!

BOLL recently sent us a web-based interface for experimenting with the emblems you can choose for your XBL Halo 2 profile – and Bungie kindly allowed us to post it for you to use. (We needed to ask, since the image generated actually comes from their servers.) Go ahead and experiment – build your best avatar! (This isn’t the only one on the net right now – recently, Yaksha pointed out another one at the Sponsors vs Freeloaders site. Try them both!)

Captain Spark has posted another 33 dialogue snippets on his website. This is the third such release – if you missed the first two, don’t worry, we’ll be posting them soon in the upcoming Halo 2 Dialogue Databank. (These 33 will be available for the next week or so on CS’s website.)

1Up.com has begun collecting data for their Best Games of 2004 Awards – head over and vote. Halo 2 is up for Best Shooter, Best Online/Multiplayer, and Game of the Year. Thanks, Frankie.

Gearbox Software, EPG Servers, and Halo Maps have teamed up to present a pretty nice contest; create a 90 second video on the theme ‘Play Halo CE’, and win free dedicated server hosting for Halo CE and Gearbox schwag. The full details can be found over at the Halo Maps website. You’ve got December 31 to get your entry in – go read the rules and get started!

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.