the DJ points out that CAL (The CyberAthlete Amateur League) has picked up Halo 2, starting in January. There’s no news yet – but the Halo 2 Division exists. More details to come!

Interesting. One of the very first vids I saw in Halo 2 was someone exploiting the 6 plasma shields on Delta Halo for Tank Launching – park your tank on the shields, and if it’s well-placed, it flies nicely when the shields regenerate. There have been 2 or 3 vids circulating around the community, showing this trick – but a couple of guys found that submitting their vid to Slashdot drastically increases the audience. Two things happened; their bandwidth got toasted (no big deal, because some /. regular simply bittorrented the film, and you can grab it now thanks to hundreds of technophiles), and they got credit OUTSIDE the Halo community for this stunt. (There’s a third thing, too, I guess – they decreased the chances that a truly innovative film will even be MENTIONED by Slashdot. Bummer.) The vid they put out is DivX 5 format, 31 mb, almost 4 minutes long. After the first 30 seconds, you’ve seen it all.

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned Halo 2 Day on G4TechTV – a day devoted to Halo programming, coinciding with the release of the game. We forgot to go back and actually SUMMARIZE that content, after the fact – there’s quite a bit.

• Pretenders to the Halo Throne – games that didn’t quite measure up
• Masterpiece or Overhyped Fluff? – a look at the real meat of Halo 2
• Rick’s Picks – Soundtrack review
• Sweet Revenge – the band My Chemical Romance talks about Halo 2
• Bungie’s Braintrust – short interviews with Jaime Griesemer, Frank O’Connor, and Max Hoberman

In addition, there are a bunch of video offerings; the X-Play review in video format (spoilers), a movie called ‘Players Playing Halo’, a bit on Halo action figures, and the Red vs Blue commercials. (All of these are in Flash video format.) Lots o’ stuff!

About a year and a half ago, BOLL started creating panoramic views of Halo, using custom-built software and some video-captured footage. He’s back… with his first set of Halo 2 Panoramas. At this point, he’s using a modded controller to make his life easier, and he’s put together a nice little flash interface for viewing the panoramas. We’ll add more images as he submits them. (If you don’t have Javascript enabled, or Flash installed, you can simply click on the thumbnails to see full-sized versions of the images with no fancy interface.) Right now there are 4 multiplayer strips, and 6 single-player ones (from 3 levels). The Delta Halo strips are GORGEOUS!

Red Vs Blue has posted a couple of Sponsor-only videos; you can’t download them unless you’re a sponsor (though you CAN comment on them – beauty of the new website). You’ll find them linked off the Videos page. There’s the intro video to the Penny Arcade Expo last summer, and a test vid in which part of Episode 35 has been refilmed using the Halo 2 engine. Fun stuff! Ross Mills pointed this out.

Red Leader points out that the newest episode of his ‘The Life’ comic centers around Halo 2. Sometimes, it’s not how strong you are… it’s your staying power.

Normally, we keep Bungie-related news that’s not Halo-based on its own subsection of Bungie.org… but I’m not sure where Hamish is right now, so I don’t know when this news will make it onto the front page of the PiD section. Several days ago, Robin Osborne alerted us to Pathways Redux, a (then) upcoming mod for Doom 3 that reproduces Pathways into Darkness. By this time, it’s actually been released – it’s a 13 mb download. I haven’t seen it in action yet – I don’t have a copy of Doom 3 – but the readme suggests that the author, Brendon Chung, cared an awful lot about this project – so the chances are good that it’s pretty faithful to the original. (The two screenshots on the site are pretty impressive!) If you’ve got a copy of Doom 3, give this mod a try – see what 10-year-old Bungie programming can inspire!

There’ve been a few articles posted in the past few days that have been passed over due to time constraints – here’s a list:

• Waterloo Cedar Falls (IA) Courier – Halo is taking over college campuses
• The Tennessean – kids say Halo is disappointing, but they keep playing
• CNN.com (review) – Halo 2 gets almost everything right (no numerical score)
• Christ Centered Game Reviews – 90% (95% when not considering Christian audience appropriateness – thanks, Ross)

In addition, Rampancy.net has begun to publish Halo 2 impressions – somewhere between a review and a walkthrough, these discuss the game from the perspective of a long-time Bungie fan. The first three chapters are up now.

Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews, over at the Junkyard, has started up the ‘Write a Poem for Bungie‘ contest – well, actually, it starts up on Monday. No Haiku, unfortunately… but pretty much everything else is fair game. Lots o’ schwag for prizes. Check it out!

Bah. I spent far too much of yesterday taking care of business – I missed the day’s One One Se7en. It was doubly relevant given the fact that Frankie skipped yesterday’s Weekly What’s Update because of the Thanksgiving weekend. Go read!

DocOctavius posted a new map he just finished for HaloCE; it’s called Red Feather Ranch, and it’s pretty gorgeous to look at. Really feels like the high hills of Colorado – as DocOc intended. The map’s quite large… but the two bases are actually pretty close together. I don’t know how it plays (haven’t had time to try it out), but the forum post lists a server it’s running on, so give it a shot!

BOLL found an interesting feature on a later level – does this tell us anything about the origins of the Forerunner, or is this just a coincidence? (Again, spoiler issues for folks who haven’t gotten here yet, but the Forerunner were a big part of the original Halo, as well.)

I’m STILL not finished with the new HBO/HIH Tricks site (this holiday week threw a glitch in a lot of projects), but there was a vid posted to our forum this morning which is pretty cool, and worth seeing. Gil27 managed to film the handheld Scarab gun – a plasma rifle, hidden away on Metropolis, that fires Scarab bolts. (Given that the Scarab was seen in Halo commercials, it doesn’t really seem to me that there is any spoiler material in this video… but you never know.) The video is 12.4 mb, DivX 5 format. What a deadly gun!

TeamXbox gave thanks for some Xbox-related stuff recently… Halo 2 Multiplayer made number one on the lsit of ten items. Nice! Thanks, Cybrfrk.

JesusLove submitted a fun little film showing a nice run of banshee boarding in single player. If you haven’t finished the Gas Giant section of the game, there are spoilers here. Otherwise, check this out; I tried it myself after watching this vid last night, and I must say, it’s pretty darned easy to fall to your death in the attempt – so I’m impressed! QuickTime format, 9.4 mb.

The last time I posted a spoiler-marked news item, I received a TON of email from people who have not figured out how to get their browser to properly set a cookie to view spoilers. There seem to be two groups with the problem: folks running MacOSX 10.2, and folks running Windows while using some sort of external firewall (Norton products are the most common culprits). Safari under OSX 10.2 is broken, with respect to certain types of cookies; we used to point people to a workaround, but stopped doing so after Panther was released (newer versions of Safari work fine with our spoiler system). You can still use this – clearly, you’ll need to change a few settings – see the bottom of that page for details. For Windows users, your alternatives are less palatable; you can either live without spoiler posts, or you can tone down your internet security settings. Because neither of these are ideal, we’ve added a third choice: On the page that explains the spoiler settings, we’ve added links to a couple of pages that can show you all spoiler-blocked posts. If you’re missing some news that you don’t want to miss, and you can’t make the spoiler system work on your computer, use these links to see the news normally blocked. Here’s hoping this alleviates some of the pain!

David “Chubigans” Galindo continues his cinematic style of video narrative with ‘The Arbiter’s Army’, a new piece putting the Spec-Ops Covenant forces fighting on Gas Giant and Delta Halo in a noble light. Really nice work! It’s available in WMP9 format (21.4 mb) at Mythica.org and bungie.org, or QuickTime format (17.5 mb) at Mythica.org and bungie.org.

Zero, from Dark-Oni.com, dropped a note about a pretty bizarre movie he made. He says “This a little joke/experiment I was working with, it’s using some of the dialogue in cut scenes to make this funny techno beat, with cinematics.” I’m not sure I get it. Epileptics beware. Vid is 16.1 mb, WMP9 format, hosted on Zero’s connection.

Halo Babies has put up a guest strip created by BOLL – that guy is everywhere. The link in the news description is a bit funky – use this one instead.

Yet another comic tips a hat to Halo 2 – Aikida points out that blowing off your significant other for Halo 2 might not even be noticed. Thanks, BoinKlasik.