Speaking of overeating… Red vs Blue has posted a new Public Service Announcement; Indigestion 2004 is part political commentary, part cultural commentary, and all funny. Go watch! (Careful of the airsick bags…) First heads-up goes to Graham Cree.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving… or if you’re outside the US, you did something else involving far too much food. We’ve just said goodbye to our guests, and I’m sitting down to take a look through today’s mail. We’ve got a very nice new film from Jon Oakes – he melded video footage from Halo 2 with audio material from the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow trailer, to make a pretty slick little piece. 5.6 mb, QuickTime format, kindly hosted by KP on boomerica. Go watch, as you digest!

Yay… finally. I’ve made a dent on the Miscellaneous Art queue! There’s still plenty more to post, but I’ve posted 30 pieces today; I’m giving thanks to the artists who’ve waited so long to see their work posted. And that will pretty much do it for the day… time to start cooking turkey, and waiting on guests. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Calvin and Halo take off on a new series of comics today – thanks, Blackstar!

We’d received mail last week from some people that were having trouble hosting Major Clan matches on Xbox Live, even though they knew they had enough bandwidth to handle the job. Chris Butcher wrote out an explanation for the trouble recently, and posted it on Bungie.net – it seems that your ability to host clan matches requires that the network has a record of your bandwidth reliability. Read Chris’s post for more info – it’s pretty interesting! (It’s got actual bandwidth requirements listed – which, in and of themselves, are fascinating… because they’re roughly HALF of what a Halo PC game needs for hosting.) Thanks, deftangel.

In honor of Thanksgiving, Frankie has recycled the Halo 2 informational article originally posted on November 8, over at Bungie.net. I didn’t keep a local copy of the first version, so it’s hard to tell what, if anything, has changed… but at the very least, there are now nice graphics for the main sections. If you have questions about any aspects of Halo 2, this should be one of the very first places you look. Thanks, Wraith.

eek has offered mirrors for both of Dave Galindo’s (Chubigan’s) videos from yesterday – he’s got the QuickTime versions of the Halo Sights Tour and ‘In the Front Lines‘ up on The Nothing. Thanks!

We mentioned on November 4 that Halo had secured a spot on the Walk of Game, a new video game landmark in San Francisco. It took until yesterday for the inductees to be officially announced, however. Halo owns one of the four Favorite Game/Character spots. Thanks, pimpmeister.

Web comics for you today:

• MacHall takes a shot at the Halo 2 ending (Clearly, if you haven’t finished, this could be considered spoiler material) – Ian’s also put up a great new desktop image using Heltana, his anime version of your favorite onboard AI. Thanks to many – Jon was first.
• The most recent Carzorthade (November 23) shows one of the downsides of Bungie’s new attention to detail (thanks, Cameron Hassler).

Wow – I wish I had one of these in my town. Rampancy.net mentioned an article about a state-of-the-art gaming center in rural New Hampshire… it just opened, and Halo 2 is one of the games it offers. And wow, what a center. Here’s hoping for a successful expansion!

Yesterday, Ducain pointed out a post on the High Impact Halo forum; it was made by Chubigans, and had links to a pair of movies. The newest one looked at Halo 2 combat from the viewpoint of your Marine buddies, the older one just checked out some of the cool scenery you run into throughout the game. Both show some spectacular filmmaking technique; great camera angles, nice choices of content. This is a guy to keep an eye on. (Warning – some of the content might be considered spoiler material. Not by me… but then, I’ve already received angry email about some of the news posts I’ve put up, so clearly my view is more lax than some.) The HIH forum is down right now, but that’s okay, because the links in the original forum post are dead (from bandwidth overload). We’ve grabbed copies of both movies (they were in WMP9 format), and put them up on bungie.org and mythica.org servers – and made QuickTime versions, as well.

“In the Front Lines” (Halo Action Vid):

• WMP 9 format (27.4 mb) – mythica.org, bungie.org
• QuickTime format (21.5 mb) – mythica.org, bungie.org

Halo Sights Tour:

• WMP 9 format (14.1 mb) – mythica.org, bungie.org
• QuickTime format (11.1 mb) – mythica.org, bungie.org

This is a lot of byteage – if you can help with these, please send us mirror links, and we’ll pass ’em along. Now go watch! Update: Thanks to the7thwar.com – we’ve got another mirror for the QuickTime version of the Sights Tour.

Hehe – Stuntmutt bemoans the audio shortcomings of Halo 2 in this blog entry – thanks, Rampancy.net.

John Kirkpatrick entered a Halloween contest at a local nightclub – his Master Chief costume won him some cash. Nice!

Dinky points out an article at Gamespy that looks at the ‘Top 10 First-Person Melee Weapons‘ – the Plasma Sword from Halo 2 is number 6. Update: 7he One { Ryan R } points out that he noted this article on our forum about a week ago – oops…

omnistegan points out yet another morning news special on the horrible effects of violent videogames on our youth. This one was CTV AM, a national morning show in Canada, and it interviewed the director of Minnesota-based National Institute for Media and the Family, who issued their 9th annual video game report card today. Once again, Halo is lumped in with games like GTA: SA. In the video segment (direct feed for folks who can’t watch it in-page), he actually claims that a recent study (this week, apparently) shows that ‘the anger center of the brain activates and the control center of the brain deactivates’ – but he doesn’t actually give any reference for this, and he doesn’t discuss WHICH games were looked at. (He doesn’t even really talk about what this MEANS.) I gotta say – guys like this activate MY anger center. If anyone actually has a reference to this particular study (if it does, in fact, exist, and is peer-reviewed science), I’d love to post it. Thanks!

Robb Hutzal points out a tournament in Calgary, Canada, to benefit the Calgary Children’s Hospital; registration is $60 per 4-player team, gameplay will take place on January 28/29, 2005, and there’s $5000 in cash and prizes on the line. More details can be found at the Maasai Clan website. While you’re there, Robb suggests you visit the Chronicles section – another member of the clan has been writing Fan Fiction, and the entire collection can be found there.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, though, 3 pictures can be worth one word. Take One One Se7en, for example. (I leave the word choice up to you.)

Yesterday, SketchFactor posted a note on the Bungie.net forums detailing changes that are being made to the Xbox Live Matchmaking Playlist – it looks like (if all goes well) these changes will occur shortly after the Thanksgiving break (meaning next week, for folks not familiar with US holidays). Some good info in there! Thanks, SYSTEMS.

Having trouble with that second hangar bay on Cairo Station on Legendary? Mike Miller has summarized some of the existing resources out there to help you through, as well as adding 3 of his own movies. Amazing to watch, they show me how far behind the curve I really am, reflex-wise… but that’s okay, because the entire post, as a whole, gives me enough info to actually get through this area. (One small trick that Mike took advantage of in his first video, but didn’t spell out in the post, is that if you leave grunts alive from a particular wave, the next wave of elites won’t drop down; this can give you a small breather – just make sure you keep at least one grunt alive until you’ve killed all the elites from that wave. You can see him doing this at about 1:30 into the first movie.)

cuc pointed out a series of articles written by David Thomas, a journalist with the Denver post – all are well-written, but 3 are very similar to hundreds of other articles that we’ve mentioned. One is different – it’s the article cuc mentioned first, and it takes a rather more thoughtful approach to Halo 2 and its attributes. I found it most interesting for the observation that ‘Ludology drowns out narrative’ – this concept pins down a problem I’ve been having trouble with since Halo 2’s release; how can a game with a much richer story be LESS engaging than its predecessor? (Thomas’ answer is simple; if you’re too focused on the actual gameplay, you won’t NOTICE the story – which leaves you with less of a feel for it.) Was Halo 2 too action-packed for the story to really penetrate? You decide. (Read the rest of the article, as well; there is some interesting speculation about how Halo 2 will affect the gaming industry as a whole.) Update: Actually more of a tangent… the same author of this article writes a revealing response to another item in today’s news about violence in videogames. I (Ding) can’t stand the hypocrisy!