Whoops! I’ve got to head out, but KP reminded me that today is the third anniversary of the release of Halo – a good day to be happy about! (It’s also the second anniversary of Xbox Live – and wow, what a long way THAT has come!) Happy Birthday, Halo! (As for all the other news that’s building up – tonight. I’ll get to a bunch of it tonight. I hope.)

Whoa. This is FIRMLY in the rumor category, until I see some evidence, but Slashdot is reporting that there’s a note at the very end of the credits screen that states ‘Coming February 9th’ – if you finish on Legendary. Utopian Gamers, where /. got their info, suggests that it’s a heads-up for Halo 3 in 3 months… I have trouble believing that. What it DOES mean (if it’s even really there), though, is anybody’s guess at this point. More if and when we learn something.

A certain hippo-lover tipped us off to a new product from Motorola, coming soon… MAN that interface looks familiar. I know I’ve seen it somewhere before…

That darn Stuntmutt… always sniping. One One Se7en gets it wrong today, though – I’m not particularly jolly. Just ask the people who email me.

Hehe – we’re holding off on most tricks/glitches/eggs until the joint HIH/HBO site is up and running (in the meantime, remember to submit your stuff to High Impact Halo!), but this one was too good to let go. Mike Basus was looking at his HDTV screen, waiting for matches to start in Live, and noticed that one of the lines of what looks like alien text is actually the lower half of text in the Halo font. He’s decoded this much so far:

“DAVID CANDLAND IS THE GREATEST UI DESIGNER EVER”
[then there are 13 characters he doesn’t understand:] “LIVEINTREEISI”
“HIS WORK IS ASTOUNDING AND HE IS VERY HUMBLE”

I gotta wonder – did Dave put this in, or was someone yanking his chain? Nice find, Mike! Update: Confirmation from a close relative of Dave’s clears up that this was, in fact, added by Dave, and as late as October, had not been noticed by the majority of Bungie employees. The best kind of egg!

Uriel points out an article on the German SCIFI-NEWS site; it talks about a Halo movie to be announced in Variety this January. Ed Harris as Keyes, Samuel L. Jackson as Johnson, with Ridley Scott directing… they even have storyboards that haven’t been seen yet (unless they come from the Art of Halo book, which hasn’t arrived here yet…). Uriel points out that there are plenty of factual errors in the text, and that this is all RUMOR until confirmed somewhere – but man, it’s a rumor that just won’t die, no matter how often Bungie says ‘we don’t like the idea of a Halo movie’.

Reviews this morning:

• Daily Trojan (USC student paper) – general review (no score) – thanks, Annie M.D. Update: They did, in fact, give it a rating (though it’s not displayed online): 4.5/5.
• Thread (New Zealand) – 4.5/5
• The Battalion (Texas A&M student paper) – no score, but ‘just more of the same’

There’s also a multiplayer overview from the Daily Trojan – thanks, Annie M.D.

Halo GT has put together another film – GT #11 starts out with some tank launching off shields, and gets to the top of the world. There are also a bunch of funny glitches on the second half of the film. Some stuff I haven’t read about yet. 30 mb, QuickTime format, available from HaloGT.com.

Wow… the folks at Xbox.com have been busy. TONS of new articles…

• Spotlight on Halo 2 sound
• The Sins of Halo (what it’s made people do)
• Book Report: First Strike
• New and Improved (what’s better in vehicles and weapons)
• A Smarter AI
• Rev Your Engines (a look at vehicles)
• Double Your Guns (dual-wielding guide)
• The Backstage Pass page has FINALLY been updated with winner info
• Minor Spoilers (story synopsis – there ARE spoilers here)
• Launch coverage: New York at 3 pm, 6 pm, 7 pm, 9 pm, overall, Seattle coverage, LA coverage

Thatsalotta articles.

Rhox, from HaloNorge.com, points out a set of pictures he took at the Norwegian launch party last week. Funky chairs!

Folks have been noticing some glitches on our website recently; we’ve been getting a LOT of mail. The explanation is pretty technical – but for those interested, I’ve written it up. Check the ‘Read Why‘ link to the right. If you continue to send mail about these problems without reading this, we’ll likely just send you the link; we’re not trying to be rude, we’re trying to deal with the astounding quantity of email that comes in while still actually maintaining the site. Thanks!

Once again, in the crush of Halo 2 news, regular sections of this website are being neglected. I wish I had a solution for that. I’ve processed the Fan Fiction queue (languishing for almost a week) – another 20 pieces are up for your perusal. Hopefully, artwork is coming soon.

A few new articles around the net for you; IT AsiaOne wrote up an overview of the game, and Alexis visited an I Love Bees training session in Illinois last week – his writeup is over at Rampancy.net, with pictures added later. Reading is gud!

Something Awful reviewed Halo 2 – sort of. Like much of the content on SA, this is a total farce. If you read it, don’t let your blood boil… it’s TRYING to piss you off. Some of the comments are quite funny. gspawn was the first to notice.

Marsguy posted a set of pictures he took at last week’s Halo 2 Fanfest hosted by Bungie. Nice shots! Comments can go back on our forum.

HaloPlanet has a nice collection of fan-written reviews, broken handily into spoiler- and non-spoiler-laden categories. Check ’em out!

We’ve been flooded with submissions for tricks, glitches, eggs, and the like, and we plan to open a section to house all these goodies in the not-too-distant future. The problem is… it’s not coded yet. However, this doesn’t mean you’re out of luck if you’re looking for hosting for your tricksterism. I’m proud to announce an upcoming joint project between High Impact Halo and HBO – two of the best-known names in Halo oddness are teaming up to bring you the most complete tricks site on the web. While the new home is built, you should post your tricks on the HIH forum – Ducain will grab them from there and add them to the main HIH site. As soon as the new home is built, we’ll import all existing Halo 2 tricks into it (and provide a nice interface for new additions). There are many things on the plate right now… but this one has pretty high priority!

Man… you guys are hardcore. I had a small problem with the spoiler system today – took me about 15 minutes to fix it. In that time, I received 10 notes – a couple were just confused, 3 were angry, the rest were giving me a heads-up… our spoiler system was broken, and was showing weird stuff. Remember, this is a low-budget operation; I don’t have a development server, so fixes happen on the live server, in real time; sometimes, I have to put some debugging code in to see what’s going wrong. If you see odd stuff, how about you wait 10 minutes and then look again, before you start mailing me that it’s broken? Thanks.

While we’re on the spoiler system – there are a number of you that continue to have trouble setting a spoiler cookie on your computer. With one exception, every single problem that I’ve heard about involves Windows XP with SP2 installed. I’ve done as much testing as I possibly can without an actual SP2 machine (I’ve had more than a dozen people with this combination playing with settings to see what works and what doesn’t) – without exception, all of my testers were able to set cookies successfully. If you can’t, it’s more than likely that you have something blocking cookies – something in your privacy settings, or a software firewall (like Norton Internet Security), or something similar. There’s nothing at all I can do about that. That’s your computer. You need to accept first-party cookies, and (I think) accept session cookies. Beyond that, any blockage is on your computer; I can’t tell you what’s wrong, because I’m not there. Sorry.