Halo Universe (sporting a spiffy new design and a faster server) has an article up about the Plantronics Halo 2 headset. It’s in German, though. If it’s in your power, go read! Thanks, Marc.

I’ve received one too many messages of the form “I heard that [spoiler] is in Halo 2, is that true?”. To preserve my own enjoyment of the game, I’m going to have to stop reading my email folder entirely for two weeks. This means that a lot of messages are going to go unanswered; wallpaper submitted through email should still get through since Louis already handles that, but mail asking general questions, especially about stuff that could be found by a little research on the site or stuff about the contents of the final game that you shouldn’t know anyway, may fall by the wayside. Blame the guy who leaked it (not “the French”, OK?).

Wow. Dunno how long this is gonna last… but Halo Impulse is offering a MASSIVE (1.3 GB) map pack, containing 264 individual Halo CE maps. Close to every map created to date, I think (minus a couple still in development). If you’ve got a really big pipe – go get it!

If you ever wondered why the Master Chief has so much trouble winning those GameFAQs polls… check out their current poll. The question is ‘Do you plan to buy Halo 2?’ – and right now, the winning answer is ‘No, I don’t have an Xbox’ (36%) followed by ‘No, I don’t want it’ (23%). Not a lot of Xbox users there… Thanks, Strato.

Payoff! The Dialogue Databank, an underused but rich resource of HBO, has been ported to a far more robust backend; you shouldn’t run into any more problems using it. (Hehe – famous last words.) Extra bonus – it’s much faster now.

Quick Note – updates will be sparse today; work is continuing behind the scenes, and on real-life (non-computer-related projects) on this grey Sunday. Apologies. If you’ve sent content that hasn’t been posted, please be patient – we’ll almost certainly get to it eventually.

Been a little while since we managed a Fan Fiction update – there are 18 new stories waiting for you in there. Go see what you can find!

Foxygrandpa, Silverspoon, and Ms. Man have made it to the top of Boarding Action. There’s a bit of extra hardware involved – some sort of box that allows control of multiple players. There’s a video – 32 mb, WMP9 format – showing the details. All this and more can be found in the forum thread at High Impact Halo. Nice!

The Major League Gaming Championships kicked off today – and coverage has begun over at the MLGPro.com website. It will continue throughout the day and tomorrow – check back! Thanks, Dolbex.

Wolfy writes to point out a new episode of Marines at Sector 7 Halo. I dunno… the problem here seems like it will resolve itself, pretty quickly…

This came in yesterday, but I managed to overlook it. The Home Front team has posted another update on the Junkyard forums – screenshots of a redone map, and a fixed release date (next Friday, actually). Go read. Thanks, Mhaddy.

IGN’s Halo 2 Countdown article today is ‘Five Ways to Prepare Yourself for Halo 2‘. I’m sort of glad none of them involve vaseline.

Finalcutmac points out that there’s a video link for the MTV vid we mentioned yesterday, right on the MTV page that contains the story. (Look in the right navbar for ‘Audio & Video’.) Unfortunately, they actively weed out Mac users – something I find pretty dang annoying. I therefore extracted the url to the actual video stream – this should work on any platform with the ability to read mms streams. (Unless, of course, they change it.) Update: Looks like the direct URL has been turned off; someone at MTV decided they didn’t like direct-linking. I can’t really blame them, except that I think it’s really dumb that they won’t let Mac users even TRY. (We have a perfectly functional WMP9 that works just fine with their movie…) Sorry, folks.

If you’re a registered member (free) of RedvsBlue.com, you can grab Episode 40 from their forum. 7:22 long, ranging from 31 to 48 mb, depending on version. I gotta say… it’s gettin’ weird. Thanks to Ross Mills for the heads-up.

Apologies for the delay – I promised last week that we’d continue releasing segments of ‘My Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ every few days, and it’s been almost a week. I realize that more than 1500 of you have grabbed the entire movie via BitTorrent in the last couple of days… but many are still waiting patiently for the smaller pieces. You can grab Part 2 either on mythica.org or files.bungie.org – Part 3 will follow soon. (Part 1, if you missed it and can’t handle the BitTorrent version, can be grabbed at the links in this news post.) [I actually wrote this – and posted it – about 12 hours ago… but somehow, I managed to forget to actually FINISH the posting process. Sorry to everyone involved.] Update: the DJ writes to say that all released pieces so far (the trailer, part 1, part 2, and the full 30-minute movie) can be found on Halo Impulse, as well. Thanks!

Wonga. Amazing as it sounds, Frankie is STILL continuing with the Bungie Weekly Updates – this one is at Subnova. New TV spots coming next week, a sick SketchFactor, and a guest Mister Chief rendering by BOLL. Go read! (And Sketch – here’s hoping you get better!) Thanks to Eric Biro, who let us know while I was watching Big Fish with my family. Update: oops – Boxer points out that I misread the bit about Sketch – it’s his DOG that’s sick. (I guess i thought Frankie was insulting him while he was down. 🙂 ) Sketch – here’s hoping your dog gets better!

Another one from Hikaru-119; he’s uploaded the French commercial mentioned earlier to Brian Towne’s public service server – you can grab it from there. 2.2 mb, MPEG1 format.

I didn’t really think this was news, since it existed in Germany a month ago – but loads upon loads of people are writing to us about it, so… looks like as of today, Microsoft has OFFICIALLY announced the Limited Edition Halo 2 Xbox Live Starter Kit in Europe – it comes with a copy of Halo 2 (but not, confusingly enough, the LIMITED EDITION copy), an Xbox Live Voice Communicator, and a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live, all for £59.99. There’s a press release at Gamespot, among other places.

nilerogers.com continues its posting spree, with another snippet from the Halo 2 Soundtrack – this one is called Earth City, and is 2:40 long. The flash art is quite nice, but if you’re on a low-bandwidth connection, the direct link to the snippet is here. Lots of heads-ups from fans, looks like the earliest one came from Hikaru-119.

Stuntmutt feeds off a great scene in Aliens for today’s One One Se7en – looks like MC ain’t no Bishop.