Two new video clips for you today, around the web; Xbox Central is hosting an MTV news clip showing the ‘Halo 2 Council’ (celebrities getting special Halo 2 goodies) and the Pelican case’d Xbox/screen that’s among their loot: 8 mb, WMP9 format (thanks, Ben Bayes), and there’s a higher-res version of the leaked EB Games commercial we saw a couple of weeks ago; unfortunately, the only place it’s currently available is on a site hosting pirated information, so we’re not going to pass out the URL. (It’s also in French.) Thanks, Hikaru-119. Update: Gah, I should have passed on this news item altogether. Warbow points out that the MTV piece is no longer available, either. Sorry.

Ryan McCaffrey, from OXM, stopped by the TeamXbox forums to answer specific, non-spoiling questions about OXM’s review of Halo 2, out now to subscribers in the December issue of the magazine (and on newsstand shelves on November 2). As of right now, there aren’t a lot of answers, but there sure are a lot of questions. Thanks, Myles Leadbetter. UPDATE: Be careful when following along here- spoilers are starting to show up. -CZ

IGN has reviewed the SmartJoy FRAG device, the mouse/keyboard combination for the Xbox. Overall, they liked it, though they said it worked better with some games than with others. Halo was near the top of the list of ‘good’ games. Thanks, Joe Larson.

There’s a short interview with Nathaniel, one of the owners of EP Game Servers, over at BlamDink.co.uk. He takes a decidedly Gearbox-centric view of the development situation for Halo Custom Edition and Halo PC – that is, Gearbox is doing everything they can to help the fans, and the only roadblock is the big bad Microsoft and its left arm, Bungie. I suppose that’s one point of view.

There’s a new article over at Xbox.com about 10 fans who won all three Halo novels (two of them signed by the author). You can read their explanations about why they wanted the books. Thanks, Littlebigman.

Today’s IGN Countdown article gives you 5 excuses to try with your significant other in order to garner some screentime on November 9. I can’t see any of them working, unless your significant other has the intellect of a small fern.

New comics up – there’s a wordless (but not even remotely hard-to-understand) strip over at Halo Babies… and a look at the MC’s improvements over at Master Chief and Cortana. And yesterday, there was a continuation of the Joe and Monkey strip we mentioned recently – with another new one today. (We’re definitely getting away from Halo-related… but it’s a story, so…)

Just a reminder, since it rolled off the front page so quickly – there’s a great new interview of Marty O’Donnell in our Miscellaneous section. If you haven’t read it yet – go do so!

Thanks to the very large number of people who wrote in to tell us that OXM has published their Halo 2 review and rated the game a 9.7- the highest score the magazine has ever given out. As usual, we’ll post scans in a month, once the magazine is no longer for sale.

Marty O’Donnell is probably the most interviewed employee of Bungie Studios – whether it’s because he loves to talk, or because his expertise outstrips the rest of the team, I couldn’t say. Most of the time, though, the questions fall into a relatively narrow range… everyone asks the same sorts of things. Nico Audy-Rowland, the man behind the music at Rooster Teeth (Red vs Blue and The Strangerhood), decided to strike off into untrodden terrritory… and Marty followed, gracefully. We’ve got a 30-question interview that ranges from nitty-gritty technical stuff to the philosophy of composing, and lots of subjects in between! Go read it, and gain a bit more insight into this almost-enigmatic musician!

Today’s Calvin and Halo shows what happens when you let a single event take over your life. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you…

This should have gone up over a week ago – but things have really been a little crazy around here. Last month’s Edge Magazine had a gorgeous 8-page spread on Halo 2 (Plus the front and back covers, the inside cover, and the Enter editorial column) – we’ve finally put it online in our Press Scans section. The text was up on Edge’s site weeks ago – but the pretty pictures are worth the look.

Tony Albert sent along a kind note with a description of some new music of his:

I’ve been a lurker of the forums and news pages for a couple of years now, and although my involvement in the community is non-existent, my admiration for the creativity surrounding Halo is immense. That said, I wanted throw my own creativity into the fray by submitting a song to you that I have written in homage to Halo. I believe it has universal appeal, but hopefully readers of Eric Nylund’s ‘Halo: The Fall of Reach’ will be hard pressed to identify it’s speaker as anyone but the master chief, John 117 himself.

The song, a 6.4 mb mp3, can be grabbed from our server. Solid southern rock, with a nice Halo-based theme after the second chorus. Give it a listen!

Mhaddy from the Junkyard writes to point out yet ANOTHER Homefront update on the Junkyard forums. (These guys are stepping up the pace.) There are 12 new screenshots of single player mode (which is just multiplayer mode – with up to 63 bots). There will be another update on Friday, with a release date announcement.

Speaking of repurposing assets… I wasn’t going to mention this right away, because I was hoping for a reply from the website owners first… but the number of emails we’re getting from viewers makes it hard to wait. Over on the Mountain Dew/Slurpee Halo 2 page, there’s a new download – they’re calling it the 339 SFX Player. It’s a downloadable Flash application, for both Mac and PC, and it’s simply an interface for playing ‘over 50 exclusive Halo sound clips’. The problem is – every single one of these clips was taken from our Dialogue Databank, with no credit whatsoever to the original collectors. If you really want sound clips – visit the Databank; there are over 1200 snippets, instead of just 50 (though you don’t get the funky Flash interface for listening to them that way). With this flood of Halo-related advertising hitting the net (and other avenues) recently, it seems that a few places have forgotten about general ethics.

A number of people have written us about ‘new screenshots’ at Gamespy.com – these are neither new, nor screenshots. They simply extracted a bunch of the artwork from the newly remodeled halo2.com. Oh, yeah – and then they put their own watermark on it.

Okay, I wasn’t going to post this, because it’s clear that the folks at nilerogers.com WANT you to watch the flash animations that go with the music… but for a lot of you, that’s a less than perfect solution; the animation doesn’t preload, it streams… which means if your internet connection isn’t suitably fast, you hear a second or two of music, followed by 5 or 10 seconds of silence, followed by a few seconds of music… and so on. This is clearly not what ANY musician would want for their audience. You can download the full 2:55-long snippet (this is NOT the entire song this time, thank goodness) here, and play it when you’ve got the WHOLE thing. Please visit the main website in any case, and check out the info they’ve got there; I’m not trying to circumvent their ability to let you know what they offer, I’m simply trying to give people a chance to hear this music as both Marty O’Donnell and Incubus would WANT to hear it, rather than in pieces. The list of people sending in links (as well as the list complaining about the choppiness) is far too large to enumerate, but thanks to all.

Another IGN Countdown article – this one is a short summary of Ivory Tower, one of the multiplayer maps that beta testers got their hands on. Read it for a summary and a couple of basic gameplay mode ideas.

Well, it took longer than any of us expected – but you can now grab ‘Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ in one fell 203 mb swoop. If you don’t know what this movie is, here’s the first news post I made about it. We’ll continue releasing chapters for folks who don’t want the whole thing in one shot – but for those with a fast connection, you can grab the entire movie tonight, and watch the whole 30 minutes without waiting. I just watched it again this afternoon… and I must say, I still believe this is one of the best pieces released in the Halo community – ever. Update: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter website is back up with a new forum, if you’d like to discuss this movie.

IGN continues their Countdown to Halo 2 series with a showdown – Halo 2 vs Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Yeah. Thanks, Creaper609. Update: In a twist that’s vaguely surreal, it looks like GTA: SA has ALSO been pirated and released to the net, before official publication. The Gamespot article is eerily similar to the Halo 2 piracy articles from last week. Given the number of megaahit titles being stolen this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some major changes in how copy protection is handled in the future (changes that will, like as not, make life far more inconvenient for law-abiding consumers). Thanks, Dean.