Today’s Penny Arcade might, or might not, involve a game you’re all familiar with. You’ll have to crack the code to decide. Thanks, KP.

I’ve turned off the Fate of the Forum poll – the ‘Yes’ percentage is almost exactly 77.7% of the total vote, and that was too good to pass up. 😉 (It’s been hovering around this point for the last 18 hours or so, but I wanted to give it a little longer last night.) Four thousand or so of you have weighed in on this – and 3/4 of you want the forum shut down, to avoid spoilers. We talked, behind the scenes, about opening the forum back up in a moderated form – you could post, but your post would be queued until a moderator approved it. This would eliminate the chance for spoilers on the forum – but would 1) slow down conversation dramatically, since posts wouldn’t be viewable until a moderator got around to approving them, and 2) would guarantee spoilage for moderators. It was a narrow vote, but the ‘keep the forum closed’ voices won in the end. So – that’s what we’re going to do. The forum will reopen on November 11; if you’re actually playing the game, we’d recommend you come back even later than that. (Once you’ve STARTED playing, it’s totally up to you to keep your nose out of the forum; we can’t be your willpower FOREVER, you know. 🙂 ) In the meantime, we’re going to try and upgrade the forum software; you may or may not notice the visual differences (depends on the viewing mode you use, I suppose), but hopefully you’ll notice the under-the-hood tweaks by how much easier they make some things. And if you really miss community conversation, there’s always our IRC channel; the moderators are pretty brutal when it comes to spoiler chat, so you’re reasonably safe there.

Daily Game has posted Duke’s Diary – the story of a controller’s visit to San Francisco to play Halo 2. Yeah, you read that right. Now go read it.

Wow… very nice. If you visit nilerogers.com, you can listen to a 1:45 long snippet of the Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix – composed by Marty O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, with guitars by Steve Vai. It rocks. Thanks, palatine. (The Flash popup that goes with the song is pretty nice, but if you’re having trouble with it, the music is here.)

Gah. I wrote this up this morning – but forgot to post it. Credit goes to Rampancy.net, which is where I found it. Over on MTV.com, there’s a story about “the Halo 2 Council”, a group of ‘7’ (if you count each of three bands as ‘1’) who receive a specialized xbox/screen combination and a copy of Halo 2 before November 9. It’s not at all clear 1) how this list was compiled, 2) WHY this list was compiled, or 3) why Bungie allowed these 7 discs out of their hands when nobody else is getting them… but that’s the way celebrity is, I guess. (I’d be pretty unhappy if I were a member of Breaking Benjamin – I’m one of three popular bands to be featured in the game, and the OTHER TWO get Pelican cases? Ouch!) Thanks to the dozens of people who wrote pointing out that we missed this story.

Yesterday, we pointed out a story on Xbox.com in which an editor of OXM stated that they’d have a world-exclusive pre-release Halo 2 review that covers Campaign play. We got word today from SketchFactor that yes, it’s true, they’re going to have the only published story with a street date before November 9 – but that they did this story in conjunction with Bungie, and they aren’t releasing any plot spoilers for the game. There WILL be new information – but it’s nothing that would ruin the single-player game, and it will be in a special sealed section of the review in any case. If you want to read it, you actually have to rip it open. Bungie still wants you to have a pristine single-player experience (if you can) – they aren’t letting anyone OFFICIAL ruin that.

Stuntmutt’s taken his own (well, okay, someone else’s, repackaged) view of the entire leaked Halo 2 issue in a special Sunday One One Se7en.

Whoa. Ms Man has managed to get to the bottom of Truth and Reconciliation, winning c0ld’s contest and proving me a pessimist. Pictures will be up on his site later today, a movie tomorrow. Congratulations!

More mirrors for yesterday’s high-quality Heart is a Lonely Hunter release – Djof points out that it’s available on the Psyjnir.org Hotline server, and the DJ has put a copy up at HaloImpulse. Don’t miss this one! The next episode comes out in a couple of days. (While we’re mentioning HaloImpulse, they’ve also got the QuickTime versions of last week’s video Bungie Update up, as well.)

Dark Helmet, over at HaloPlanet, has set up the ‘favorite tricks’ votes – go and make your opinion known! There’s a Favorite Multiplayer Trick vote, a Favorite Coop Trick vote, and a Favorite Single-Player Trick vote. The choices you have are the ones nominated and seconded in the past two weeks on the High Impact Halo forums. Update – looks like the polls were broken, or something. A new poll page is up.

A couple of people mentioned that Halo 2 was the subject of a story on 60 Minutes in Australia – apparently, it’s news because it’s looking like November 9 (and the days that follow) will ‘affect the industrialized world’ with the number of ‘sick’ days taken. The web release is here, and a transcript is coming soon. Thanks, Octavian and ragereset.

Churchofhalo found a funny error message on the net – the images are busted, but the text is humorous.

Holy moley… in the last couple of days, a TON of tools for decoding the alien font used on halo2.com have come out – and now, you can find not one, but THREE different fonts available for writing your own messages on Wallpaper or whatever. We mentioned two tools yesterday – now there’s a third (37K), and it’s functionally identical to Chappy’s Konfabulator widget, except that it runs on a PC and is built with .NET. The three fonts come from MrFluffyPants (8k), Multipilot (8k), and eek (5k). Grab ’em all, see which one suits you best. Okay – there’s plenty more news for today – but real life takes me away from the computer for a bit; back in a couple of hours. Update: focused7 has updated his decoder to sort shapes by common feature. Link has been updated.

Wow. The email response to the closing of the forum has been surprising, to put it mildly. Folks writing to us have been overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the forum closed until November 9. However – I want to hear from the whole HBO community, not just those who bother to write emails. To that end, I’ve set up a simple poll – please cast your vote. Thanks!

Every once in a while, a Halo movie comes along that’s head and shoulders above almost everything else out there. Great filmography, awesome sound, fantastic voice acting… if you look back on all of the Halo machinima creations that have been released (we’re not talking music videos now, or gameplay presentations), there are only a couple that are up there in a class that can stand alone, be of interest OUTSIDE the Halo community. (Red vs Blue is probably the most prominent example.) Now (in my opinion), there’s a new one. ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ is a 30-minute movie which has it all; great acting, great storyline, great cinematography, great music, great effects. Humor and pathos, all rolled into a Halo-driven package. 30 minutes is WAY too much to release on the web in this format, so they’ve broken it up into 6 episodes. The first one (as well as a 1:14-long, 7.5 mb trailer) is available on the HiaLH website; It’s 2:51 long, 20 mb, in QuickTime format. To ease the load on their server, we’ve mirrored this episode at mythica.org (and the trailer, too). Episode 2 will be released sometime early next week. Our forum is still down, so comments should be sent directly to the team (check their Contact page for email addresses) or to us – we’ll pass them along. Update: As many of you have noticed, the HiaLH website is offline right now, for exceeding their bandwidth. We’re tossing up another mirror of both of these files; you can find the trailer and Part 1 at files.bungie.org. We’re talking about BitTorrenting the entire thing, but give us some time to work it out.

Recoil points out nice bonus deals from Canadian sellers, if you haven’t already ordered your copy of Halo 2. Best Buy is offering a free T – the Blue ‘2’ logo on the front, ‘Go Earth. 110904’ on the back. (This doesn’t seem to be available on the online store, and Recoil doesn’t say what color this shirt is; most of the freebies I’ve seen have been black, though a white one exists, as well.) Over at Futureshop, they’re offering free mini action figures (one of two packs). Again, this doesn’t seem to be available online, so visit your local store.

There’s a note over on Xbox.com from the Assistant Editor of the Official Xbox Magazine talking about their next issue, and the massive Halo 2 article planned for it. The mag will be out on November 2, one week before the game is out, and will contain (it looks like) information about the entire Campaign mode. Up to you whether you buy it then, or wait until after you play. (Subscribers, of course, will get it even sooner.) Thanks, Ash.

Oh, man… in all the mess of yesterday, I managed to forget to post yesterday’s One One Se7en. That might have been a good thing… you decide. It’s up now.

IGN’s Halo 2 Countdown article for yesterday is called ‘Lockout’, and gives a couple of decent Multiplayer ideas for use on the map Lockout. Go read!

Very cool. Chappy has created a Konfabulator widget (138K) to ease translation of the code found on halo2.com. This requires Konfabulator, a MacOSX in-system javascript runtime engine that allows you to put cool functions on your desktop. This one is pretty useful, if you’re trying to decode a message; simply click the appropriate symbols, and the message will be typed out in the text bar at the top. A sample screenshot is here (78K). Again – this works in MacOSX only. Update: I just noticed that there’s a PC equivalent, of sorts – IWTPH2 created a small app that allows you to do the same thing. A tad harder to use – but it runs on a PC, which the widget does not. 🙂