TeamXbox posted the official Press Release for the Plantronics Halo 2 headset a bit over a week ago; they knew, at the time, that it had been leaked a little early, and that they might have to pull it. Looks like Plantronics has let it go, and the official PR release has hit the newswire today. A beautiful, hi-res shot of the headset is visible on the Plantronics site, along with a preorder page. Go check it out! Quick Update: John Durning points out that Plantronics’ website prices might be high; as an example, he points out that in the last couple of days, he bought (at Best Buy) a Plantronics MX150 for $31 and a M60 for $17 (these are priced at $45 and $25, respectively, on the Plantronics site); if this pattern continues, you might be able to buy the Halo 2 headset for something in the neighborhood of $35. Of course, you can’t PREORDER it at that price…

Man… I go a couple of days with no Fan Fiction update, and there are 18 stories waiting for me. No WONDER that server is having troubles. 🙁 Go read.

Boxer points out that the next Adventures in Disaster comic is up at akba.info – Episode 6 might give you a different outlook on Halo multiplayer.

Four tricks movies showed up on our forum in the last day or so; pretty wide range of size and interest. First post was from foxygrandpa117; he posted about a pair of vids a clanmember of his, wOot, made. The first shows a coop pair riding the initial pelican in AotCR down to the bottom of the pit; the trick is old, but nobody’s bothered to document the entire ride, I don’t think. WMP9 format, 7.7 mb. The second is random trick stuff; it’s the sort of video we’d decline to host if it were submitted here, because every single trick has been shown in other vids, but it’s a nice compilation of stuff, if you’re not a rabid downloader. WMP9 format, 21.7 mb. Then there was a post from vshields ash, pointing out a vid made by fluit (and originally posted at highimpacthalo.org). This one shows some platform-to-platform hog launching at the top of AotCR. Nice distance. WMP9 format, 2.7 mb. Finally, Madrox and Monoxide continue with their ‘getting stuff into the AotCR underground pit’ series, this time actually working on Two Betrayals, and bringing down a flood combat form. WMP9 format, 10.7 mb. (This is enough to get this post spoiler-labeled.) Nice to see that Halo tricking is still going strong!

Joshua Pettigrew has created a few bizarre widgets for Konfabulator, a MacOSX interface enhancer. (If you’re not using MacOSX, these are useless to you.) Drop them on your desktop, click on them, they spit out random dialogue from the game. if this sounds like something that interests you, go grab ’em. (Forum thread is here, for comments.)

Looks like the Sydney Roosters, on track for the National Rugby League finals in Australia, have pulled Halo’s Master Chief on board for some coaching help. Read all the details on the Australian Xbox.com site. Thanks to David the Great for pointing this out – and to the Aussies in this forum thread, who noticed the Nightmare Armor-clad giant on Rove Live recently. Looks like those suits are popping up all over the world!

Looks like Dr. Nick found that Canada.com article as well, but he went one step further, and found THIS article on the Canadian contingent on the same site. It’s a good read, even if they DO call Anim8rJB and bentllama the ‘Canimators’… and it looks like Sep7imus has taken issue with a couple of other… um, interesting phrase choices.

Nice image by opticalneuralinterface over at DeviantArt – someone else who shares Tina Leyk’s twin passions for Halo and the Xenomorphs. A browse through his gallery turns up this Halo 2 image (and lots of other fun stuff). Thanks to Mr. Cynical for pointing it out.

We’ve got another 10 desktops for you today in the Wallpaper Section – and a quick note. Some of the subsections of our site are hosted on a machine that’s having more and more trouble keeping up with the traffic; we’re doing everything we can to migrate away from this. In the meantime, though, if you get an error message when you load a page that reads ‘The database failed to initialize’ – be aware this is (mostly) transient – refreshing a few times should get you past it. I’ve moved the Wallpaper section off that machine for now; I’m not sure its current home will be any better, but given the greatly added traffic in both Wallpaper and Misc Art sections these days, anything that helps has got to be good.

TalkXbox was another site with a reporter at last weekend’s PAX event in Seattle – you can read their writeup, and view lots and lots of pics, on their website. Thanks, Jman.

Canada.com, the web version of Canada’s National Post, has a two-page article on Halo 2, and contains what I think is the first legitimate webview of the new Covenant beam rifle (as well as a not-very-clear pic of the Scorpion tank). It’s a pretty good read…

Normally, I wouldn’t put this on the front page… but it’s the best way of making sure everyone who needs to see this will. The next HBO Junkies lanfest has been scheduled for October 2, 2004; details (and instructions that EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO ATTEND MUST FOLLOW) can be found on the HBO Junkie’s Events page at b.net. I’m already overwhelmed with how many people want to come… so don’t sign up unless this is really something you can make it to. (Even if you DO sign up, please understand that I’m gonna have to turn away at least half the folks who sign up; nothing’s guaranteed. I wish I had a bigger house… but I don’t.)

Equally as surely, we’re working our way through the Miscellaneous Art backlog – another ten pieces have been posted today. We’re still in July, as far as submissions go… but that won’t be for much longer.

Dolbex, synide, and Jason of MLG put together an 8-minute long retrospective of the MLG-Seattle Halo 2 experience; you’ve already seen the in-game footage, this will give you some flavor of the event itself. 26.9 mb, QuickTime format; we’ve put copies up on both files2.bungie.org and mythica.org.

No matter how hard you try, sometimes info gets out before you mean for it to. Take One One Se7en, for example.

Another day, another 10 desktop images for the Wallpaper Section. Slowly but surely…

Nice. Wideload Games, the brainchild of Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian and the first (and only?) company with plans to release a game using the Halo engine, has finalized a publishing deal with Aspyr Media, a Mac publishing house. (This doesn’t mean Wideload’s first offering will be Mac-only… in fact, it’ll be released on Mac, PC, and Xbox.) There’s very little info about the game itself in the article, other than some comments about it not being just like Halo. We’ll be keeping our ears to the ground about this one – the Halo engine is a pretty solid asset, it’ll be fun to see how else it can be used. Thanks, Elite Marine and Gundulf.

Frankie showed up at the PAX event (the Penny Arcade blowout last weekend) with 12 Xboxes loaded with Halo 2 in hand… and seems to have had a good time. Of sorts. Check out the pictures and entertaining commentary over at Bungie.net. (He states, near the end, that this is probably the last chance the public will have to play this build. I think he must mean ‘in the US’, because unless something really stupendous is happening at the ExCeL center in London next weekend, they’ll be playing it again at the Gamestars event there.)

Didn’t think I was going to get to it today… but sometimes you get lucky. The next of about 8 backlogged batches of Miscellaneous Art (ten items per batch) is now up for grabs – so go grab. Cool sketches today.

Boxer points out that Episode 5 of Adventures in Disaster has been posted at akba.net. Careful where you step.