Very cool. GruntKilla pointed out the original artwork for the cover of Toyfare Magazine #86. A little investigation turned up the website of Greg Horn, the artist. (Click on the MC head in the ‘Other Projects This Month’ section at the top for his own copy of the art.) It’s the only Halo-related artwork I could find, but there’s some fun stuff if you poke around. Update: G-Nox found a second piece of Halo-related artwork on that site – nice work!

Remember back when Calvin was worried about what was under his bed? Today’s Calvin and Halo ramps up the fear factor.

Thirteen new pieces in the Fan Fiction section today – including a couple of poems and a pledge. See what you can find!

Radid Gnome interviewed a friend of his, an MLG staffer who played Halo 2 at the Downpour event, about the game. He’s posted the interview on his website. (The site is framed, so look for the ‘New Halo 2 Article’ in the news.)

Whoa. The band Regurgitator, out of Australia, is performing a 3-week ‘Band in a Bubble’ experiment, where they attempt to record an entire album in social isolation (though with millions watching). For entertainment? They’ll be playing Halo 2, apparently. Details can be found in this Xbox.com article. The whole shebang kicks off in 5 days. Thanks to gspawn for noticing.

Gamespy has posted a Halo 2 Reader Feedback Followup article; questions readers have asked, answered by Gamespy staffers. There’ll be another part tomorrow. Thanks to LaMuerte for the heads-up.

Sevenar posted a short ad for a pretty entertaining event… in movie format. Details on what you’re watching (as well as filesize) are in the forum post. If there’s demand, I’ll rip a QT version of this, too.

[-TLG-]Madrox continues his ‘live stuff in the pit’ series by bringing a stack of live Marines to the bottom of the chasm in the underground area of AotCR. Amazing! Hosting provided by Mythica, via High Impact Halo. I’ll try and get a QuickTime version posted later today – look for an update to this newspost.

The London (Ontario) Free Press posted a news piece on X04 Canada, held recently in Toronto. Halo 2, of course, got a chunk of the text. Go read.

We got word of a couple of contests recently; Blade writes about a Halo 2 Cover Design contest, where winning entries get Gmail invites and some Halo 2 material. And Ryan Kiskis, Director of Xfire Business Development, writes to let us know about a Skins contest; design a skin for Xfire (an instant messenger for gamers, with Halo PC and Halo CE support), win a piece of $3000 in cash. Check ’em out!

Narcogen pointed out that Rampancy.net, as well, has set up a special forum just for discussion of I Love Bees-related materials. Folks on our own forum cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that bee discussion will be deleted here – whether it’s Halo-related or not – but hopefully, as time goes on, they’ll move that discussion to more appropriate places… like Rampancy.net. Check out the news post for details of the resources available.

Yaksha posted a video today showcasing a couple of Halo PC mods… and a pretty drawn-out punchline. 2:09 long, 10.2 mb, WMP9 format. Hosted by redvsblue.net. Check it out!

Boxer points out that the next episode of Adventures in Disaster is posted at akba.info. Man… I would HOPE they have this cleared up by then…

The Junkyard’s analysis of Halo levels by an experienced Marine pilot continues, his time with a look at Truth and Reconciliation. I was amused at the discussion about entering the grav lift area (“Going through the maze inside the plateau is a bad idea, especially if it’s guarded. Going on top of the plateau would have been a better idea”) – Halo tricksters had the right idea all along! Thanks to Mhaddy for letting us know about it (even if I forgot to post it this morning).

Miguel Chavez, the Number One Bungie Fan, sent along a picture (72k) of The Smallest Spartan, otherwise known as Rafi Chavez. I’m not really sure whose desk that is behind him, but I’m pretty sure you’ve seen it on the webcam at some point.

Dang, I said I was done talking about Zanzibar today… and then Stuntmutt had to go and cover it in One One Se7en. I wonder if there’s a coral reef? Update: Go load it again. Make sure your speakers are on. Yes, it’s true, I’m a moron.

This was released yesterday, but would have been completely buried… timboh56 created a trailer for a stop-motion picture he’s putting together, ‘Attack of the Giant Grunt’. It’s short – but it’s quite good, so we’ve mirrored both the original WMP9 version (721K) and a new QuickTime version (812K), so that you don’t have to hammer his personal website. C’mon… it’s tiny. Grab it.

synide, from haloTV, wrote to say that [cG]rapture finished the first of the cookedGamers at Summer CPL 2004 videos, cG vs Strive/Reality. You can watch it over at haloTV.net. It’s about 20 minutes long, 720×480 format, and streamed straight to your desktop. It was filmed behind the cG team; you get the players’ reactions as well as the gameplay itself. Nice vid! There are more on the way – check back at haloTV.net often.

Since the ilovebees phenomenon started back on July 23, I’ve been ambivalent about posting updates related to it; on the one hand, it’s clearly Halo2-related, so it falls within our purview… on the other hand, we’re just not equipped to handle a game of this magnitude. A few weeks ago, in response to forum flooding, I banned the word ‘bee’ (and some common variants) from our forum, to try and convince people to think twice about posting this information. I wrote a short piece, explaining where HBO officially stood on the matter, and requested that discussion be taken elsewhere. I stopped short of outright banning of the discussion, however.

Until today. Last night, I had to delete more than 350 posts on our forum that added nothing but noise; once again, folks were simply regurgitating what they found elsewhere on the net, without even TRYING to read what others had already written. The general excuse for this is ‘this forum is too hard to understand’ or ‘there’s too much here to look through’. And that’s the point. The puzzle is pretty interesting; cut through the silliness and there’s a lot to like about it. And it’s definitely related to Halo 2, so once all is said and done, we’ll do our best to wrap it up and include any relevant information in our various sections. For now, though, conversation MUST take place somewhere else – because what was happening here was not conversation, it was unintelligible noise. (And oh, yeah – for now, please stop sending us updates about what’s happening on the various ILB-related websites; we’re not going to post anything on the front page about it… that would simply encourage folks to discuss it again on the forum which would lead to… well, you know.) Update: Fluffy, site director at HaloPlanet, reminded me that they’ve just opened a new bee-related forum over there; yet ANOTHER good place to go and discuss this stuff.

Wow. I hate for the front page to be dominated by a single file – but I guess this one is pretty big. The MLG Zanzibar Halo 2 Mirror page now has quite a few direct download links, if you’ve had trouble with BitTorrent – and Two Degrees, another peer-to-peer sharing network which made its HBO debut last winter, is back as well. (As of this writing, BitTorrent has served over a terabyte worth of files in about 18 hours – not too bad.) I’ve also put up a 320×240 version, for folks on slower machines (some computers can’t handle 640×480 video), and for those on slower connections, there are representative rounds; you can download either a full 3 minute Offense or Defense round, in either 640×480 or 320×240 sizes. Filesizes on these get as small as about 10 mb, so almost everyone should be able to handle them. (If you’ve already got the large file, you gain NOTHING by downloading the segments; I just cut them out of there. Please save our bandwidth by NOT downloading, in that case.) If you feel you can mirror any of these versions, go ahead and send the links, we’ll add them. mrsmiley, the player in the vid, has also written up his experience over at Halo Babies – and included ANOTHER 8 minute video (WMP9 format, 32.1 mb) which gives some flavor for the day. This will be the last I mention this today – check the Mirror page for new links, if you’re missing anything.