It looks like London denizens will get a chance to play some Halo 2 next month, at the Gamestars Live event at the ExCeL facility. Tickets can be purchased from the Gamestars Live website, and the press release can be read at XboxRules.com (thanks, Walchicus). First notice of this came from Dark G, yesterday, though the information itself was nearly drowned out by the flamewar that erupted over the idea that the playable material might be single-player. Thanks also to broony, who pointed out an article at MyXbox. Details about WHAT will be playable don’t exist yet – but an educated guess would be the Zanzibar level.

Stuntmutt proves that metaphors are lost on the literal in today’s One One Se7en.

8 new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section. Go read…

Today’s Halo Babies strip finally reveals the face of the Baby that MC’s been trying to save. It may surprise you.

B ball master wrote gleefully to point out that The Gamesman (a New Zealand gameseller) is reporting that the November 9th release date for Halo 2 has been confirmed for New Zealand – which means that a kiwi will be the first consumer on the planet to officially get their hands on a copy.

Hehe – Roger Wilco seems to be as tired of a certain buzz-inducer as we are.

Want some Bungie schwag, but thought the Bungie Store was a little expensive? Looks like they’re moving – and having a fire sale on existing merchandise. Everything’s a few bucks off. Buy before August 31, though, because on that day the eCS/Bungie Store closes for good. Read the details on the front page. Thanks to Ross Mills for the first heads-up.

He’th Baskin really enjoyed the monk chanting in the Halo theme, but was frustrated that it was never by itself. So he mixed his own, 3:32, 4.8 mb mp3 version.

I have listened to as much Halo related music I could get my hands on but was always disappointed to find the monk chanting to be limited and always mixed with other instruments. So I set it upon myself to try and mix and match chant music from different Bungie tracks into a track of its own.

You can listen to it, too – we’re hosting it for him. Update: we’ve replaced the original with a new version that has less noise – he’th spent a couple of hours cleaning it up after release.

Wow, must be a day for exceptions. Back in March, we closed down the Guest Submissions section of One One Se7en – Stuntmutt himself created Guest Strip 100, and we said ‘no more’. Today, however, we’ve received a strip from Gruntsbane, the artist behind Halo Babies, and his Guest One One Se7en, a tribute to yesterday’s 200th strip, was too much fun to leave alone – so I’m reopening the Guest Section for this one last entry. Enjoy!

We don’t normally mention new websites on the front page any more – when we automated the Links section, the flood of new links (well over 100 of them) made that totally unfeasible – but there are always exceptions, and today we have one for you. CEAds, the Halo CE Promotion Project, is a website to show off the best and brightest of Halo CE and to help bring more Halo players to Halo CE. The ‘Why Play Halo CE’ page details what makes CE superior to PC, listing a good number of Halo CE’s new features. It’s still new, so content is sparse, but the idea is solid: Halo CE is the future of Halo on a PC, and more people should be playing it. This website will help show you why.

Today’s Calvin and Halo points out that some skills don’t translate well from virtual to real world…

Wow. 200 strips. And that doesn’t count Sundays, or Holidays, or Guest strips, or Archived strips. There are a lot of things you can say about Stuntmutt, but fly-by-night isn’t one of them. Today’s One One Se7en has got to be one of the worst puns EVER. Update: That BOLL just COULDN’T leave well enough alone, could he?

Five new stories for you in the Fan Fiction section… not too rough! Go read.

Gruntsbane, from Halo Babies, took some time out to talk to Dolbex, from MLGPro.com, about the comic strip, and the upcoming MLG Seattle event. Give it a read!

Agony points out a poll on the World Cyber Games site, asking for suggestions for games to be played at WCG 2005. Halo 2 is one of the FPS choices. If you vote, you have to vote for two choices in every category – just a heads-up.

Sparkypinball has posted another in his series of Halo multiplayer guides – this one is for Team Slayer. Swing on by Rampancy.net and read it. (And thanks to Sparky for pointing it out on our forum.)

Homefront, the Battlefield: Vietnam mod, has posted another update; Phantoms, Pelicans, FRGs. Thanks, Pballwizard.

Not to be outdone in the tournament writeup arena, cooked Gamer rapture wrote up a description of cooked Gamers’ path through the recent CPL Extreme Halo Championships (they fought back to second place after losing their very first match). Go read, and turn as green with envy as the $11,500 check they’re holding up… We heard about it on our forum.

There is a MASSIVE writeup on last week’s Halo50k3 tournament in Atlanta over at Bungie.net, penned by Dolbex, the man who made it all happen. Give it a read. Good stuff.

Makes me sad that this has to be pointed out… but what’s got to be done has got to be done. Frankie jumped into a thread on Bungie.net’s Underground Forum to flatly deny that Halo 2, or a demo for Halo 2, or anything REMOTELY RELATED TO PLAYABLE CODE will be released on August 24.

Halo 2 comes out on Nov. 9th or Nov. 11th for the UK. It does NOT come out on Aug 24th. You know what does come out on Aug. 24th? Some OXM special which does NOT, and I repeat does NOT have a Halo 2 demo on it.

It doesn’t get any plainer than that, folks. Go back to figuring out the ilovebees puzzle… but leave a playable Halo 2 out of it. (This was the last news post of yesterday’s news day… but apparently Count Zero was a bit too circumspect in his wording; I’ve received 3 separate emails from folks who didn’t notice that it was there at the top of the news page. I hope this is a bit more obvious.)