Bungie.net came back online a couple of hours ago, with 5 new forums, snappier response times, and some information about the Seventh Column site. Go read about it!

Quick roundup of some Halo 2 impressions articles we missed in the last few days:

• Worthplaying
• PC Arena
• Gamers Hell (really short)
• Boomtown

Good stuff.

Coming soon to gaming stores near you, Xbox.com has a nice 2004 Spring Guide as a free giveaway. It contains a very nice 3-page writeup of Halo 2, including a bunch of shots not yet available (legally) on the web. Since it was freely distributed at E3, we’re able to bring you a scan (thanks, Dan’s Brother). Check out our Press Scans section for details. (Yes, I know I said it would be posted yesterday… nothing ever goes as planned.)

Slashdot’s got a poll up on its main page; ‘Most Anticipated of E3?’ Currently, Halo 2 has 10% of more than 3000 votes (with Doom and Half-Life 2 each pulling a quarter of the total). Does that seem right to you? Thanks, Chris Simpkins.

Quick update on Chimp, mentioned yesterday – Baka has released version 1.3, with .wrl file importing to gmax. (For information about this Error Geometry file, and why you might want to import it to gmax, read the ‘Level Compilation’ section of the HEK tutorial.)

Limax created new screens for a fun game, with kudos to Fuzzy for the sprites. I’d play…

From Narcogen, at Rampancy.net:

In celebration of Rampancy’s fifth year (the early parts of which were spent as The Core), we’ve published the first two parts of Halo: Combat Retrospective, a look back at what people thought of Bungie and Halo before the award-winning game was even announced, yet alone released, and what’s changed since then: everything and nothing.

Narcogen reminds us, obliquely, that we’ve allowed our own 5-year anniversary to pass, unheralded. (It was Saturday.) As long as I don’t forget my OWN, though, I guess we’re fine.

MinM points out that the Game Critics Awards nominations will be posted today at 5 pm pacific (midnight UTC); Halo 2 should have a decent chance at some. (It was beaten by Half-Life 2 last year for everything except Best Console Game – will this year be a chance to even the score, or will a different game step in?)

IGN posted the fourth episode of its Halo 2 Multiplayer Hands-On series, this time focusing on how Halo 2 has won over the Nintendo fanboi at the heart of Fran Mirabella, editor of IGN (and author of the Hands-on). It’s a decent read – thanks, 3Suns.

[-GTC-]MaverickJ, who disappeared a while ago after producing a series of really nice movies (check our Movie database), is back with a new site, and new movies. Well, movie, for now, but more are coming. The Grammaton Clerics are a clan, and this is their site… but the movies are useful to everyone. The first movie they’ve released is pretty amazing; it’s called ‘Basic Essentials’, and it shows (and explains, in words) how to do some of the myriad of tricks that good tournament players consider essential. Watch this movie, and see your lan performance rise immediately! You can find it in their Video Archive in DivX (22.6 mb) and QuickTime (22.9 mb) formats. It’s 2:48 long. Comments can go in this forum thread. Update: Bah. We (along with any other site that linked to them) seem to have broken them; they’re out of bandwidth for the day. I can’t do anything about the DivX version (i never downloaded it), but you can grab the QuickTime version (which is actually only 18.6 mb) at files.bungie.org. I HATE overloading someone’s bandwidth, especially when it’s something worth watching.

MikeMan445 noticed a subtle but rather critical change in Bungie’s Halo 2 FAQ this morning:

Q: When does Halo 2 come out?

A: It’s official! Halo 2 will be released in the U.S. and Europe [emphasis mine] on November 9th, 2004. Halo 2 should be available very soon after in other markets but exact dates are TBD.

Given the uproar recently on our forum and others, this news should come as a welcome reassurance to EU gamers worried how long they’ll have to wait to play Halo 2. (It doesn’t help people OUTSIDE Europe, unfortunately… but please remember that Bungie will do its best to bring you your Halo 2 lovin’ as quickly as it possibly can.) Mike found this tidbit in Mat Noguchi’s blog, as a subtle hint with a subject of ‘Testing the land-speed record of information desemination of the Internet’. (Judging by timestamps on the site, it would suggest that this attempt at the record clocks in at about 10 hours. Not bad!)

Fire Team Charlie’s 12th offering is up and available for download, in both Divx and QuickTime formats. It’s hefty (60 mb in DivX format, 47 mb in QuickTime), long (6:57), and very, very funny. Once again, mods rule the special effects, with some stunning visuals resulting. What are you waiting for? Go grab it!

Bungie.net will be offline for a couple of hours today, starting around 10 am PDT (5 pm UTC), with some visible changes to be noticed when they come back. Hmm… Thanks, Wolfy.

Boxer’s put up another .comic at Subnova. Frankly, I don’t get the humor behind this one, but maybe it’s just me.

Just for Halo Custom Edition mapmakers – it looks like there is now a tool to export maps from gmax (and 3ds max, for that matter) to a format that Tool can read and import for Guerilla and Sapien. It’s called ‘Chimp’, and you can thank Baka, at the Gearbox forums, for it. This thread is pretty useful, and the actual download is here (210kb). If you couldn’t afford the steep cost of 3ds max, you now have an alternative!

For all the people waiting patiently for the Halo 2 magazine scans from last month – the wait is over. The June issue of Game Informer magazine hit newsstands today, so we’ve put up last month’s Halo 2 article in our Press Scans area. There’s more coming later today, so stay tuned! (Most of the pages are sized for readability without overloading our server – but there was a picture spread on pages 3-4 that was so gorgeous I resized it to fit larger monitors; you might have to play a little with the width.)

Today’s One One Se7en was actually written a month ago, when Bungie.net unveiled its new design. The queue was so full of hilarious jokes, though, that it had to be put off until now. Hmm… wait, nobody’s gonna believe that… okay, we lost it. It got covered up by the deviled ham when we put it back in the fridge. Sorry. (I have a special fondness for this strip because the Beautiful South rocks.) Update: This was supposed to be an archived strip; it’s completely and utterly my fault that you’re reading it in the main series. That said, I blame Stuntmutt.

If you weren’t sure about release dates, Halo: Resolution clears things up.