Bungie.net member ev1l tr1t0n has kicked off a small project to map Halo’s online population – there’s a thread on Bungie.net, and a website containing the relevant charts. Interesting info for the stats-minded among us! (Thanks to chess, at NeoGAF, for the heads-up.)(Louis Wu 18:18:21 UTC)

It’s time for another Gears of War 2 XP event, but this one has quite an interesting twist. This time we’ll be receiving a measily 10x XP, not much when compared to the massive 35x XP event we had last month. And I can hear alot of you saying, “I already got my Wings, why should I care about another XP boost?” Well, this is where it gets interesting.

Rod Fergusson has recently been teasing on Twitter, what’s going to be happening with Horde mode for the 9 day event that starts tomorrow. No specifics yet, but he has confirmed that it will be a very good way to boost the Seriously 2.0 achievement, but it won’t be easy so Rod recommends you bump the difficulty down to Casual and grab some Gears buddies. The map you choose to play on will also be the key to success.

What do we think, a huge mass of Tickers?

The Bees Knees’ Willeth and some friends set up a nice comparison – check out Combat Evolved! (1080p version of the Reach shot is in his Fileshare.) (Louis Wu 17:51:30 UTC)

Mendicant Bias noticed that a recent episode of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things (a strip created for an Escapist contest not to long ago, that now lives comfortably on its own) features your favorite 26th-century supersoldier, among other video game luminaries. (The text below the comic can help with context, if you don’t recognize the song.) (Louis Wu 17:24:14 UTC)

Treeskunk decided to recreate the Battle: Los Angeles trailer in Reach (you can see the original here) – it seems to be more of a ‘feeling’ recreation, rather than a literal transcribing of the scenes. Either way – go look! (Louis Wu 17:23:44 UTC)

Morpheus noticed an IGN article entitled ‘How To Make Video Game Movies Not Suck‘ – Halo is a big part of it. Interesting read!(Louis Wu 17:23:17 UTC)

Didn’t remember to post this on Tuesday, when FyreWulff announced it – but his Noble Fundraiser (with funds going to the Brian Morden Foundation) ended up bringing in $301 from generous Halo fans – nicely done! Read FW’s post for a full breakdown.(Louis Wu 17:22:38 UTC)

Hydranockz, at NeoGAF (and FyreWulff, on our forum) pointed out that the Halo Wars website is going offline on December 19 – the Halo Waypoint team are making a forum to give folks a place to discuss the game, but the other functions of the website (most notably online stat tracking, as Bungie.net does for Halo 2, 3, ODST, and Reach) will be disappearing forever. Bummer! (Halo Wars Title Update 5 will unhook the game from the website, and fix a few small bugs.) The discussion on our forum, at least, has ventured towards what this might imply about stats tracking once Bungie is gone from the Halo series… no statement has been made by anyone about this. (Bungie’s still in business, while Ensemble ceased to exist right after Halo Wars was finished.) (Louis Wu 17:21:39 UTC)

Ghutarrific! 

Cover your bases.

We mentioned the Honor The Code contest (Mountain Dew and Doritos) a couple of times, and the grand prizes (a pair of Reach life-size Mongooses, built by Weta) have made the news on September 6 and September 22… but the first drawing is tomorrow, and CrunchGear has a great shot of the product. Go see! (Thanks, bakemono)(Louis Wu 23:41:59 UTC)

Whoa. One of the glitches shown in the E.O.A. 3 video posted this morning involved flying a Seraph on Long Night of Solace – the group has now released a tutorial vid showing how you can do this yourself. (No modding required, though it DOES look like it takes a bit of dexterity.) Thanks again, MelkorTheGreat.(Louis Wu 21:32:23 UTC)

Bungie’s Comm Chatter highlighted a pretty cool assisted stick – guy throws a sticky, then uses rounds from a concussion rifle to place it where it does the most damage. Pretty cool! (The YouTube version adds absolutely nothing to the film – so here’s the Bungie.net version; at least you can download it to your Xbox and explore it yourself.)(Louis Wu 20:58:05 UTC)

As most of you are undoubtedly aware, there was a HUGE iTunes announcement earlier today. After relentless requests from Apple and heated negotiations, we have released THE RED VS BLUE REVELATION SOUNDTRACK on iTunes!!! We are really excited about it and are sorry it took so long to form this partnership.

If you are unsure about downloading the album or if you have pre-ordered it from our store and want a sneak preview of what is to come, click here to preview the tracks for free.

The album is also available digitally on Amazon and will be on Zune soonish.

Hello out there. Are you still one helmet away from having all of the Avatar Awards in Halo Reach? Does that one helmet belong to Carter? Well then you might want to check out this video, as Geoff and I show you an easy (and fast) way to grab it.

Gamasutra has posted the Game Developer 50 – their choices for the people behind the most significant contributions to the game industry over the past year. In the Programming section, Bungie’s Jon Cable gets a tip o’ the hat for Forge World. Congrats, Jon! And thanks to ElzarTheBam, who noticed this at NeoGAF.(Louis Wu 18:11:29 UTC)