Someday we'll return to being able to post news items separately. But there are those who say that day will never come... in the meantime, the roundup, thanks to HBO, Halo Planet, Halo Babies, The ILB Wiki, and many others:

• Brian Morden's voice is indeed in Halo 2, confirmed by Jay "The Younger" Weinland at Bungie. Check Bungie Sightings for more information on Brian and his story.
• A recording of the conference call with the I Love Bees puppetmasters is now online at ARGN. It's a 30 Mb .wav file.
• Anton P. Nym may have found out why Flood can't infect Hunters: according to The Art of Halo, Hunters are colonies of spineless worms.
• Marty "The Elder" O'Donnell doesn't mind at all if fans transcribe his music for Halo 1 and 2, but there won't be any official transcriptions from Bungie or Microsoft because there's no resources for such a project.
• HBO also has their usual roundup of articles from other websites on game sales and local color.
• Smeeisqualityfoo in a post that might be called a spoiler noted a few Marathon connections in Halo 2. There are probably going to be lots of these, and we'll try to catalog them-- after we get the game here.
• Alexis went to the ILB training event in Schaumburg, IL and has put up a slide show. He's also wondering if Halo 2 is the end, as many fans are.

Gabe and Tycho seem to have the same opinion of Halo 2 as Halo 1: they love multiplayer and hate the campaign:

I havent talked about Halo 2 yet but thats because Ive been playing it every night. For me its a lot like Halo 1 in that I lost interest in the single player campaign almost immediately but Ill be addicted to the multiplayer for months. Tycho beat the entire game and he assures me that Im not missing anything. In fact when I asked him about the ending he swore and kicked over a chair. I dont really care about that though as what I was looking for out of Halo 2 was an improved multiplayer experience. The addition of Live play along with new weapons, levels, modes, abilities and the possibility of DLC is enough to make me happy with my purchase.

They are playing online as the Halo 2 clan Team Inferno.

Cnet today has an article speculating on Microsoft's approach to trying to eliminate users of modified Xboxes from its Xbox Live gaming service, even going so far as to try and implicate Halo 2.

For awhile now, registered users of Rampancy could enter in their XBL GamerTags in their profiles, by clicking the my account link under the lefthand menu for their username, and editing their personal information. Now, we have a way to actually use that information. First, you can see a list of our registered users, and if you like, you can see only those who have entered GamerTags.

The list will also display users' city and country, if they have entered it, so you can find GamerTags of Rampancy.net users nearby you if you like. Personal information like your email address is not displayed on this page, or anywhere else. We are also planning to allow users to share information like GamerTags and stats feeds between various Halo fansites.

There is also now a field to enter your Bungie.net stats RSS feed; so if you have XBL and haven't entered this information, go ahead!

Tycho of Penny Arcade is beginning to post his first impressions of Halo 2, starting with the matchmaking system, which he seems to like fairly well:

It's odd when you first start, especially if you're used to PC-style server browsers or classic Live optimatches, both of which make up for their deficiencies somewhat by being highly explicit. Once you get the hang of this new way, it's startlingly humane and organic in comparison.

And, of course, today's Penny Arcade comic is also Halo 2-themed.

[image:8734 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] HaloMods is carrying news of one of the first mods made with a legitimately owned copy of Halo 2; Iron Forge has created a dual plasma swords mod. Don't know how effective it is, but it looks damn cool. Thanks to synide for the heads-up.

GameSpy has a two-page feature up called The Numbers Never Lie about the Halo 2 statistics system.

The BBC wonders why Halo 1 has created so much enthusiasm for the sequel; and to find out, they asked HBO's Claude "Louis Wu" Errera:

Bungie got everything right. They were really careful to make sure everything worked the way it was supposed to.

Nothing distracts you when you were playing. There was nothing in Halo that had not been done before but everything in there was as good as it could be.

SFGate.com also did a writeup on fan expectations for the game, and spoke to Miguel "Freewill" Chavez of Bungie Sightings and Brian "Blackstar" Josselyn of Blackstar Productions.

Over at Sector 7, Fusion is promising coverage from Times Square soon, and Shadow points out his chance to do his bit for Bungie by offering his own personal Xbox as a demo machine to his local Gamestop in Washington state.

Coke points out on IRC that it looks like the Bungie.net forums have been reorganized. Additional Halo 2 forums have been added: Zanzibar for multiplayer discussions, OptiMatch for matchmaking discussions.

[image:8701 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Blackstar of Blackstar Productions sent in a series of photos from the midnight opening of his local EB where he picked up a copy of Halo 2. There's also a writeup of his shopping experience:

Well I have it. It is in my hands as I write these words. I have yet to put it in my xbox and play because I know if I do I will never finish writing this. So here is a little write up about me getting Halo 2 at the Midnight Madness sale and 2 years of waiting, hoping and praying all comes to fruition.

Check out the whole writeup and the photos as well.

Major Nelson is reporting on his blog that massive numbers of people are logging into the service to play Halo 2, but that everything is running smoothly so far.