Rampancy

David Galindo has made several Halo 2 movies, the most striking of which perhaps is The Sights of Halo 2, which includes no action or gameplay, just some of the beautiful locations in the game set against part of the Halo 2 soundtrack. Almost... soothing. You can see it, and his other videos, at the recently-opened Sights of Halo 2 site. Thanks Evil Avatar.

Major Nelson points out a way developed by Samrad to pull your Halo 2 stats from the RSS feed at Bungie.net into Excel for analysis and the making of pretty charts. Editor's Note: The required "import XML" menu item seems to be missing from Excel 2004 on the Mac, so it looks like this procedure requires Windows.

The updates to Halo 2's Xbox Live playlists have arrived; the Team Slayer only list is now there. If you were online when the lists were updated, you'll need to disconnect and reconnect to see the new lists. Lots of changes here, and you can see a list of all the changes at Bungie.net.

News.com is reporting that overall console sales are down, with some 19.3 million units expected to have been shipped by the end of this year, compared to 35 million the previous year. In-Stat/MDR analyst Brian O'Rourke summed up the console wars like this:

[Microsoft and Nintendo are] fairly close for No. 2, and I think they'll remain that way. Xbox has done really well in North America, but it hasn't gotten very far in Japan and the rest of Asia. The (Nintendo) GameCube has a solid presence in all three (regional) markets, but they're not really knocking them dead in any of them.

As an aside, the article featured a link to GameSpot Trax, a feature that site uses to rank games according to unique users on Gamespot; at the moment Halo 2 sits atop the chart, followed by GTA: San Andreas and Half-Life 2.