Colin Plamondon wrote to let us know about a new series of Halo instructional videos at TalkXbox. The series will have seven episodes, and was created by Eisen Feuer, the new strategy video maker for TalkXbox. Online right now is an introductory trailer for the series.

In a surprise move, the identity of this week's Humpday Challenge opponents was revealed in the latest Penny Arcade comic. As Gabe and Tycho feared, Bungie did indeed want to play Slayer, and ended up schooling the Penny Arcade duo and their friends, winning all three games with kill ratios of about 2:1. Frankie's writeup is up at Bungie.net now.

WaLKa pointed out the results of StK's grudge match against Check 6 in the MLG Houston event over in the HBO forum. There's no results on the official MLG site yet, but it should be soon. Thanks Louis Wu.

Louis Wu, courtesy of Dan Chosich's tipoff, points us to Gamasutra's freely-availably printer-friendly version of Handling Complexity in the Halo 2 AI, the GDC 2005 presentation by Bungie's Damian Isla. Lots of interesting diagrams.

synide writes at MLG that the finals are now underway; the story has Video On Demand links.

This week's What's What Update is a one-note songbird: where's the downloadable content? Frankie says the date will be known soon. In addition, he disavows any knowledge of the recently-discovered Maji skull.

In other news:

Bungie took on Pioneer Electronics in the last Humpday Challenge and won all three games-- and quite handily, too, by the look of it, despite Frankie's show of self-deprecation.

Slashdot is reporting that Bungie's audio team of C Paul Johnson, Marty O'Donnell, and Jay Weinland won the Best Audio award at GDC 2005 for Halo 2. In most other categories, though, Half-Life 2 stole the show. Thanks Louis Wu.

James "Fiend" Schneider of Major League Gaming has interviewed Alfonso "AYB Fonzi" Chartier. Fonzi and his teammates came to the fore with the launch of Halo 2. Thanks Dolbex.

[image:9096 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Only slightly more than three years have passed since the Xbox brought Microsoft into the console wars, and the next generation, if rumors are to be believed, will be upon us by the 2005 holiday season. Ahh.. Xbox. A console of infinite games... assuming they're all made by Bungie.

Here's a look at recent items about upcoming consoles, as well as goings-on in the Bungieverse:

Frankie has clarified his post from yesterday: there'll be "plenty of warning" before Halo 2 downloadable content is available. It's not going to be today and you shouldn't hold your breath and there'll be no more comments by Frankie on HBO, you insensitive clods!