Another weekend, another news roundup!

• Major Nelson points out a revised version of the Halo 2 Stats worksheet for Excel 2003.
• A troika of heavy-hitting articles at MLG today: an interview with girl gamer Xena, a how-to on surviving Halo 2 without losing your Significant Other, and lastly a piece on the policing of XBL. Thanks Dolbex.
• rapture at Cooked Gamers notes the ongoing search for Halo 2 Super Weapons. If I only had a super weapon...
• XTournaments is announcing their 2005 event schedule, starting with the North East Coast Halo 2 Tournament on February 12, 2005.
• I have no idea what you'd do (and probably don't want to know --Ed.) with a life-size replica of the Master Chief, but if you enter this contest, you could win one. Thanks Sector7.
• Louis Wu at HBO sends word about the opening of the Halo 2 Dialogue Databank, with over 200 submissions from Captain Spark.
• BOLL has discovered a shirtless Jason Jones in a Halo 2 cutscene. (We kind of hope this one's not true. --Ed.)
• Ars Technica diverges from its usual PC focus to review Halo 2, the cult game even grandmothers ask for by name. (It's a great look from someone who wasn't all starry-eyed about the first game. --Ed)

Team 7hr33, consisting of Daniel "Finn" Barbour of the Halo Story Page, Richard "Shovelface" Nickel and Rob-Roy "M3" Schmidt have put up their review of Halo 2, titled Page of Woah|Woe, or, How I learned to stop worrying and criticize Halo 2.

Jason Carl at Xbox.com has put up an article on the use of the Covenant Ghost vehicle in Halo 2. Thanks Dolbex at MLG.

VerdaFolio notes a Field of Vision (FOV) hack for Halo 2.

Obviously showing off in front of the Frag Dollz took away whatever humility Bungie might have developed as a result of being beaten by the forum mods; triumphant in the latest Humpday Challenge against OXM, the egos run rampant.

K.R. Wicks of Rockslide Megabattle fame put up his own review of Halo 2, entitled Halo 2 Disappointment. Generally, it is a nice collation of most of the complaints that many players have had about the game, altough the postscript, added on November 29, is more harsh:

Put my copy of Halo 2 up for sale, restored Halo to its natural resting place in my Xbox, and loaded up some good old rockslide megabattling. Ah... blissful relief! Jackals that point and roll. Grunts that are truly grunty. And when an Elite bounded up and greeted me with "Wort Wort Wort!", I almost went over to give him a hug (but no don't worry, I quickly regained my senses and blew his ugly great head off). Just like old times. And wow, this gameplay is so much more enjoyable, it's like a breath of fresh air after the last few weeks. Makes Halo 2 seem like a bad dream to be forgotten.

For awhile I was thinking that criticism of the game was due to overhype and unreasonable expectations, but when someone who clearly loved the first game so well actually sells his copy of Halo 2 and feels good about it... ouch.

[image:8886 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Given the recent release of the Pathways Redux mod for Doom 3, it seemed appropriate to look for more old school Bungie news, and Izual delivered it: box art for Minotaur, Bungie's dungeon-crawling game, in Halo multiplayer levels: Foundation, to be exact. You can find it in our Halo 2 Tricks Database under Multiplayer.