Enough todo. Let's have at it!

• HBO's Louis Wu has collected up news articles and reviews and posted them, excepting the oft-repeated figure of $125M in sales on the first day.
• Joyride has pictures up of the Drone action figure, expected in January 2005. A company that does work for Joyride leaked the original image of the drone. Thanks HBO.
• The Xbox 2, according to The Inquirer, is rumored come in three flavors; a cheap version without a hard drive, a standard edition, and a media center PC edition. The first two are expected out next fall, the last in the fall of 2006. Penny Arcade today has Tycho's commentary on that rumor as does the comic, while Eurogamer has more details on the Xbox 2's ATI graphics chipset.
• Rapture at cooked gamers likens the unlockable multiplayer level, Foundation, to the return of Thunderdome from Marathon 2.

Read them in good health.

Taylor Whitfield of the Paly Voice, the online paper of Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, California, has a rather interesting figure quoted in their article on Halo 2 midnight madness:

"This is definitely the biggest turn out we’ve ever had," said Tyler Durden, manager of Game Stop."

Sounds like a lot of people have been breaking the first two rules of Halo Club. Thanks for the heads-up to vector40.

Kitt at Evil Avatar pointed out a comparison between the number of users on Valve's Steam service to those playing Halo 2 on XBL. At the moment, they are about equal: around 75,000 players currently online.

As usual, more news than one can shake a boomstick at:

• Eric Trautmann notes that the Art of Halo hits bookstore shelves yesterday, at least in theory-- he says some stores don't have it due to late shipments.
• Major Nelson notes that MS' official sales total for Halo 2uesday is now $125 million and also talkes about how Halo 2 matchmaking is different than usual matchmaking on XBL.
• mrsmiley points out that Halo Babies is mentioned in the Halo 2 credits, and that their forums are now back online.
• Fluffy at Halo Planet reviews the SmartJoy Frag and how well it works with Halo 2.
• mnemesis at Bungie Sightings summarizes the old Bungie box acronyms and asks for suggestions on what Halo 2's acronym, JNAMSFTFY, might mean. However, fans should take note that several old acronyms, including PC Halo, GOtY edition Halo, the Halo Soundtrack, Myth 2, the Myth Soundtrack, and the Myth Total Codex, are also still not yet officially solved even after all this time.
• Louis Wu at HBO points out a phone-in chat conference with the I Love Bees players mentioned at ARGN.
• Frankie posts that Bungie will be hosting a weekly challenge to all comers on XBL with bragging rights on the line. They went up against IGN this week; you can see the results courtesy of Bungie's amazing Game Viewer stats system. Shishka seems to be the class of the Bungie team, consistently finishing near the top.

  Editor's Note: The Bungie.net story links to game #2 twice, but Shishka gladly provided the link to game #3.

• Penny Arcade's Tycho is obsessed with trying to connect Halo 2's plot, the Conversations from the Universe insert that comes with the Limited Edition, and the I Love Bees ARG.

That's all for now.

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.

How much money did Halo make on its first day? $100 million, according to Microsoft and EB Games, says GameSpot. Not bad.

Editor's Note: Comparisons keep being made to the opening day takes of Hollywood films, and there's no sign that such comparisons will stop anytime soon. However, they're probably not very meaningful. Movie tickets are cheaper, the potential audience for films is larger because there are no hardware requirements, the chance for multiple viewings is much greater than for multiple copy purchases, and films rarely offer pre-purchasing for tickets months in advance, meaning that the purchases for Halo 2 are stilted towards the first day in a way that looks similar, but is motivated by different circumstances, than for films. But still... not bad at all.

[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.

Mat "Shunji" Noguchi responds in his blog to some of Halo and Halo 2's critics by pointing out how Halo 2's game experience is optimized for average, not "hardcore" players.

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

Evil Avatar writes that Killzone for the PlayStation 2, widely billed as a Halo-killer but launched to scathing reviews, isn't as bad as it's hype, but that Halo 2 lives up to its:

I played Halo 2 for several hours straight. The game is just awesome, it will be hard for anything to beat it as Game of the Year.

The item isn't much more than a few paragraphs, but if you're worried that Halo 2 cannot live up to the hype, it seems some players believe it has.

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.

Louis Wu at HBO has already done a really good job of collecting up many of the links to articles and reviews that came out after I went to bed yesterday; so rather than repeating or cutting and pasting, I'm just going to link to his roundup. As he mentions, some of those reviews contain spoilers, so consider yourself warned. Most of the articles are variations on coverage of launch events, preorder pickup lines, and sales estimates.