Frankie's latest installment of the Bungie Weekly Update is over at HBO right now. This week he stresses that there's no trickery involved in the grandeur that is the new Halo 2 screenshot:

It's really important to point out that this screen is straight from the current game engine. The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer, but this is entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects. There's no trickery or BS here. And of course, this is early stuff, so things will change and improve between now and launch. We basically played the game and took a ton of shots until we finally picked the one that rocked the hardest, and best represented what playing that level was like.

Plenty of more information there, too, about the new Bungie.net site as well as international localization for the game. One wish in that area: subtitles, guys, in local languages and English, please. Thanks to Blackstar for the heads-up.