Dyslexia at Major League Gaming interviews Str8 Rippin. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

• Xbox365, GameSpot, 360hacker, and every other site in the universe fawns over photos of what looks like a real-life sighting of an Xbox 360, which of course exists because "my dad who works for Microsoft brought it home." (Saying that on the Internet should be illegal by now--Ed.)
• Robbie Bach, announcing the X05 show to be held in Europe this coming October, says "We have a lot to say and even more to show people. Believe me, after X05 there will be no question that Xbox 360 is the next-generation." Kiziko has the story.
• SPOnG repeats the rumored November 4, 2005 launch date for the Xbox 360.

Players who want to compete in Major League Gaming's Philadelphia events in Halo or Halo 2 need to register online.

Bungie.net has a couple of updates today; SketchFactor has posted that the last Humpday Challenge pitted Bungie against Team Korea where Bungie won a best four of five match; next they'll take on Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Sketch has also posted that the playlists have been updated to include the new maps.

Rumble Preview has Slayer on all the new maps except Containment, as well as some slayer variants as well as two oddball games and two hill games. The first batch of small new maps-- Turf, Sanctuary, and Warlock-- now appear in the regular Rumble Pit playlist. There's also a note about banning cheaters and the next autoupdate-- basically, until the next AU comes out, the addition of these new maps to ranked playlists will likely mean that things will "get worse before they get better".

TeamXbox has a feature on the Xbox 360's probable launch lineup; the games that will make it, those that won't but should, the ones you might not know about, and a category called "where the hell is" games. The article begins by mentioning Halo:

Halo. Perhaps the most important launch title of all time. You could easily argue that there have been better console launch titles, but it's hard to discount how important Halo has been to the success of the Xbox. Face it - launch titles can make or break a console. Launch titles also set the tone for the system, giving gamers a pretty good glimpse at what to expect in the future. Put a bad taste in a gamer's mouth with a paltry, unimpressive launch lineup, and hear them all mutter "Dreamcast 2" under their breath.

However, strangely enough, Halo 3 is mentioned on only two the six authors' lists. Nate puts Halo 3 down under "won't make launch but should have":

Despite the fact that the words "launch" and "Halo 3" have never been in the same sentence with one another doesn't change the fact that playing the Xbox 360 on launch day with no sign of the series that made the original big black box what it is today just doesn't feel right.

Matt puts Halo 3 on his "where the hell is" list:

So my question is where the hell is Halo 3? At this point, nothing has been said aside from rumblings on message boards, and whispers of secret room meetings. So will we see Halo 3 on the 360? I don't doubt it, it's too much of a flagship series, but c'mon, lets start seeing some details already.

(That sums up my opinion as well: Gates' bravado over releasing Halo 3 in time to spoil the PlayStation 3's launch sounds like a great idea, but it's a poor substitute for having the Master Chief riding shotgun for the new console himself on launch day--Ed.)

SPOnG says that production of the Xbox 360 will begin this August. Rumors of constrained availability due to high preorder rates have also been circulating...

Aspyr Media writes to remind us that Halo 3 isn't the only game to look forward to; Stubbs the Zombie impressed at E3 (GameSpot, Eurogamer, Xbox Advanced) and even won two awards, being mentioned in 1Up.com's Best of E3 2005 and Xbox Evolved's 10 Best of E3 2005.

But the real news comes from Alexander "The Man" Seropian himself, in his first blog entry after E3, this past week:

Stubbs is coming along very nicely. Every level is in and playable and we are on to the glorious process of playing and tweaking. We had our final mocap shoot last week. I don't want to spoil any surprises but I'll let slip that we had a professional dancer in the suit to do some moves for police chief masters.

The blog entry also has four new screen shots, notes that all cutscene dialog is in the game, and wishes everybody a Happy Bungie Day.

Frankie is back at Bungie now with a brand-new Weekly What's Update. This one covers the teleporter glitch on Relic (it's "being taken care of"), demos for Halo and Halo 2, and what Sketch would look like if he ate all the pies.

Xbox Live users in #hbo have begun reporting that the second set of Halo 2 downloadable maps, Terminal, Backwash, Elongation, Relic, and Gemini, are now available for download for $11.99. Thanks Tex.

The BBC has the story that a 22-year-old UK resident and Cambridge graduate was sentenced to 140 hours community service and ordered to pay £750 in court costs after being caught selling modified Xbox consoles, fitted with a 200GB hard drive and 80 pre-installed games.

The UK's enactment of the EU Copyright Directive in 2003 makes the modification of consoles illegal; Sony won a case prohibiting the sale of modchips in the UK in 2004.

Kikizo is offering a 26-minute video interview with Microsoft's Robbie Bach about the upcoming Xbox 360 console. The only mention of Halo is listed in their text summary as follows:

The same Halo 3 / PS3 spoiler question we asked J - as much time as needed...

"J" in this case I'm sure we can safely assume means J Allard, and is probably a reference to the "when it's done" release date Allard cited after Microsoft chairman Bill Gates had spilled the beans that the company wanted Sony's PlayStation 3 to "run right into Halo 3" when it releases; Microsoft and Bungie representatives have been artfully dodging the topic ever since.

Grenadiac has announced that the forums and files areas of HaloMods will close temporarily until the next auto-update of Halo 2, to try and help stop the spread of information about cheats in the game.