TankRamp at Battleground:Halo is reporting that XboxConnect, a Windows tunnelling program, will be holding a 100+ participant Halo tournament. More information is available on their site, including sign-ups.

GameMarketWatch.com announced on July 16 that sales of the Xbox version of Halo had reached three million units worldwide. Meanwhile, EuroGamer reported on the 21st that Microsoft's financial results for the last quarter revealed that worldwide sales of the Xbox had reached 9.4 million, somewhat lower than the 10 million some estimated.

That makes Halo far and away the most popular Xbox title.

CobaltNova has announced that this year will see the first organized system of awards for Halo fan films, to be called the Rockets on Prisoner awards. From among the 300 Halo fan films out there, there will be five nominees in each of six categories. More information is available from the Rockets on Prisoner page of CobaltNova.com.

Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo has posted a three part article at The Junkyard, comparing elements of the forthcoming PC release of Halo by Gearbox to the original game on the Xbox.

The cat has left the bag, hopped on a train and skipped town. News on how to exploit an integer underflow bug in the security routines of the Xbox dashboard's font loader have been posted at Full Disclosure.

The example code there does NOT, repeat NOT allow for copying games or playing copied games. Full Disclosure isn't going to help you do that, and neither is Rampancy.

What this news does do is usher in an era when Xbox Live gamers may have to worry about the same kind of cheating that PC gamers do, and Microsoft is going to have to seriously start worrying about software piracy on its subsidized gaming hardware. Oh, and Linux computing, too.

News.com is running a story today that a group of security researchers have discovered a way to make Xboxes run Linux without a modchip, and are apparently threatening Microsoft that unless the company releases an official Linux boot loader, they will publicize the technique.

They claim that an official boot loader from Microsoft could
be made in such a way as to disallow piracy, but that a side effect of their method, pirate copies of games could also be made without modchips.

Microsoft released a statement that they are investigated the technical and legal issues and will respond early next week.

Apparently, the hack consists of soldering a few points on the write enable pads of the Xbox's motherboard, allowing the BIOS to be reflashed.

Part Two of Bungie.net's feature on the making of the E3 demo is up. This one, by SketchFactor, is called Lights, Camera, Action! and features an interview with Joseph Staten, BungieТs Director of Cinematics.

HBO's Louis Wu gave us the heads-up.

We won't summarize the whole Halo 2 Preview at UGO, pointed out over at HBO by Louis Wu, but we'll just mention a few of the more... ahh, interesting bits of... ahh... information. Some of these aren't new, some of them are, and some of them... well...

Some of these-- like weak Prophets and mercenary Brutes-- seem a bit odd, especially since in the E3 demo, Brutes emerge from Covenant vehicles, and earlier articles attributed unique attacks to Prophets. However, time will tell.

Well, we're not in the lofty company of mirror sites like Mythica and o1, that pump out Halo videos by the terabyte, but we've done what we could in the past few days.

So far, we've meted out about 28 Gb of the high quality WMV, about 6.5 Gb of the high quality QuickTime, and 4.5 Gb of the low quality QuickTime versions of the Halo 2 demonstration at E3.

We hope you enjoy the video (we do, immensely and daily) and we'll continue to host it until the next popular file comes around.

Also, it's worth noting that the end of the last month we missed our fourth birthday, as this site-- originally known as The Core -- went online on May 26, 1999. Happy birthday to us!

The official, high quality version of the Halo 2 demo shown this year at E3 will be made available to selected websites this coming Friday; we know it's true because SketchFactor said so at Bungie.net, plus a little birdie told us.

According to the post, it will be available in WMP 9 and QuickTime. According to HBO and Gamepro, the WMP9 version will be 640x480 with Dolby 5.1 sound and weigh in at about 150 Mb.

Nick has put up the six new Halo 2 screenshots up in the HBO forum, at full size and without watermarks. HBO's own tireless Louis Wu notes that Shacknews did the same yesterday.

Lorraine Mehve R. McLees posted in the HBO forum the other day, just to clarify a couple of comments people were making on the Official Xbox Magazine cover art. The work is, indeed, hers-- but she was so tired after finishing it that she forgot to sign it.

She pointedly decided NOT to clarify whether or not the figures standing next to the Master Chief on that cover are merely marines or other Spartans. However, anyone who's seen any of the recent trailer footage (who, us?) may note that the marines in it are wearing green armor not unlike the Chief's, which may go a long way towards explaining the Spartan-like appearance of the other figures on the cover.

Gaming Age's Marcus Lai has summed up his reaction to the Halo 2 demo shown by MS at E3 thusly: Halo 2 Rocks.

We've never known Marcus to be wrong before. But then again, we don't know Marcus. So don't take our word for it.