Devin Olsen points out in the HBO forum that some new items have popped up at the recently-reopened Bungie Store, including a new titanium coffee tumbler. It seems KP tipped him off.
Elsewhere, OftenK made a few comments on merchandise quality at the store; from his perspective, the shirts were a bit thin, but the pens are "excellent".
According to SketchFactor and Louis Wu at HBO, there's a massive 9-page feature on the Halo 2 development team in this month's issue of Wired. HBO promises scans once the issue is off the shelves.
guS and Burnie have written up their own compendious Halo 2 Preview based on their trip to Bungie, complete with photos of themselves and other Bungie staff and fans, and a nice rundown on maps, vehicles and weapons.
Rampancy.net is now hosting a node of the IRC network run by Subnova, which hosts channels for Bungie fans, and is the official IRC network for the Seventh Column. Channels include #hbo (http://halo.bungie.org) #rampancy (http://rampancy.net), #subnova (http://subnova.com) and #7thColumn, among others.
You may connect to this network using the server name rampancy.net and port number 6667, which is a standard IRC port.
Microsoft employee Andy Pennell asks in his blog whether or not the launch of Halo 2 on November 9 will affect Microsoft's overall corporate productivity. Although XBL won't work on the company's network, apparently System Link games and tunnelers do. In fact, one of the comments on Andy's blog mentions a tunneler we seem to have missed before now: Xlink Kai. In theory it will run on Windows, MacOS and LInux and can tunnel for the Xbox, GameCube or PS2. In practice, only the Windows client is available right now.
Thanks Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.
Bungie.net will be down for a bit on the 23rd, according to SketchFactor, so that Bungie.net can be upgraded to pave the way for the new 7th Column site. Cool new things are afoot, stay tuned!
Looks like bentllama has been fooling around in Fable when he isn't undergoing crunch time on Halo 2. I wonder if pancakes make you evil or good...
The New York Times has put up an article on how true innovation is lacking in today's videogames-- but holds up Halo as an exception to the rule. Editor's Note: Free registration required, or use the login/pass rampancy/rampant.
Marty O'Donnell has been interviewed by Electronic Gaming Monthly; the three-page article is online at 1Up.com. Fun fact: Halo 2 has about 15,000 lines of random combat dialogue. So far.
While most of Bungie has been mum lately about the single player campaign, Marty does reiterate how his sound work is contributing to it, and what Bungie is trying to do in the second game:
I think if you look at what we're trying to do with Halo 2 in the story is that we're trying to make the aliens more fleshed out, rather than just targets/cardboard cutouts. The Covenant is a collection of alien races that have come together for very strong religious purposes, and we wanted to make sure that people understand that this is a long, long history of cultures that have come together for a reason. There's something real there. So we spent a lot of time on fleshing out the alien races. Joe Staten will be back as a grunt, because he was sort of beloved, but let me just say that we've fleshed out the alien races quite a bit. There are more voice actors involved.
As a natural follow-up, EGM asks if Elites still speak in backwards English-- a question Marty won't answer.
The impromptu interview that SketchFactor and Frankie conducted with fans last weekend has been collected on a question & answer page that serves as last week's update.
This week's Bungie Update took a slightly different format: Frankie and SketchFactor offered a question and answer session (excepting those on the story or campaign mode). They asked for questions from fans (26 pages of them at last look), and then provided answers in the New Mombassa forum, starting around 2:00 PM PDT.
The Xbox Live Backstage Pass contest as announced earlier was only valid in North America; of course, the contest itself is worldwide, but each country gets its own page:
... with more likely to come. Thanks HBO and Gamesindustry.biz.
The Bungie Store is back according to Bungie.net; not everything shown is available yet; Frankie calls the selection "compact and bijou", which we'll assume he's doing to prove he knows French. One thing they do have, though: flaming ninja t-shirts.