Shadow at Sector 7 relates how clams, cigarettes, sleep deprivation, aurora bourealis and nausea combine to make a memorable experience of buying Halo 2 from GameStop. Editor's Note: We made a short note of Shadow earlier; he got his hands on Halo 2 slightly earlier than most because he helping out the store by lending them his Xbox for display.
Today, November 15, 2004, marks the third anniversary of the release of Halo for the Xbox. Happy birthday Halo!
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.
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!
Gaming rumor sheet SPoNG has another of its items about infighting between nVidia, ATI and Microsoft over the possibility of making the Xbox 2 backwards compatible with the first iteration. Please pass the salt.
[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.
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ZexGX found this Carneyhole in the Old Mombassa area of Outskirts. It contains a skull, a pile of grenades, and a camera. Looks almost like a gravesite.
Major Nelson is reporting on his blog that massive numbers of people are logging into the service to play Halo 2, but that everything is running smoothly so far.
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Xbox365 asks where you will be (or rather, where you were) at midnight on Halo 2uesday. There are some store pics as well.
Much, much too much stuff out there now that November 9 is finally here (at least in some time zones).
Here's a summary, drawing on sites like HBO, Halo Planet, Halo Babies, The Junkyard, Voodoo Extreme, Sector 7, and of course, Bungie.net.
That is much too long a news post.
Shishka has written up the Fall Foliage: Crisp Death HBO LANfest as possibly the "last great Halo LAN," obviously anticipating that Halo 2 will soon assume the mantle of the game of choice for such events. Thanks mnemesis at HBO.