Max Yeroen Hoberman at Bungie.net posted today that KingsGames.com will be starting the first Halo Tournament Season starting September 7. Details available from the Kings Games site.

Wired has an article previewing the battle that will replace the Console Wars-- the Online Console Wars.

According to the article, MS will launch Xbox Live on Nov 15 and beginning to beta test the service. This week Sony introducted its online adapter for the PlayStation 2, which unlike Xbox Live, supports analog modems as well as broadband connections.

Another interesting article mentioned by HBO's Louis Wu is at GameStudies. This one takes a look at Halo, and suggests that it's more genre breaking than it seems-- with an emphasis on the work break :

All in all, Halo triumphs in understanding the anatomy of the FPS, pulling many of the right strings. It even manages to implement the FPS control system to the Xbox gamepad very well. Halo doesn't lack innovativeness. Rather, its innovativeness lies in its ability to mix. The game does not come up with ground-breaking yet simple design solutions, e.g. substituting the generic seek conflict convention with avoid conflict , as Thief - the Dark Project did. It does not have (under-used) gimmicks like the geo-mod feature in Red Faction, or the role-based multiplayer scenarios of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Halo is not so much about combat evolved as the subtitle suggests, but about genre evolved . As a consequence, a requiem for the FPS is in order. Anyone to the rescue? Warren Spector, Deus Ex 2, Thief III?

While the author did elicit some much-deserved groans by calling Halo the Terminator 2 of FPS games (groan) the rest of the article is a good read.

The boys at Electric Playground got their eyeballs on the Halo 2 trailer, and boy, they seem to have enjoyed it. They wrote up a summary, here, and commented on the progress that game's made from the original. A worthy read.

Thanks to the Junkyard for catching this. Not HBO. Ho ho ho.

A story at Xbox365 this morning says that a company called Focus Enhancements in California has unveiled a new, cheaper video chip for the Xbox, which will be used in a new motherboard design. The chip converts video into TV-friendly formats. This is only the latest of a series of moves to help Microsoft reduce the cost of Xbox production; they are currently in arbitration with Nvidia over the cost of their graphics processor, and manufacturing partner Flextronics recently relocated production facilities for the Xbox from Hungary to China in order to further reduce costs.

Bungie.net has posted information on a new Halo tournament in Florida. This one is special because it has a lower age limit than the Halo National Tournament; it's for players between the ages of 10 and 17. The rules are similar to those of the HNC but without an elimination round. You can get more information about the tournament at CyberMax Internet Cafe's site.

Ouch.

PlanetXbox has the latest console sales figures from Media Create... and for Xbox supporters, the picture is not pretty.

The Xbox sold 3,600 units, up 600 from the previous week. That's good.

What's not good is the PlayStation 2 sold 90,400 that same week. No, that's not a typo. Ninety thousand. In other words, the PS2 is outselling the Xbox by about a 25:1 ratio.

In fact, you have to dig deep on this list to find a console that isn't selling better than the Xbox. Currently it's being outsold by the Game Boy Advance (62,900 units) the GameCube (16,700 units) and something called the Wonder Swan Crystal that I've never even heard of (7,300).

The final insult? Sales of the PlayStation One: 4,900 units. The land of the rising sun is definitely not a friendly place for the black box of the green 'X'.

We couldn't find the GameSpot poll mentioned at HBO-- perhaps it already closed with Halo named the undisputed victor before we got there.

However, we did find virtually the same poll running at Gaming Age. Currently Halo 2 is trailing The Legend of Zelda 371 to 231, but leading GTA: Vice City (159) and Doom III (81).

You know what to do.

The winners of the regional HNC competitions have been posted at Bungie.net. The finals will be played next week in Los Angeles. If the winners are unable to play, there is an alternate from each center. Thanks for the post from Louis Wu at HBO.

There have been a few recent threads in the HBO forum about a remark that musicmeister Marty The Elder O'Donnell made at the E3 fanfest regarding Covenant Elite taunts . Basically, he said they were in the POA level but would be near impossible to find.

Surreptitious thinks he may have found them, and recorded a number of Elite vocalizations in the POA level.

Marty has since confirmed that Surreptitious did, indeed, find one of the taunts-- c'mon, tough guy but also said that there are others.

All I ever remember hearing (aside from the standard, backwards-Sarge dialog) was lousy piece of crap , which was the only thing I ever heard them say in English. And no, I don't have it recorded. But I know I heard it.

Louis Wu, of course, posted this at HBO.

The countdown banner at Xbox.com disappeared briefly this week, but has apparently returned. BOLL first noted it was missing, and Louis Wu posted it at HBO.

Given that the countdown is an image, I'm guessing the countdown outage was a result of a manual update rather than anything nefarious.

Our countdown, being automatic, is unlikely to disappear, although it does remain unofficial.

Blackstar Productions has come out with a new video. This one's an advertisement for Halo and Xbox Live featuring Stephen Hawking. We've added Mr. Hawking to our Halo Movies section as well.

Matt Soell dropped into our forum just to clarify one point: Combat Evolved was, in fact, a marketing catchphrase for Halo and not actually part of the title:

It's in all the printed materials and ads and press releases because the Marketing folks don't ever want someone who hasn't already bought the game to see the word Halo by itself. Nothing about that word screams running around with guns shooting people, and that bothered Marketing to virtually no end.

So there we have it. No word on whether or not Halo 2 would have a subtitle, though... hmm. Perhaps Halo 2: Blam! THAT at least screams running around with guns shooting people. At least, it does to us.

Ok, perhaps hit is a bit of an exaggeration. But it was played at the recent Penny Arcade convention, despite the authors' earlier expressions of acrimony towards Bungie's first Xbox title, not to mention the Xbox itself.

From today's news at PA, August 19, 2002, by Tycho:

Different games started up from time to time but never reached critical mass - Battlefield 1942 essentially stole the show. We actually melted through some extension cables and lost power to one bank of machines, which seemed less like a crisis and more like a badge of honor, a sign that were doing things right. There was a 'Cube with Super Smash Brothers on there, and the two Halo Xboxes stayed full almost the entire day. From time to time, I would get up and survey the room with a ridiculous grin.

Today's comic from them about Yahoo Maps is also pretty funny.

Harry Al-Shakarchi and Griffon , via Louis Wu at HBO, respectively gave warning that PC Gamer in the US and Edge Magazine in the UK will be doing previews of Halo 2. Edge has a teaser graphic up.