GameDaily has interviewed Bungie's Pete Parsons about (what else) Halo 2. Two concepts kept coming up; how Bungie has deepened and extended the single player story (and kept most of the story out of the press, so far) and how the multiplayer aspect is now fully realized and a separate experience both from multiplayer in Halo 1 and from the single player in Halo 2:

We've made the multiplayer easy to get into with a ranking system, which doesn't allow veterans to pick off new players in unfair matches. You can play against people all over the world that are on the same skill level, which makes this game fun no matter what level of player you are.

Does Halo 2 on XBL mark the return of the comet?

A very businesslike Weekly Update this week over in the Bungie.net forums. There's no censored in sight, but lots of information on how things are coming together: final art, animations, and dialogue. Check it out.

Halo Babies has a new strip up, writes mrsmiley, and they've also announced the winners of their avatar contest.

The Bungie Webmaster is back to ridicule some more of you. And by the looks of it, you deserve it.

Eric Trautmann of Halo Bible fame got married. Congratulations from Rampancy!

HBO has put up a BitTorrent seed (and a mirror list) of some good quality footage of multiplayer action on Zanzibar at the first-ever Halo 2 tourney, using the E3 2004 build of the game. Lots of shakeycam footage has been floating around, but this is the real deal. Go snag it if you have BitTorrent. The footage if of mrsmiley of Halo Babies fame playing, and he's put up a thread in the HBO forum to talk about the footage.

Frankie is back, with a few choice words with those who were upset at last week's update, and news on how placeholder items in levels have been replaced with real items, how Marty has gone into hiding to finish scoring the game, and other non-hair-related tidbits. The Update is in the Forum at HBO, which should shock all of you to the very foundations of your respective beings.

Several stories around the web the last few days (XboxSolution, CNN have mentioned the resignation of Take Two's CEO, Jeffrey C. Lapin, and the subsequent revision of financial estimates for the second quarter and year-end results for 2004. Lapin had the CEO job for only one year and three months.

What does this have to do with Bungie? Well, for a while Take Two owned almost twenty percent of Bungie; when Microsoft bought the company, Take Two got the rights to the Myth and Oni franchises, as well as two licenses for the Halo engine in return for its shares.

Since being sold by Bungie, the Myth franchise saw the release and then abandonment of Myth 3 by Mumbo Jumbo, which was disbanded shortly after the game's disappointing release. The Oni franchise has remained dormant, and there's been no sight of any Halo engine games from Take Two.

SketchFactor has posted up two new goodies at the new Bungie.net. (I wonder when we're going to be able to stop calling it the new Bungie.net and go back to just calling it Bungie.net.) The first is a render of a Helljumper, or ODST, and the second is a wallpaper of 343 Guilty Spark.

Those complaining that the Weekly Updates have been thin will have little to whine about where the new Bungie.net is concerned. A press release from Steve Cherrier at AEG let us know that Bungie is planning on releasing two new screenshots of Halo 2 during the week of the new site's launch. And sure enough, Louis Wu at HBO has already spotted one new shot.

The release mentions a lot of the new site areas that have already been mentioned, such as the revamped History of Bungie and the team profile pages. However, another cool item is the Meet The Bungie Team contest; the grand prize winners will get a trip to Redmond, Washington to meet the guys and gals at Bungie and get a sneak peek at Halo 2. You must be a U.S. resident 18 years of age or older to participate, and have an account at Bungie.net.

Frank "Frankie" O'Connor and Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard of Bungie have been interviewed by César "Cesar" A. Berardini at TeamXbox. Among the highlights: Frankie plays Halo on his Titanium Powerbook from the toilet. No kidding. I thought only I did that.

Thanks Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.

Preston Cyberdog found and Louis Wu posted an apparently poorly-hidden feature of the new Bungie.net site that offers to help you out if it looks like you don't know what you're doing.

As part of the all-new, uncut, extended and extruded History of Bungie on the new Bungie.net, the page on Halo 2 has this to say on Steve Ballmer's mention of Halo 3 last fall:

Mr. Ballmer's statement to the press (on a completely unrelated matter) contained the following shocker, " we're working on the next version of Xbox right now and we're working on Halo 2 and Halo 3, the two newest versions of the game." Halo 3? What the...! Anyway, turns out it was a mistake, nobody had to go quickly program anything, and work continued on Halo 2.

Of course, if one wished to split hairs, one could say that this simply means nothing has been said about Halo 3-- not that Halo 3 doesn't or won't exist.

And for the numerologists-- this reference occurs on page seven of the History.