Louis Wu at HBO has pointed out a writeup of the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest he held recently. This one's by CYBRFRK, and it's called Cold plasma still sticks... Friendship, loyalty and gaming - the ideology of bungie.org. The writeup is great, and so are the photos.

[image:6750 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Quit giggling at the headline, the Weekly Bungie Update is serious business. The newest edition, by Frankie, is over in the forum at Battleground: Halo. One of the more interesting bits of info is how Mat "Shunji" Noguchi has figured out how to make it so players won't miss key pieces of explanatory dialogue, something that was commonplace in Halo 1, as combat noise, vehicles, or other things drowned out what Cortana was trying to tell us about those vitally important non-natural cave formations:

Mat Noguchi is up to something pretty special too. He just perfected a neat technique/tool/trick that allows the player to hear all the important game dialog in a completely natural way. No longer will you sprint by an event and miss a vital clue from an NPC (Non-Player-Character). We can't tell you exactly how it works, suffice it to say that when it happens, it'll make perfect sense.

Of course, our cheap joke pales in comparison to Frankie's, as he loudly exclaims that Chucky finally has the POOPS working. We'll let him explain. Thanks Frankie at Bungie.net.

The Bungie Store now has new Grunt short-sleeved T-shirts; thanks SketchFactor at Bungie.net.

Frankie has written up a postmortem-cum-pictures on the Bungie Winter Pentathlon 2004, featuring competition between four teams, Grizzled Ancients, Old Skool, Middle Skool and Newbies in five events: Halo 2, Top Spin, Pictionary, Mario Kart and EyeToy.

The Grizzled Ancients won the competitions for Halo 2, Mario Kart and EyeToy, earning the full five points for each to win the Pentathlon. Old Skool took second place, based on their top performances in Top Spin and Pictionary as well as taking three of five points each in Halo 2 and Mario Kart.

Congratulations to Charlie Gough, Lorraine 'Mehve' McLees and the rest of the Grizzled Ancients on their win, as well as kudos to Marty O'Donnell, Chris Butcher and the rest of the Old Skool team for their good showing.

Our favorite team, Middle Skool, distinguished themselves in neither success nor failure, despite the doubtless heroic efforts of Rampancy's founder and unofficial Halo team captain Tyson 'Ferrex' Green, pulling 3 points out of 5 for Pictionary and EyeToy (both favorites of hardcore videogaming stalwarts, of course) .

Condolences to Frankie, SketchFactor and the rest of the Newbies team, who finished last, garnering goose eggs in Halo 2, Pictionary and Mario Kart and redeeming themselves only with solo points in Top Spin and EyeToy.

Frankie's latest installment of the Bungie Weekly Update is over at HBO right now. This week he stresses that there's no trickery involved in the grandeur that is the new Halo 2 screenshot:

It's really important to point out that this screen is straight from the current game engine. The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer, but this is entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects. There's no trickery or BS here. And of course, this is early stuff, so things will change and improve between now and launch. We basically played the game and took a ton of shots until we finally picked the one that rocked the hardest, and best represented what playing that level was like.

Plenty of more information there, too, about the new Bungie.net site as well as international localization for the game. One wish in that area: subtitles, guys, in local languages and English, please. Thanks to Blackstar for the heads-up.

[image:6662 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Everybody's new best friend, Frankie, has put up the first Halo 2 Weekly Update, and the first fansite to get the nod is (not surprisingly) HBO. As we did with the original Halo Weekly Updates, we've placed it in an archive here at Rampancy for posteriority and easy reference.

Not content to simply wow us with his command of the English language, he also gave us a taste of his m4d sk1llz as an artist, giving his interpretation of one of Mehve's newest Halo 2 poster.

Frankie was a little amazed at first by the sheer volume of cool information about Halo 2 he was given, relatively little of which he's been able to part with so far (you know, job security, all that). What we do know so far, though:

• Frankie is a sucker for nice graphics, and Halo 2 has them.
• A stats bug has made Marty the Halo 2 multiplayer leader. (Go Marty!) In addition, he's been working on new ways for the physics engine to interact with sound effects.
• Work is proceeding on the new Bungie.net.
• The Halo 2 engine is almost entirely new.

If all goes according to schedule, we should see another update this coming Friday. Thanks Frankie!

Got a question about Halo 2? Yeah, yeah... who doesn't? Well, this is your chance to Ask Frankie through TeamXbox in advance of the Halo 2 Weekly Updates starting up.

And yes, we know this item is late, we're including it here for extra credit. It's either that, or head out back to clap more erasers.

Emil from CobaltNova already has made his own 2004 prediction come true, and it's still 2003. CobaltNova has reinvented itself as a Halo-related art site. Not everything is ready just yet, but probably will be soon.What they do have running right now is their very own CobaltNova PC Halo Server.