Rampancy

Okay, this morning we've got a couple sites, in this case Xbox365, quoting EuroGamer, saying that Halo 2's release date has "slipped" to April of 2004. EuroGamer cites Microsoft as the source of the information, but there's no official press release text or link to one; in the Microsoft Game Studios Press Site, there's no mention of this "information". Eurogamer claims this is a delay of two months.

Everyone who watches this space knows that the only thing that was officially ever said about Halo 2 was "in 2004". If you want to interpret that to mean January 2004, then sure, I guess releasing in March means a two month delay. But you can't have a delay of an unofficial release date; and frankly, anybody who thinks about it for two seconds would probably assume that if Bungie knew that far in advance that it was impossible to release for the Christmas 2003 season, that the delay was probably going to be more than just a few weeks, so assuming January was probably wrong in the first place.

It's also unclear whether or not the dates in question are intended for a European audience; that seems to be the opinion of the Xbox365 forumgoers, anyway.

And of course, at the end of it all, there's horses' mouths and horses' asses; Microsoft is a big company, and it's probably better to trust those who are closer to what's going on.

UPDATE: Microsoft's official Xbox.com game list still lists the release date for Halo 2 as "TBA", although the page for Halo 2 itself does, in fact, say March 2004.

[image:4040 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Attempting to move as quickly as possible to squash bugs in PC Halo, an unidentified Gearbox programmer accidentally moved faster than the speed of light, creating a wormhole in spacetime that caused time to run backwards. The result is that the remaining items list has now increased to 2, instead of one. It is unclear whether the bug has itself traveled backwards in time to before it was fixed, or if the world traveled around it.

Break Point Halo has reported that Dolbex has shut down the Halo50k tournament, and instead will be working on a Halo ranking system. The Halo50k site itself doesn't seem to load anymore.

[image:4046 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Stories around the web are showing that the much-vaunted upgrade to Xbox.com and Xbox Live, featuring a web interface for Live that lets you view statistics and check on online friends, has launched as of today. We haven't played around with it yet, stay tuned for a report later when we have.