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:

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:

Where's Alec Guinness when you need him to make a wry remark about the who is more foolish?

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.

Team Overkill, a talented Halo-abusing team, has released a new video called Causing A Ruckus. Some charming antics in it - worth watching. We've mirrored it.

Also seen on HBO: tourney writeups by 909 (Plano, Texas) at HBO and Matt Soell (Washington) at Bungie.net. Thanks Louis Wu.

Cino posted in the HBO forum that a Bungie representative showed up there and showed the Halo 2 trailer. And guess what? It turned out to be true, as Matt Soell confirmed:

Xbox.ign.com has put up an FAQ page about MS' upcoming Xbox Live online gaming service. One of the most amusting parts of the page is a graphic with a red arrow pointing to the Xbox's ethernet port that is labeled Xbox Live Goes Here . Just in case you weren't sure.

There is one interesting quote about pricing:

Vector40 recently traveled to San Jose for a videogame tournament to be played on an IMAX dome (well, at least the finals) and Halo was one of the included games. While our good friend didn't make it into the finals, he did have quite a dramatic run, and it makes a great read. His description of the final match is particularly entertaining:

Louis Wu at HBO gave us the heads-up that Yeroen at Bungie.net has posted the schedule for the Halo National Championship regionals. It's got the name, address, and phone number of each location hosting a regional along with the start time.

Ok, now we've seen it all. Halo 2 is so popular this is the only time we've ever seen sites do previews not for a game, but for a trailer that's not going to be out for another 3 weeks for a game that isn't going to be out for more than a year. It's... astounding.

Aquaduct, the superior Xbox tunneling app for Mac OS X, has been updated to beta 3 today. The changes since beta 2 include:

bikeman74 has posted on the HBO forum that a file called halo2trailer.mov on the Imesh and Kazaa P2P file sharing systems is, in fact, a hoax contrary to earlier claims.

As seen on Voodoo Extreme, GamesFirst has put up a preview of Halo 2. Basically the same information as everyone else, and the same screen shots, but we mention it here for completeness.

HBO has pointed out the latest installment in the Psyjnir Complex's Shallow Throat series of tabloid prognostications on Halo 2.