Bungie's own Matt Soell has posted a Halo National Tournament report from El Bastard in Florida:

XenGamers, which used to be called CoreMagazine, has put up a story on the Halo 2 announcement in New York and the trailer that we are now waiting 21 days for:

It's strange that we have to wait 21 days for the Halo 2 trailer, but Smilebit thinks he knows why. He writes in the HBO forum:

The Halo trailer is encoded using WMP9. The Windows Media Player 9 beta comes out on Sept. 4th.

So IS Windows Media Player 9 coming out September 4? You betcha. My main concern is, will a Mac version be released by that time?

Crap. Don't count on seeing the Halo 2 trailer any time in the near future. There is a counter at Xbox.com that says it will be released 21 days from now. That would be September 4, 2002.

We've started a Halo 2 Screenshot section and added the first seven shots from the upcoming trailer as released on Bungie.net.

Louis Wu over at HBO has posted a link to Team Overkill's page on their experiences on the first day of the Halo National Tournament.

Gamers.com, a site which has pages on Halo and Halo 2 as well as Bungie Soft... uh, Studios, featuring various pieces of information, has also put up a transcript of the Halo 2 trailer unveiled last week.

According to a news item at Bungie.net, the page that EB was hosting for the Halo National Tournament rules has disappeared inexplicably . There is a complete copy of the HNC rules online at iGames.

The good folks at GameFAQs have opened up a message board dedicated to Halo 2 in addition to their Halo and Halo Online boards. It's always nice to have more resources available, so this gets our approval.

HBO is back, and in one of the first news posts of the day Louis Wu drops an interesting tidbit:

Hopefully, DNS will propagate fast enough that by the time the Halo 2 trailer is released, folks can find us.

If one were so inclined, one might be led to believe that means that shortly after the time it usually takes for a DNS record to update-- usually 2-3 days, tops-- the trailer will be out.

A site called XboxGamers recently advertised that it was looking for questions to submit to the Halo 2 development team for an upcoming exclusive interview . As it turns out, this was more a result of an overly charitable response to a bit of spam in Matt Soell's mailbox. Get the lowdown in his HBO post on the subject.

HBO pointed out a section on The Psyjnir Complex called Tabloids. There's an interesting series of items running there purporting to be insider reports from a Bungie informant called Shallow Throat. The crux of it seems to be the plans for a total of six.. no, make that seven... (or was it nine, originally?) Halo games.