GameSpy's prelaunch coverage continues with an interview with Tyson "Ferrex" Green about level design and why Halo 2 won't include repetetive levels like Halo 1 did.

The news items are flying fast and furiously in the last few days before Halo 2's launch, so in order to keep up we'll be posting news summary items where necessary. These items were pointed out at various other gaming sites, including HBO, Sector 7, Halo Planet, GameSpy and IGN. This weekend's summary so far:

It looks like one of the features I personally had hoped to see when Bungie.net became integrated with XBL is coming to fruition: RSS feeds for individual stats. Right now an XML button for an RSS feed of "recent games played" is visible on the Stats page of Bungie.net users that have linked their gamertags. It looks like the button only appears on your own Stats page, so to get the feeds for other players you'll have to ask them. As I haven't been able to play any games yet, I don't know what kind of information is in the feed, but still, the idea is pretty sweet.

TeamXbox is the proud home of the honest-to-gosh last Weekly Bungie Update for Halo 2 by Frankie, and among the topics covered is the Stats page at Bungie.net that will be open once people get their mitts on the game and plug into XBL; right now it's showing placeholder stats. If it's showing anything at all; Bungie.net may be up and down still for awhile, and at the moment it seems to be down, taking the final Mister Chief art with it.

Some have reported that select few attendees at the I Love Bees "training" events have been receiving special items. Some received commemorative DVDs, others got Limited Edition copies of Halo 2 before anybody else. Lucky buggers.

For those of you who administrate a 7th Column Group at Bungie.net, you'll notice a new set of links there now that allow you to link up to seven (appropriate number, no?) different clans to your Group. It can be a clan that includes your members, or an allied clan, or even a rival clan. Links to those clans' statistics pages will appear on your Group's pages.

Bungie.net is back up, but Halo 2 stats are, understandably, not yet available. Here's what Bungie.net is displaying right now on the Stats page:

Halo 2 Xbox Live game statistics are not currently available to you or your mom. We hope to have them available soon.

We hope your mom is available soon, too.

Ding from Bungie Sightings was in on the Cold Pizza event at ESPNZone in Times Square, New York, playing Halo 2 multiplayer. He's written up an account of the event over at BS.

GameSpot is reporting that some stores in Midwestern states of the USA are breaking the November 9 embargo on Halo 2 and letting some consumers buy it now.

Several such purported copies are listed now on eBay; one has sold for over $250.

Looks like Bungie.net is getting ready to open their Stats section (Editor's Note: Still down as of this writing) in preparation of Halo 2's launch on XBL next week; after a short downtime, today the site is notifying users about their new Privacy Statement,

The latest in GameSpy's series of interviews with Bungie is with Marty "The Elder" O'Donnell, about the sounds and music in Halo 2. Marty always gets asked a lot about music, but this article also talks a bit about the game's sound effects:

Hitting a cabbage with a metal pipe works wonders. Also this time we have doubled the sampling rate, and have stereo/surround sound files that are crisp, juicy and crunchy. Plus, we killed a lot of grunts while recording.

IGN's newest Halo 2 article tracks down where the first Halo 2 launch events will be around the world; time zones being what they are, the first customers to get their hands on Halo 2 will be in New Zealand and Australia. Last up are parts of Europe and Japan on November 11.