A few items of note before the holiday break:

• Frankie reported the goings-on at Zero Hour on Bungie.net, including a 7th place, 7-kill Xbox Live performance.
• Coldforged has an Xbox 360 high definition FAQ that you might find useful.
• The Red Herring thinks the Xbox 360 will be good enough to knock Nintendo out of the console hardware business.
• Game Insider has a series of photos from launch lines at Best Buy.
• Kotaku has reports of one Xbox 360 that seems to be broken, crashing while playing PGR3 several times in a row with all default settings, and an Xbox 360 that is definitely broken as a result of an encounter with a sledgehammer.
• GamePro says Bill Gates is standing behind the Xbox 360. (If he stands behind the power adapter, no one will see him--Ed.)
• Nearly lost in all the Xbox 360 launch hubbub, Aspyr has shipped Stubbs the Zombie for Mac OS X.
• Voodoo Extreme is collecting reports of Xbox 360 problems and directing readers to the official support pages.

As of today I've been reinstalled in Rampancy's core after a short business trip to London and environs last week, the culmination (or at least the high point) of which was some Halo 2 play on XBL with Stuntmutt and c0ld vengeance. In the meantime, here are the most important items in the Halo/Xbox 360verse in that time:

• Frankie, on his way to Zero Hour, confirmed that from the interface to Xbox Live and System Link games, Halo 2 is the same when played on an Xbox and the Xbox 360. Also, the little-used Head to Head playlist is being discontinued, and Major and Minor Clanmatch are being removed as separate playlists, to be replaced by a simple Clanmatch playlist with a player limit of 5 per side.
• TeamXbox says that Halo 2 looks a lot better on the Xbox 360, even when output through an S-video signal at 480p; however, Sandstone makes some educated guesses about how the upscaling from 480p to 720p is being achieved on backwards-compatible games like Halo 2, and strongly suggests that using the 720p signal might be a bad idea. Thanks to HBO for pointing out both articles.
• Seasoned Gamers beat Bungie in the latest Humpday Challenge. Bungie takes on Mexico next, because that's the American way.

Dean Takahashi, author of Opening the Xbox and gaming columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, has written a feature story about Microsoft's ambitious plans for the Xbox 360.

As part of that feature, there are several Reader Views items at A+E Interactive. They are from Rudy Seidl, Josh Sattler, and yours truly, "business guy living in Kazakhstan."

Two major categories of news in this roundup: Stubbs and Xbox 360.

• GameSpy previews the PC version of Stubbs.
• IMG previews the Mac version of Stubbs.
• Gaming Horizon reviewed Stubbs and gave it 9 points out of 10, calling it "refreshingly original" as well as addictive and entertaining; they only bemoaned that the single-player campaign was too short. (Where've we heard that before?--Ed.)
• MacWorld's Peter Cohen takes a first look at the Mac version of Stubbs the Zombie; he loved the humor and the soundtrack, but felt the campaign was too short. He also confirms that the Mac version doesn't have cooperative play.
• The Xbox 360 manual has been spotted online in PDF form. We'll host a copy... until somebody tells us to stop.
• Circuit City is rumored to be selling an Xbox 360 bundle as early as this coming Friday, ahead of the official launch date. Not to sure about that one.
• The Xbox 360's power supply is, indeed, lolhueg.

Microsoft has listed all 200 or so games they say that the Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible with, as well as revealing that all such games, not just Halo and Halo 2, will be automatically upscaled to 720p. Microsoft's VP for the Xbox Product Group, Todd Holmdahl, also did a Q&A about the 360's backwards compatibility.

As mentioned earlier, the hard drive accessory is necessary for backwards compatibility, in order to store the "emulation profile" for the game you're trying to play. The hard drive comes preloaded with early versions of the profiles for Halo and Halo 2.

NOTE: Marty "the Elder" O'Donnell warns that this early version of the emulation profile for Halo and Halo 2 has serious problems with audio, and urges everyone to get the new version via XBL or Xbox.com before playing:

Without the update the audio will suck. Without the update you will think that your new Xbox 360 is broken.

Other profiles can be downloaded from XBL or installed from a CD, either one you burn yourself after downloading profiles from Xbox.com on your computer, or on a CD ordered from Microsoft.

Saved games will not be transferred from old Xboxes.

This week's Bungie Update mentions that texture pop-in on Halo 2 should be "slightly improved" due to the new box's DVD drive. Copies of Halo and/or Halo 2 running in emulation on Xbox 360s are compatible in network games with players running those games on original Xboxes. Halo 1 still doesn't support Xbox Live, and won't. The

A year ago, on November 9, Halo 2 was released. And there was much rejoicing. And not a little bitching about mostly insignificant stuff. But nevermind that now.

To celebrate Halo 2's first anniversary, Bungie is revealing a neat little tidbit. If you play your existing copy of Halo 2 in an Xbox 360 when it comes out later this week, this is what you'll see:

But here's another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions.

The rest of the article is jam-packed with stuff; a retrospective of Halo 1, including demos and logo prototypes, input from Pete Parsons, Claude "Louis Wu" Errera, the Bungie Princess, and OXM's Ryan McCaffrey. If you haven't already, go check it out.

Nick from HaloDev, with the help of Grenadiac and MonoxideC, has put up a massive update on the progress they've made on their Halo map editor, Prometheus. Prometheus is intended to be an easier-to-use alternative to the Halo Editing Kit, with additional features.

The big news in the update is that it can make brand-new maps that you can play on an Xbox:

Last week we finally created some fruit from our labors. The first Xbox map for Halo 1 that was created directly from tags, which was ported from the Halo CE map "Anxiety" (with permission from Mothergoat and Doublefire). I'm sure some of you are like me, you liked Halo for the PC but the gameplay just wasn't the same compared to the Xbox version. Well now we can create our own maps for Xbox and pretty soon you will be able to as well.

The update has plenty of images and descriptions of Prometheus' features; go check it out.

NewCityChicago's Mike Schramm has produced a nicely researched little feature on Alex "The Man" Seropian; it includes a brief history of Bungie, with a proper tip of the hat to Marathon as the genesis of Halo, and an introduction to Wideload and their brainchild, Stubbs the Zombie.

If it's written enough times, it might just become the truth. DailyGame is repeating rumors of Xbox 360 shortages, saying that Microsoft may have lowered the estimate of how many consoles will be available on launch day, and many retailers are listing even their extremely expensive bundles as "sold out" in response.

On the eve of Halo 2's first anniversary, most of the hype isn't about what Bungie is doing, but what Microsoft is doing to get ready the vehicle for whatever Bungie does next: the Xbox 360. We've got:

• 1Up has 23 reasons why the Xbox 360 is like the Dreamcast, but 10 reasons why it will succeed where the Dreamcast failed. (Yes, the Dreamcast failed. Being the last hardware console made by Sega makes it a failure. Perhaps a brilliant failure with many good games and ahead-of-its-time features, but a failure nonetheless. Now excuse me while I go play games on my Amiga 500--Ed.)
• Ars.Technica opines that with development costs up, most future console games will be designed for a lowest common denominator specification, that will actually benefit PCs and the least-powerful consoles while at the same time making games look more and more alike. (Everyone seriously needs to read this article, now--Ed.)
• El Mayimbe at Latinoreview says he's got his hands on the Halo film script, and says it's good. He doesn't post the script itself, and nothing in his review reveals anything that a good Halo fan doesn't already know, but if you enjoy that sort of thing, go check it out.

HBOer N1NJ4 wrote a review of Wideload's Stubbs The Zombie. The mostly-positive review says that Stubbs is as gross as it is engrossing:

For me, there is no joy greater than whistling to my complete army of festering undead and knowing that they are my minions. The warm feeling I get when one of them is eating a brain, however, is nothing short of creepy. Its like I have a family: I feed them, push them, and occasionally use them to take bullets for me. The creation and manipulating of zombies is by far the most important as far as game play is concerned.

What N1NJ4 wonders is if the game has replayability. Hey, time to look for those hippos!

The Hilton Head IslandPacket has a nice review of Stubbs the Zombie up that has two major negative points: one, it spoils part of the plot of the game in its second paragraph, and two, it suggests that because the game is too short, it's a better rental than a purchase. (This is what happens when you play Halo engine games on "Easy"--Ed.)

Joseph Blancato at the WarCry Network has put up a review of Stubbs the Zombie called That's Not Eisenhower-Era Behavior. He found the game quite underappreciated, as well as its main character, Stubbs, whom he likened to a zombified James Dean (hence the title):

Rather than being a mindless beast, Stubbs, the main character, exhibits more charm and personality than most videogame protagonists have in the past decade. He's Mario, only undead. And with a fedora. He's silly, suave, debonair, and sarcastic, all without a spoken line. The soundtrack behind him, featuring old doo wop songs performed by modern bands, only makes him stronger as a character. If you don't fall in love with him when he starts breakdance fighting with Punchbowl's chief of police to "My Boyfriend's Back," you're as dead as Stubbs is.

Of course, coming right out and asking writer Matt Soell if there is more than meets the eye to Stubbs is like asking if the Beatles took drugs-- but it's nice that someone is looking more closely at this game.