CAL, The CyberAthlete Amateur League, is now accepting Halo 2 teams for competition. They've also opened a Halo 2 forum. Thanks rapture at Cooked Gamers.

Frankie's finally given in to reality and posted about Bungie's loss in last week's Humpday Challenge; The Bungie.net Mods team of Shishka, Yoozel, Stoshy and (sort of) Payneful defeated Frankie, AGDTinman and Negabyte. Thanks to akba for the heads-up.

UPDATE: Stosh added a comment to the earlier item about this particular Humpday Challenge; he's also put up an account at his Mob of Angry Peasants chapter page. Editor's Note: We knew peasants would be back in the story at some point; must be Case's influence. As for the Challenge-- Frankie puts the blame on the Bungie loss to Payneful playing for the Mods team, while Stosh says he entered a game and then left after a few seconds.

[image:8816 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] BOLL has created a set of panoramic views of Halo 2, using a TV capture card, a modified controller, and the blind skull. Check it out over at HBO.

As I've not yet finished Halo 2, and with work and the holidays I'm not sure when I will, I've decided to review Halo 2 in pieces rather than as a whole, logging my impressions of the game as I play through it. The Halo 2 Impressions page will break the game down level by level; it won't be completely a review, nor completely a walkthrough, and one of the major points of emphasis will be comparison and contrast to Halo 1 and Marathon. So far there are three items in the Halo 2 Impressions section: The Heretic, Armory, and Cairo Station.

SketchFactor has posted in the Bungie.net forum that all existing Halo 2 XBL playlists are being revised, and new ones will be created, including one for all team slayer, all the time. The new lists should come out, subject to change, after the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanks MikeMan445.

Slashdot linked to a story at The Wire about Holo-Dek Gaming Inc., a company opening up networked gaming centers featuring PC and Xboxes connected to large projection screens in Hampton, New Hampshire.

Halo 2 seems to be topping everybody's lists these days-- the XBL games list, the sales charts-- oh, except the list that watchdog groups like the so-called Interfaith Council make of most violent games. Fifth? After Half-Life 2 at number 4? Bungie gets no respect... Thanks GameSpot.

[image:8794 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] KP has posted up some photos of the setup he created to play Halo 2 in the HBO forum, and invited others to do likewise.

A full list of all the skulls in Halo 2 has been provided to Halo2Source by abhinav; one apparently unlocks a level of difficulty higher than Legendary. The list has this as confirmed but I haven't seen confirmation as yet.

UPDATE: There's also voluminous info on the search for skulls in the High Impact Halo forum. Currently their Skulls page links to the latest skulls post by Halo-2-Xlink. According to HIH, it appears that rather than unlocking a separately accessible difficulty level, the Mythic skull makes Flood invicible while in vehicles, but also makes the whole game on Legendary more difficult. Thanks Gil27 and Hawk7886.

Shadow Panther has put an almost painful amount of detail concerning Halo 2's weapons into a series of tables that keep track of how many shots and how much time each individual weapon and dual wield combo takes to kill a fully shielded target, broken down into head and body shots. He's also done a page where he ranks each weapon according to effectiveness. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.