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:

This is one of those weird times when something written about us on the internet is true.

I did actually show up in Renton with a DVD of the Halo 2 trailer, which I played between tournament rounds. It was on a tiny screen, and the glorious sound design suffered from the two tiny TV speakers, but it was the Halo 2 trailer, and people seemed to like it.

Looks like the rest of us will still have to wait a few days...

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:

Pricing plans beyond the $49.99 for 12 months hasn't been revealed yet by Microsoft. The company is comfortable with a 9.95/month value for the service, but this hasn't been translated into any long term pricing.

Where the comfortable with a 9.95/month value quote comes from isn't stated, so don't bank on it.

There's also this slightly discouraging piece of information:

The gamertag is permanent but there's still the potential for specific in-game handles and nicknames if a company makes a game that supports it. You can sign up for another user ID but that means opening another Xbox Live account to go with it. If you have four Xbox gamers in the house and they each want their own XBL ID then somebody is going to have to spend that $49.99 for each of them.

Here's hoping that they somehow figure out a way to handle multiple gamers on a single Xbox in a single household without depending on game-specific implementations.

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:

They played. They played with skill. However, all the time they were playing, Mr. Pistol was killing them.

It was almost ludicrous. He ate them for lunch. These guys were GREAT, very talented, almost no shortcomings Ч highly skilled, highly trained, well-drilled players who were all worthy of recommendation. They had great moves, and all were excellent with the pistol. And the god barely blinked as he mowed them over.

It's over in the HBO forum, go check it out. Noticed first by Louis Wu at HBO.

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.

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

• Xbox detection column graphics added.
• Working pings.
• Client/server code overhauled.
• DING button added.
• GUI cleaned up.
• Help Files!
• Numerous small stability enhancements and other minor changes.

Looks to be a good step forward for the software. Pick up beta 3 and make sure you have GameRanger so you can find other people to play with.

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.

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

Everyone knows people who have played Halo through on Normal, but seem to always get their asses handed to them during LAN play. Usually, this person feels that their tactics are superior and it was the game that failed in the execution. Such a player might, say, jump into a warthog, drive close to a heated battle, then hop in the back and try and use the LAAG to wipe out his foes. In theory, such a guy should get a few kills, right? Well, theory or not, this interesting tactic resulted in a grand total of 3 kills. You'd think wandering around shooting rockets randomly into each base might have improved his chances by a factor of 5 at least.

Be sure to check it out, some interesting stuff in there.

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:

With Halo passing the two million mark in global sales, Microsoft unveiled the first in-game trailer for the much-anticipated sequel. The trailer starts off with the Master Chief, assisted by his AI construct Cortana, deep inside a spaceship. Arming himself with an assault rifle, he makes his way though the corridors of the ship, as mission objectives from the first game flash across the screen, each with a Completed after it. Upon entering the ship's hangar, huge Covenant ships can be seen invading Earth. Huge explosions burst across the continents. A new mission objective hits the screen: Stop the destruction of the human race and Master Chief opens the hangar door and jumps into space, heading directly for a hovering Covenant craft below. The trailer showcased new graphic enhancements that Bungie's managed to get out of Xbox, including realistic real-time lighting effects, more fluid animation and more realistic bump mapping. In addition to featuring online play through Xbox Live, the sequel will offer a larger assortment of weapons and twice as many vehicles.

The story also covers the Xbox Live announcement.