InsideMacGames is saying that the Official UK Xbox Magazine has reported that Halo 2 is in development and will be out for Christmas 2003. There is a quote in the IMG article, but it only mentions the Xbox General Manager -- not a name.

According to the article, there's still no solid release date on Mac/PC Halo. Mr Yun in the HBO forum provided the notice.

And now, for a few moments, we venture into the breach that straddles the realm of the official announcement and the territory of the unfounded rumor.

Louis Wu at HBO is reporting the rather specious claim forwarded to HBO by Greg that a site named GamePlay will take your preorder for Halo 2 right now-- despite their admission that there is no pricing information for the title. They've set their price at a shade under $45 pounds sterling-- that's about 70 or so Euros, or, for you Yanks out there, about $66.50. (Warning, this includes UK sales tax). They claim this should go down.

The UK retailer is claiming that Halo 2 was just officially announced at this year's E3.

But that seems like a bit of a stretch-- Bungie certainly never mentioned anything about Halo 2, nor did they show anything. But statements by Microsoft PR talked about an online enabled Halo title, and Bungie reps have repeatedly denied the existance of any Halo 1.5 title that would be online enabled.

That leaves any reasonable thinking person to conclude that:

1) There will not be an online-enabled version of Halo 1
2) There will be an online-enabled Halo game

This pretty much leaves open the only possible conclusion that:

3) There will be a sequel (or prequel) to Halo, for argument's sake called Halo 2 , that will have online play via Microsoft's Xbox Live service (as MS announced).

Now, Louis is warning us that Halo 2, as such, has not officially been announced-- but this seems a bit like splitting hairs. True, no positive statements regarding a Halo sequel have been made by Bungie personnel themselves. They've only told us what they won't be doing. But if we keep making these kinds of disctinctions we may reach a point where it's impossible to know anything about what Bungie is doing because of conflicts between statements made by Bungie and MS-- and to completely discount statements made by MS representatives really isn't a viable long-term strategy, given that at the moment they're the only one making statements about products and services that fall outside the immediate scope of what Bungie is doing-- things like Xbox Live, which Bungie games will most certainly support but which Bungie probably doesn't have authority or permission to comment on directly.

We're mirroring two of the four Making Of Halo videos that were recently posted at HBO; the one featuring Alex Seropian and Hamilton Chu, and the one featuring Steve Abeyta and Shikai Wang.

Matt dropped into the HBO forum to say that some Bungie Store preorders of the Halo Soundtrack had shipped as early as last Friday. So get your orders in!

In addition, Brian Blackstar Josselyn pointed out that the track listings are up at Tower Records' website, right under where it says track list not available. Somebody better warn Marty, though, because they list the composer as some clown named Martin O'Donnell... :)

We've just added the recently captured QT5 version (4 Mb, 480x360) of the television commercial for Halo that's been airing in the Canadian market this spring and was captured by Bill and Bob Maguire. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the notice.

The latest poll up at Shacknews asks which platform had the most impressive games at E3 this year.

Currently the Xbox is in third place with 419 votes (15%), edged out by the Nintendo GameCube with 533 votes (19%) and getting demolished by the PC (1504 votes, 56%). Despite the console content, it looks like Shacknews really is a PC gaming site.

Trailing the Xbox were the PS2 (167 votes, 6%) and the GameBoyAdvance (56 votes, 2%).

So according to this poll, the E3 showing for the Xbox this year better than that for a one year old console or a handheld game.

In a forum thread at HBO discussing recent claims that Halo saved game files had been hacked to gain access to infinite ammo and other things, Mat MSN Noguchi had the following to say:

All things considered, I doubt anyone has managed to hack the save file of any game yet.

Besides, there are much easier ways to hack Halo :)

Louis Wu replied that it was mean to say that without providing details, but I think it's safe to say that if there are other easter eggs or exploits left to find, Bungie will probably leave the fans to find them on their own.

There have been a couple of interesting recent developments concerning the attempts to hack the Xbox for a variety of purposes: to modify game files, install custom programs and operating systems (Linux), play foreign games and DVDs, and, yes, even-- to make illegal copies of games and movies.

CNET has a story about Lik-Sang's mod chip for the Xbox.

XBOXHACKER has an item up on a white paper available from an MIT ftp server that documents something called the XBOX LDT bus . I have no idea what that means, but apparently it's about the Xbox's boot procedures and security system.

The white paper itself has been slashdotted because of this story, which you might also find interesting.

GameSpot has a story up about a survey conducted by Greensfield Online. Apparently it contained some questions for consumers about concepts for new Microsoft products. One such product was an Xbox connection kit, which would let Xbox owners connect their systems to a PC for the purpose of accessing MP3s and other files. Apparently the connection would be made via ethernet

Like anything else like this, take the mention with a grain or two of salt-- last time I read anything about it, the audio files in the Xbox were Windows Media Player files and not MP3s.

Randall Glass made a new version of his infamous Warthog Jump movie, called Warthog Jump Revisited. We're mirroring the large (240x320, 30fps, 17Mb) version right here at Rampancy.