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:

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:

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.

Amped IGO Features has an article up detailing the successes and failures of the original Xbox. Chief among the former, naturally, was Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie Software to bring Halo to their fledgling console.

Thanks 3Suns, who pointed this out in the HBO forum.

Cats, jello, pink shirts, fist-ass-extreme and IRC figure prominently in Stingraid's interview of IBO admin Kevin "KP" Paul over at High Impact Halo.

Frankie's Weekly What's Update at Bungie.net promises that the lack of information about.. whatever it is they're doing isn't just to spite us all:

We're torn between two goalposts (worst metaphor ever!) which are; waiting til' we're comfortable about talking about it, and being very busy making it. I know that's frustrating, but it's a complicated business and we're not just being jerks.

Frankie was quick to point out (as usual) that the (disastrous) results of the latest Humpday Challenge are up at Bungie.net.

The Cayote Cavegirls took two games out of three against Bungie, with the second game being a draw due to a power outage. In the words of Frankie:

Joe Staten has written the third part of his Great Hollywood Journey article at Bungie.net; this one talks about the superb craftsmanship that he, Don Parsons, and Steve Schreck witnessed at WETA Workshops.

The next installment should include information about possible directors for the film.

The Weekly What's Update at Bungie.net is loosely packed with... stuff this week. Frankie says that Bungie's next project-- as yet still unnamed-- is generating tangible results:

Frankie's latest Weekly What's Update at Bungie.net makes up for in important details what it lacks in epic scope.

Namely, it mentions the over fifty thousand XBL accounts permanently banned, the over $175,000 raised for Katrina relief efforts by the Fight the Flood campaign, and how a seven-foot tall female Spartan killing machine looks without a gun.

Frankie's written a Bungie.net primer on the new Team Hardcore playlist, arranged with the input of Major League Gaming. To help Frankie stay alive more than two ten seconds in Team Hardcore, he enlisted the help of MLG's own director of communications, Dolbex.

Bungie's own Mat Noguchi has a new assistant, recent DigiPen graduate Bob Glessner. (Let's call him Microsoft Bob for now, because that's the cruelest thing I can think of at the moment--Ed.) The interview with Bob shows what it's like to be hired (and fired) by Mat, usually several times a day. Thanks Frankie, whom one could almost believe wrote both the questions and the answers in this interview.

Bungie has killed the Halo 2 leaderboards to discourage cheaters, as well as added the Team Hardcore playlist. Thanks SketchFactor.

What's interesting in Sketch's post is the admission that the top-ranked Halo 2 players online are cheaters: