The bane of my existence, the news roundup, is back again. Lodged between the rough incisors of the news roundup beast are the following remnants of its recent meals:

You've beaten the game, you're stuck on dialup, and your entire neighborhood is populated with Sony fanboys. How do you get your Halo fix now? Play it again, Sam. But how replayable is Halo 2 compared to the original? That's the question that the latest Narc's Retort dances around and perhaps even eventually answers.

A bunch of gaming-related Valentines out there: The Most Romantic Moments in Gaming from GameSpot; romance across battlefields, species, and even the periodic table in One One Se7en, and Lorraine "Mehve" McLees' old Bungie valentines retrieved for nostalgic purposes by

Skeletor posted a guitar tab in Power Tab Editor format, as well as a recording, of The Maw from the Halo soundtrack in the HBO forum the other day, and was kind enough to let us add the file to our Sheet Music collection here at Rampancy.

Halo Babies today comments on who we definitely don't want directing a Halo movie (if there is one). Thanks mrsmiley.

Bungie manages another Humpday win, this time against HaloMods. (Corollaries to the rules predicting Humpday Challenge results: having Ferrex equals a win, but losing Frankie can also create a win, with or without Ferrex. Thanks to Louis Wu for the idea. Why does the Coagulation game summary show a screenshot from Headlong? Because those are shots of HaloMods mods --Ed.)

The Marathon Map Makers Guild has released version 3.0b7 (remember the b stands for beta) of Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, or EMR for short. This is a third party scenario for Bungie's Marathon games, and has been updated to work with the latest enhanced open-source version of the Marathon engine, Aleph One.

February 9 has now arrived, and unless you count the resumption of Bungie.net stats tracking, or the Top Story at Bungie.net about RSS and Halo.Defas.Org, then I think it's safe to say that nothing terribly exciting has happened yet, nor is it likely to.

There are those who said something would happen today. What are they to say now?

mrsmiley announces the Biggest Fan Art Update Ever over at Halo Babies, a total of thirteen gallery pieces plus extras. Go check it out.

Major Nelson today pointed out the blog of Halley "gamermom" Suitt of Boston, who says she has started a blog to "write about videogames and how my son and I deal with them." Her son's game of choice at the moment is, of course, Halo 2.

Greetings from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a place that has very nearly nothing to do with the following things which happened in the Bungieverse and the Xbox markets while I've been out here futzing around:

Another news roundup before I head out to the airport. I'll be away from the Rampancy Cave until Super Bowl Sunday (or, as it happens to be in this time zone, Super Bowl Monday Morning) but hopefully I will manage to pop in now and again. Here are some of the items of note from earlier this week: