The latest giveaway, according to Steve at Cortana.org is a Cortana figure, part of Wave 1 and very rare. Check Cortana.org for details.

Don't know how we missed this, but way back on February 6, longtime Bungie community members Clan Plaid opened their very own Halo server. It should be in the lists as #CP#_For_Fun_&_Honor!. Official "Halo Nights" are Mondays at 9 P.M. eastern time.

Episode 24 of Red vs Blue is up now on their site. Is this the end of Sarge... again?

Blackstar of Blackstar Productions, that yesterday released a video of the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest held by HBO's Louis Wu, mentioned in the HBO forum that a second part of the video will also be available soon.

Grenadiac has put up version 3 of the PC Halo level editor SparkEdit up at HaloMods. Also, earlier this month, somehow it escaped our notice that another Halo editing app, HMT, is being ported to the Macintosh at MacHaloMods.

[image:6820 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Over at Blackstar Productions, Blackstar's highlight film for the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest held on January 31 and February 1 by HBO's Louis Wu is now ready. It's called HALO: Offensive Tetraboxing and it's clocks in at a little over 9 minutes and 93 megabytes.

Major League Gaming has sent a reminder that this weekend's Philly Eastern Regional is set to be the biggest US Halo tournament to date with 300 participants and a $16,000 purse.

[image:3572 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Back in the day Craig Mullins was responsible for a lot of the absolutely kick-ass art associated with Bungie Software's products, most notably their series of SF 3D shooters (sounding familiar?) for the Mac; yes, Marathon.

Over at Bungie.net, SketchFactor has put together an excellent summary of the goings-on at the Halo PC World Championship, the tournament sponsored by iGames beginning last fall and culminating in the showdown on February 17 in Gardena, California. Top honors went to Jonathan "BEAST" Finglass of the UK; Sketch's article contains the final standings for the top 19 players.

mrsmiley has posted that the new Halo Babies site has launched, and it looks like a real treat. (For one thing, it supports RSS, which always gets appreciated here at Rampancy as that's how we keep tabs on things in the Halo community.) James "Gholsbane" Wheare did the code from scratch.

th3gh05t has posted at Halo-Source.com that Beta 4.0 of XBconnect is now available. XbConnect allows Xbox users to connect to each other over the Internet and play games that don't support Xbox Live.

On the off chance that you haven't been paying attention, longtime Halo forum denizen BOLL has been experimenting with various Flash-based pranks in the HBO forum. The latest is more than that; it's a game that puts you behind a LAAG cannon with a whole host of animated grunts to fight. Almost as addictive as Halo itself! Try it out. Thanks Louis Wu.