Taylor Whitfield of the Paly Voice, the online paper of Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, California, has a rather interesting figure quoted in their article on Halo 2 midnight madness:

"This is definitely the biggest turn out we’ve ever had," said Tyler Durden, manager of Game Stop."

Sounds like a lot of people have been breaking the first two rules of Halo Club. Thanks for the heads-up to vector40.

Kitt at Evil Avatar pointed out a comparison between the number of users on Valve's Steam service to those playing Halo 2 on XBL. At the moment, they are about equal: around 75,000 players currently online.

As usual, more news than one can shake a boomstick at:

For awhile now, registered users of Rampancy could enter in their XBL GamerTags in their profiles, by clicking the my account link under the lefthand menu for their username, and editing their personal information. Now, we have a way to actually use that information. First, you can see a list of our registered users, and if you like, you can see only those who have entered GamerTags.

Tycho of Penny Arcade is beginning to post his first impressions of Halo 2, starting with the matchmaking system, which he seems to like fairly well:

It's odd when you first start, especially if you're used to PC-style server browsers or classic Live optimatches, both of which make up for their deficiencies somewhat by being highly explicit. Once you get the hang of this new way, it's startlingly humane and organic in comparison.

How much money did Halo make on its first day? $100 million, according to Microsoft and EB Games, says GameSpot. Not bad.

[image:8734 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] HaloMods is carrying news of one of the first mods made with a legitimately owned copy of Halo 2; Iron Forge has created a dual plasma swords mod. Don't know how effective it is, but it looks damn cool. Thanks to synide for the heads-up.

Mat "Shunji" Noguchi responds in his blog to some of Halo and Halo 2's critics by pointing out how Halo 2's game experience is optimized for average, not "hardcore" players.

GameSpy has a two-page feature up called The Numbers Never Lie about the Halo 2 statistics system.

Evil Avatar writes that Killzone for the PlayStation 2, widely billed as a Halo-killer but launched to scathing reviews, isn't as bad as it's hype, but that Halo 2 lives up to its:

I played Halo 2 for several hours straight. The game is just awesome, it will be hard for anything to beat it as Game of the Year.

The BBC wonders why Halo 1 has created so much enthusiasm for the sequel; and to find out, they asked HBO's Claude "Louis Wu" Errera:

Bungie got everything right. They were really careful to make sure everything worked the way it was supposed to.

Nothing distracts you when you were playing. There was nothing in Halo that had not been done before but everything in there was as good as it could be.

Louis Wu at HBO has already done a really good job of collecting up many of the links to articles and reviews that came out after I went to bed yesterday; so rather than repeating or cutting and pasting, I'm just going to link to his roundup. As he mentions, some of those reviews contain spoilers, so consider yourself warned. Most of the articles are variations on coverage of launch events, preorder pickup lines, and sales estimates.