A very businesslike Weekly Update this week over in the Bungie.net forums. There's no censored in sight, but lots of information on how things are coming together: final art, animations, and dialogue. Check it out.

A site called The Flaming Blue Ninjas has a new article up where their own Rabid Gnome interviews John "Xearo" Blow who played Halo 2 at MLG Seattle. He rates the vehicles and weapons and talks about his general impressions. Generally, he dislikes dual wielding, the new needler, the plasma sword, the fixed pistol, and all vehicles. He likes the battle rifle.

In the London Free Press, Steve Tilley apologizes, first for his job, that allows him to drink for free while playing Halo 2 pre-release, and then for committing 6 teamkills in a 3-2 CTF win on Zanzibar:

Halo fans submitted some follow-up questions to GameSpy about Halo 2, and they've done their best to answer them.

mrsmiley of Halo Babies has put online the promised writeup of the MLG's Downpour event, which featured the Halo 2 action on Zanzibar that most of you are currently downloading via BitTorrent.

Just a short update on the goings-on in the world of I Love Bees.

As many suspected, the Links page, that contained times in the PDT time zone and GPS coordinates, were indeed connected (most of the time) to pay phones. The coordinates were grouped in banks of seven each with a code word. If someone was there to at two positions in the group to answer the phone, identify the caller (variably Melissa or The Operator-- not all reports are consistent) and speak the group's code word, then an audio file became available for that group. Currently 23 such files are theoretically available, but I get 404 errors on three of them (eyes, reflected, and say something).

Many sites are following the puzzle now, and as the backstory of the puzzle, now explained clearly in the sidebar of Dana's I Love Bees blog, relates directly to Halo 2, many Halo and Bungie fansites are also now involved in one way or another. However, not every site wants to have discussion of Halo drowned out by speculation on the ILB puzzle. HBO in particular has a single, extremely busy forum where ILB discussion has threatened to drown out everything else. HBO's administrator, Louis Wu, doubts Bungie has much direct involvement in the puzzle, and has thus asked that ILB discussion be kept down on the HBO forum.

Now, with another 350+ post explosion of bee discussion there, Wu is asking that all bee discussion be removed from the forum completely, as none of the discussion there is being well organized, and the repetition of old information is getting in the way of the usual forum operation.

Rampancy's forum has several indexes, so it's no problem for us to isolate Bee discussion in a separate forum, which is what we've now done. Discuss away.

Some resources for those who haven't been following closely:

• A map of coordinates in the Unfiction forums. These phones are supposedly going to be called at the specified times every day. However, keep in mind that some players expect that times and/or coordinates may change. There is a counter on the Links page that currently stands at 74/777, indicating that this phase of the puzzle is far from over.
• Status Page at Melangerie. This lists the times, coordinates and code words for the known "axons" (phones that would be called) along with the status of each one and their grouping.
• Bee Blog at Netninja. This blog tracks the puzzle's progress.
• I Love Bees Blog. This site is the one the in-game character Dana uses to track progress and give hints. The sidebar now has a summary that mentions the Covenant.

Stay tuned for more updates.

KP and HBO's own Louis Wu took time out yesterday to drive out to one of the CT locations listed on the ilovebees.com page, to wait and see if a nearby phone would indeed ring. As it turns out, they had no luck-- no call came in. It is not clear at this point whether all locations actually received a call, but apparently only two per group were needed to trigger one of the audio files now on the ILB site,

HBO has put up a BitTorrent seed (and a mirror list) of some good quality footage of multiplayer action on Zanzibar at the first-ever Halo 2 tourney, using the E3 2004 build of the game. Lots of shakeycam footage has been floating around, but this is the real deal.

The countdown has ended at ilovebees.com and been replaced by the phrase "transmitting" with a link to the groups of GPS coordinates on the links page.

Two lists of locations have come out of the attempts to decipher the puzzles embedded in the ilovebees.com site. If something is going to happen on August 24, it might be observable from these locations. My guess? Some kind of Halo advertisement.

http://www.trynamics.com/location_list.html
http://qube.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=GPS_Corrected_Addresses

Well, the javascript that makes the countdown on ilovebees.com, since it's based on the user's local time, has already reached zero for us here in the Rampancy Cave.

Nothing else much seems to have happened. We'll let everybody know if our powerbooks start leaking honey or Covies break in looking for AI constructs.

IGN's Tal Blevins was on hand at the German Games Convention in Leipzig, and while there they got their hands on Halo 2. Having already had the chance to play Zanzibar at E3, their rep thought he could hand the Germans their hats on the map; sounds like he got his chance. However, with phrases like "Suck on some of that, Dieter" I hope he isn't hoping for a career in diplomacy.

Frankie is back, with a few choice words with those who were upset at last week's update, and news on how placeholder items in levels have been replaced with real items, how Marty has gone into hiding to finish scoring the game, and other non-hair-related tidbits.

Microsoft's VP for Xbox marketing has been interviewed over at GameSpot, and, predictably, the subject of Halo 2 comes up. Here's what Pete Moore had to say: