BGH forumgoer Noctaurus has produced a more complete and accurate transcription of the X03 video that came out earlier this week; thanks TankRamp at BGH.

Computer and Video Games managed to nab studio head Pete Parsons at Bungie to interrogate him about Halo 2.

[image:4345 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Some intrepid forumgoers here (thekman) and at HBO (op_ivy) noticed a new Halo 2 screenshot at an image hosting site called ImageMagician, apparently originating from the French gaming show X03. Later, it appeared on Bungie's own Truth and Reconciliation site. We've added it to our Halo 2 gallery.

[image:4046 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Eric Trautmann of Microsoft, who is the point person for the Halo novelizations, mentioned on the HBO forum that the manuscript for the next Halo novel, Halo: First Strike, which will cover the as-yet-undivulged amount of time between Halo and Halo 2, has been

Okay, this morning we've got a couple sites, in this case Xbox365, quoting EuroGamer, saying that Halo 2's release date has "slipped" to April of 2004. EuroGamer cites Microsoft as the source of the information, but there's no official press release text or link to one; in the Microsoft Game Studios Press Site, there's no mention of this "information". Eurogamer claims this is a delay of two months.

Everyone who watches this space knows that the only thing that was officially ever said about Halo 2 was "in 2004". If you want to interpret that to mean January 2004, then sure, I guess releasing in March means a two month delay. But you can't have a delay of an unofficial release date; and frankly, anybody who thinks about it for two seconds would probably assume that if Bungie knew that far in advance that it was impossible to release for the Christmas 2003 season, that the delay was probably going to be more than just a few weeks, so assuming January was probably wrong in the first place.

It's also unclear whether or not the dates in question are intended for a European audience; that seems to be the opinion of the Xbox365 forumgoers, anyway.

And of course, at the end of it all, there's horses' mouths and horses' asses; Microsoft is a big company, and it's probably better to trust those who are closer to what's going on.

UPDATE: Microsoft's official Xbox.com game list still lists the release date for Halo 2 as "TBA", although the page for Halo 2 itself does, in fact, say March 2004.

Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, the man who provided most of the information about PC Halo during the recent Fanstock event, has been interviewed by Computer and Video Games. Highlights include the fact that playing as the Covenant-- originally a central idea in Halo's design, pre-buyout-- was discussed and rejected. And while bots will not be in the game as shipped, the possibility exists for something in the future:

One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with.

Gabe over at Penny Arcade has posted that this month's Gaming Day event, to be held at Lanwerx in Bellevue, WA on August 23, is going to feature a Halo tournament as well as some Halo 2 stuff:

To go along with our Halo tourney, Microsoft will has agreed to come down and show off a bit of Halo 2. We aren't sure yet if it will be the same stuff they showed at E3 or something new but either way it's pretty fucking exciting.

Penny Arcade, of course, is a regular webcomic focusing on gaming that has, at times, mentioned Halo in the past.