Newly recruited Bungie.net reporter Mnemesis has written up a report in the HBO forum from the HNC Finals... where the Halo 2 Trailer was shown.

While the trailer itself has been written about numerous times already, he does add a few impressions of his own:

The boys at Electric Playground got their eyeballs on the Halo 2 trailer, and boy, they seem to have enjoyed it. They wrote up a summary, here, and commented on the progress that game's made from the original. A worthy read.

Thanks to the Junkyard for catching this. Not HBO. Ho ho ho.

We couldn't find the GameSpot poll mentioned at HBO-- perhaps it already closed with Halo named the undisputed victor before we got there.

However, we did find virtually the same poll running at Gaming Age. Currently Halo 2 is trailing The Legend of Zelda 371 to 231, but leading GTA: Vice City (159) and Doom III (81).

The countdown banner at Xbox.com disappeared briefly this week, but has apparently returned. BOLL first noted it was missing, and Louis Wu posted it at HBO.

Given that the countdown is an image, I'm guessing the countdown outage was a result of a manual update rather than anything nefarious.

Harry Al-Shakarchi and Griffon , via Louis Wu at HBO, respectively gave warning that PC Gamer in the US and Edge Magazine in the UK will be doing previews of Halo 2. Edge has a teaser graphic up.

Cino posted in the HBO forum that a Bungie representative showed up there and showed the Halo 2 trailer. And guess what? It turned out to be true, as Matt Soell confirmed:

Ok, now we've seen it all. Halo 2 is so popular this is the only time we've ever seen sites do previews not for a game, but for a trailer that's not going to be out for another 3 weeks for a game that isn't going to be out for more than a year. It's... astounding.

bikeman74 has posted on the HBO forum that a file called halo2trailer.mov on the Imesh and Kazaa P2P file sharing systems is, in fact, a hoax contrary to earlier claims.