Cortana pays the price for Master Chief's wardrobe malfunction in this week's Halo Babies cartoon. Thanks mrsmiley.

Today, Halo Babies proposes an alternate use for the Covenant sword.

This one's been sitting in the hopper for awhile-- the newest Halo Babies comic is an ambitious six-panel called the Adventure of Super Chief. Check it out! Thanks mrsmiley.

Halo 3 garners a mention in today's Penny Arcade cartoon, as a pawn in the ongoing chess match between Microsoft and Sony over the next-generation console launches.

It seems Microsoft is suing 117 for phishing without a license.

Spong, featuring a new Googlified logo, put up a story late last night (so it's not an April Fool's joke, at least not a fair one) that says the Xbox 2 will have downloadable demo content right at launch.

In other news:

New strip and Gruntsbane's resume up at Halo Babies today; thanks mrsmiley.

Stuntmutt's 300th One One Se7en comic is online today, along with a frightening afterword and shocking revelations.

Penny Arcade's side of the Humpday Challenge debacle is up now; responses come in both verbal and visual forms. Tycho thought that Bungie's triumphant victory would make up for their initial review of Halo 1..

The last in the series of Bungie Fundamentals (and the 77th strip overall) is up at Halo Babies. Thanks mrsmiley.

In a surprise move, the identity of this week's Humpday Challenge opponents was revealed in the latest Penny Arcade comic. As Gabe and Tycho feared, Bungie did indeed want to play Slayer, and ended up schooling the Penny Arcade duo and their friends, winning all three games with kill ratios of about 2:1. Frankie's writeup is up at Bungie.net now.

New edition of Calvin and Halo today by Blackstar; at least the trash-talking is equal opportunity. Thanks Louis Wu who pointed it out and Blackstar for the comic and the tips on sniper positions in Colossus.

*_mc* mrsmiley at Halo Babies writes that he and Gruntsbane put together five new Halo Babies emoticons they said "no Halo forum should be without." We interpreted that as a direct order and installed them. For the sake of convenience, the codes needed to use these at R.net are the same as those at Halo Babies.

More Xbox 2 specs, this time from GDC through GameSpy via Voodoo Extreme. The upshot? A triple-cored PPC, 256Mb of total memory, optional hard drive, 720p standard output and a new 500Mhz GPU. Yowza. Apparently part 2 of this series is due tomorrow.

In other news:

[image:9096 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Only slightly more than three years have passed since the Xbox brought Microsoft into the console wars, and the next generation, if rumors are to be believed, will be upon us by the 2005 holiday season. Ahh.. Xbox. A console of infinite games... assuming they're all made by Bungie.

Here's a look at recent items about upcoming consoles, as well as goings-on in the Bungieverse: