The guys at TeamXbox have delivered Bungie their first major defeat from a wholly external group in a Humpday Challenge; read all about the suffering at Bungie.net.

Frankie has put up a new update on how Halo 2 has been doing on Xbox Live, numerically speaking, and it's impressive: Halo 2 is the #1 game by far on the service, dwarfing its nearest competitor by a factor of 10, according to Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb, Xbox Live's Director of Programming.

There are also a few more sobering items, like the fact that Game Viewer data is being used to catch-- and ban-- cheaters.

As further celebration of Marathon's tenth anniversary, James Willson has added code to Aleph One enabling users behind NAT firewalls to join TCP/IP network games. Test Windows and Mac versions are being hosted by Gregory Smith.

Louis Wu, with help from Devin Olsen, Gil27 and others, is documenting a so-called Spectator Mode glitch in Halo 2 that allows players to enter a "spectator mode" of sorts, rendering the player invisible and invincible and allowing for instant travel across maps.

Obviously showing off in front of the Frag Dollz took away whatever humility Bungie might have developed as a result of being beaten by the forum mods; triumphant in the latest Humpday Challenge against OXM, the egos run rampant.

A special detachment of Bungie's best calling themselves the Frag Doodz took on girl gamers the Frag Dolls in the latest Humpday Challenge and were as gracious in their (narrow) victory as we're ever likely to see them. This is what happens when geeks try to impress girls. Both sites have blog entries from various participants about the match.

vviperxx pointed out another way to save your Halo 2 XBL stats from being wiped out: a perl script called H2SA that downloads all the HTML pages from Bungie.net and processes the statistics to produce a summary. It runs on Windows and *unix computers.

Major Nelson points out a way developed by Samrad to pull your Halo 2 stats from the RSS feed at Bungie.net into Excel for analysis and the making of pretty charts. Editor's Note: The required "import XML" menu item seems to be missing from Excel 2004 on the Mac, so it looks like this procedure requires Windows.

The updates to Halo 2's Xbox Live playlists have arrived; the Team Slayer only list is now there. If you were online when the lists were updated, you'll need to disconnect and reconnect to see the new lists. Lots of changes here, and you can see a list of all the changes at Bungie.net.

CAL, The CyberAthlete Amateur League, is now accepting Halo 2 teams for competition. They've also opened a Halo 2 forum. Thanks rapture at Cooked Gamers.

Word on the street is that Bungie has suffered their first loss in the Humpday Challenge since they started-- to the Bungie.net admins. There's no writeup at Bungie.net yet (surprise, surprise) but hopefully more details will surface soon.

SketchFactor has posted in the Bungie.net forum that all existing Halo 2 XBL playlists are being revised, and new ones will be created, including one for all team slayer, all the time. The new lists should come out, subject to change, after the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanks MikeMan445.

Greetings from rainy Langley outside of London, where I'm in town for a few days doing something almost, but not entirely, unrelated to Halo 2; something I hope to rectify in approximately 12 hours or so. In the meantime, of course, I returned to notice that the server logs had filled up the server's disk space, effectively closing the site; hopefully that won't happen again for... oh... at least another 24 hours or so.

[image:8656 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Funkmastaeric writes in the HBO forum that if you currently don't have access to XBL, you can set your XBL icon at Bungie.net by manipulating the URL in a browser. Neat trick. For information on the selection of icons, see our Emblem Gallery.

Cnet today has an article speculating on Microsoft's approach to trying to eliminate users of modified Xboxes from its Xbox Live gaming service, even going so far as to try and implicate Halo 2.