The countdown has ended at ilovebees.com and been replaced by the phrase "transmitting" with a link to the groups of GPS coordinates on the links page.

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.

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:

Alex Cross says in his HBO forum post that he's seen copies of the Official Xbox Magazine that's just hitting shelves now, the one officially coming out on August 24 that Frankie mentioned in his ILB/Halo 2 demo denial, and although it's got a nice spread on Halo 2, he says there's nothing in the way of new information; just recaps of what has been revealed at E3 and since.

SPOnG has a story that says Konami is confirming that the next installment of the Silent Hill series of games will not be released for the current generation of consoles-- meaning it will instead be released on machines such as the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 2. Silent Hill 4: The Room is the latest in the series so far, due out this September.

Eurogamer has the story that Microsoft has cut the price of the Xbox in Europe to £99.99, as a preemptive measure against Sony, rumored to be cutting the price of the PlayStation 2 to £104.99 this coming Friday.

According to GameSpot, a company called Nyko Technologies is shipping the SpeakerCom, an alternative to the XBL headset. It's a microphone and speaker that mount on the Xbox controller, allowing the use of voice communication features without a headset.

Xbox.com has an interesting article up titled Xbox Undercover: Who's watching the Xbox Live service?" which is well worth a few minutes to read just for itself, as it contains interesting information about how XBL is run and what an average day looks like.

Of course, it's made even more interesting for this tidbit:

11:30 p.m.

IGN has an interview with Greg Thomas of Visual Concepts; they develop the ESPN branded sports games for Sega. In the interview, he mentions that MS is introducing LSP (Live Server Protocol) next year that will allow developers to host their own servers with Xbox Live, something that stopped Electronic Arts from bringing their industry-leading sports games to the XBL service when it launched.

Nice big, juicy update at Sector 7 this week. Frankie promises to talk about dialog, sound effects, animation and Xbox Live, but also mentions how Jaime "Flawless Cowboy" Griesemer is down in the Griespit working on CENSORED and how "something cool" is going to happen on Bungie.net next week; in fact, Monday April 12 is marked with a red X on Mister Chief's calendar, so maybe everybody should check on Bungie.net then.

Jake "Evergreen98" Billo of The Junkyard has put up the first of a three-part series on Xbox Live 3.0, codenamed Tsunami. Thanks to Dan Chosich for the heads-up on #HBO.

Slashdot has a story on the Xbox emulator, CXBX, which is now apparently able to run at least one commercial Xbox title; in this case, Turok Evolution. The CXBX site has screenshots and AVIs of it in action.

People still aren't sure whether or not the Xbox 2 will have a hard drive or not, or whether or not it's a good or bad thing if it does... or doesn't.