Bungie.net has posted a note that the Halo National Championship Finals have started, with roving reporter Mnemesis at the event, with news soon to come. Stay tuned.

HBO and Bungie.net both now have walkthroughs of The Library on Legendary difficulty. HBO's Legendary Library Walkthrough doesn't have screenshots, but the Bungie version does. Louis Wu provided the heads-up.

There are profiles of each of the sixteen Halo National Championship finalists up at Bungie.net. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO.

Max Yeroen Hoberman at Bungie.net posted today that KingsGames.com will be starting the first Halo Tournament Season starting September 7. Details available from the Kings Games site.

Wired has an article previewing the battle that will replace the Console Wars-- the Online Console Wars.

According to the article, MS will launch Xbox Live on Nov 15 and beginning to beta test the service. This week Sony introducted its online adapter for the PlayStation 2, which unlike Xbox Live, supports analog modems as well as broadband connections.

Another interesting article mentioned by HBO's Louis Wu is at GameStudies. This one takes a look at Halo, and suggests that it's more genre breaking than it seems-- with an emphasis on the work break :

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.

A story at Xbox365 this morning says that a company called Focus Enhancements in California has unveiled a new, cheaper video chip for the Xbox, which will be used in a new motherboard design. The chip converts video into TV-friendly formats.

Bungie.net has posted information on a new Halo tournament in Florida. This one is special because it has a lower age limit than the Halo National Tournament; it's for players between the ages of 10 and 17. The rules are similar to those of the HNC but without an elimination round.

Ouch.

PlanetXbox has the latest console sales figures from Media Create... and for Xbox supporters, the picture is not pretty.

The Xbox sold 3,600 units, up 600 from the previous week. That's good.

What's not good is the PlayStation 2 sold 90,400 that same week. No, that's not a typo. Ninety thousand. In other words, the PS2 is outselling the Xbox by about a 25:1 ratio.

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 winners of the regional HNC competitions have been posted at Bungie.net. The finals will be played next week in Los Angeles. If the winners are unable to play, there is an alternate from each center.

There have been a few recent threads in the HBO forum about a remark that musicmeister Marty The Elder O'Donnell made at the E3 fanfest regarding Covenant Elite taunts . Basically, he said they were in the POA level but would be near impossible to find.

Surreptitious thinks he may have found them, and recorded a number of Elite vocalizations in the POA level.

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.

Blackstar Productions has come out with a new video. This one's an advertisement for Halo and Xbox Live featuring Stephen Hawking. We've added Mr. Hawking to our Halo Movies section as well.