Welcome Ash!

Everybody give a "Woosa!" to our newest member, Death Valkyrie (Formerly Ash, the Grenade Queen) who has now moved from being a clan groupie to a full-blown member of XBox live after much soul-searching and a heated debate over the proper choice of names for her gamertag. Ash, we're just wondering, does this mean you'll be too busy to bring us pizza and drinks from now on?

Halo 2 Myspace theme

We won't take sides in the heated debate over Myspace, and we aren't commenting on the trend to dress up Myspace profiles with so much gaudy glitz and glamour that browsing through them is like getting lost in old Las-Vegas, but if you go in for that sort of thing, Graphiclayouts.realgage.com has a rather nice (Tasteful, even) Halo 2-themed Myspace layout for your amusement. Just remember, don't talk to strangers and never agree to meet anyone you don't know, especially on Lockout after dark.

Add a custom gamercard to your website

For those of you who would describe yourselves as forum monkeys, you may have noticed people putting their gamertags in their sigs on various forums around the web. Well, it turns out there are a number of nifty little options when it comes to generating a custom gamertag for use on your website or in your signature or whatever. A particularly good tool for this is available at Glop.org This fine bit of dynamically updating geekery is actually pretty easy to add to your website or blog, so give it a look-see.

That's amaze-za-zing

So, apparently someone legitimately beat the Halo 2 campaign on legendary WITHOUT DYING. If that's not enough, he did it in 3 hours, 28 minutes. Ok, either this guys is really good, really lucky or really bored with his life. My guess? a combination of all three. Anyway, props to Cody for his accomplishment. He has a walkthrough of how he did it posted Here as well as a link to the video.

halo2.junk.ws accepting new members!

In case you didn't know about it, the website http://halo2.junk.ws has some really neat statistics on Halo 2 games to check out. They utilize the RSS feed from Bungie.net and break down the stats differently than on Bungie so, for instance you can see the breakdowns of maps played by popularity. (Lockout being nearly TWICE as popular as any other map!) Cool, maybe but the REAL news is the intense amount of info they break down on a player-by-player level. You have to be a member of the site in order to take advantage of it, and there are only a limited number of users that the site allows. At this moment there are still around 88 slots open for new members so now's the time folks! Oh, and it's free.

Modtastic

No, this is not a 360 that overheated after trying to run Dead Rising for an hour straight. It's a darn cool case mod. Check out some more pimped out 360s' Over at CyberNet

Everything you wanted to know about your rank but weren't interested enough to ask

Ever wondered how your Halo2 level is calculated? Well Bungie has an unhealthy amount of info about the nitty-gritty of it on their website. They refer to the information as a mere overview, which proves conclusively that they are way smarter than me. I would like to say the page explains why I am only a level five in rumble pit, but I'm afraid that has more to do with my lack of skill than it does with a flaw in the ranking system. The Halo 2 Sats Overview

The next best thing

Bungie has a brand spankin' new action figure available over at their site to tide you over till they start selling fully-functional life-size wearable Spartan armor. Check it out Here

Strategy tips -coming soon

We'll be posting the first of hopefully several Halo2 strategy guides by xTc DeathStrike here in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Mother of all gaming chairs

Woosa Overlord xTc DeathStrike would like to inflict Halo ownage from this piece of functional art, aptly named "The Villain Chair". If anybody has loose change amounting to $6,800.01 just laying around and would like to donate to xTc DeathStrike so he can purchase the chair, please let him know. Otherwise he'll just have to keep playing from his partially assembled futon. If anybody knows how to read assembly directions in french or chinese, you might want to drop him a line. More info about the chair available on Uncrate.com