Bungie is fielding a team of crack Halo players at the Penny Arcade Expo on Saturday (which takes place between 10:30 and 2:30 in the console tourney room at Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center in the lovely state of Washington. Be there or be sad.

How will Bungie's team perform against real competition from the competitive Halo world? Let's just say that those other teams don't have a Gamertag that allows the player to press a button combo for simultaneous sniper kills on all opponents.

ZOMG chetz!

Again, the team we're fielding comprises: Joe Tung, Charlie Gough, Luke Timmins and Eamon McKenzie. Other Bungies will be wandering around knocking over Magic: The Gathering tables and outdancing hapless nerds at the DDR machine.

You're dead like K-Fed, punk.

Click here for extra details.

Cody Miller's speedrun of Halo 2 on Legendary with no deaths has made the Guinness Book of World Records. Grande Carne noticed this in his new edition of the BoWR and posted it to HBO this morning. Congrats to Cody Miller for his insane speedrun and for going down in history.

I bet that about 40 of you will say, "ZOMG I TOTALLY DID THAT TWO YEARS AGO IN HALF THE TIME." But you're lying. I know it, you know it and your mom knows it good and hard. So just don't.

Cody Miller is reporting over at High Speed Halo that they have finally whittled down the overall time of their Halo 2 speedruns to under two hours. Congrats to Jeff Cousin for getting the run that finally pushed them under the 2 hour mark.

You can find the announcement on HBO in this thread. Very cool stuff, guys.

Open call for Southeastern Wisconsin residents who would like to participate in a Halo 2 tournament for charity!

Game Crazy
459 West Johnson Street
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin 54935
920.922.5379        

August 1st, 2006  

Game Crazy in partnership with Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery are pleased to announce Halo for Hunger IV.  Halo for Hunger is a Halo 2 tournament in which participants enter by either bringing 5 cans of nonperishable food items or $5.00.  All food items collected are donated to the Salvation Army of Wisconsin and all monetary funds raised go to the Starlight Children’s Foundation (www.starlight.org), which helps bring entertainment centers into local children’s hospitals.  This event is held twice per year in Fond du Lac.  This event is open to all residents of Wisconsin and is not limited to the city of Fond du Lac.  

Halo for Hunger IV will take place on August 12th, 2006 at the Fond du Lac National Guard Armory located at 796 Sullivan Drive (920.929.3976).  Registration begins promptly at 11:00AM and the first match will take place at 12:00PM.  Parents, friends and spectators are welcome to attend with no admission fee.  

Along with the tournament itself, the National Guard will be doing several different demonstrations, which have previously included weapons, demonstrations, explosive demonstrations and vehicle demonstrations.  Refreshments and concessions will be available for purchase at the event courtesy of Hollywood Video of Fond du Lac.   

Partners of Game Crazy that have generously supported our cause by providing prizes for the event include:  

Hollywood Video                             
Microsoft Games Studios
Roosterteeth Productions             
Sony Online Entertainment
Microsoft Xbox 360                         
2K Games
Konami                                             
Namco
Ubisoft                                              
Nintendo of America Atari                                                   
Sony Playstation Portable Capcom                                            
Electronic Arts  

Inquiries concerning Halo for Hunger IV can be directed to the Store Director at 920.922.5379.  Directions to the event can be obtained by contacting Game Crazy Fond du Lac, also at 920.922.5379 or by using www.mapquest.com.

Xbox Live Evolved, the fan-made site with a dedicated team willing to help you and your Clan, is starting its first Halo 2 League - Autumn 2006 - on the 13th of August.

You might remember Xbox Live Evolved as the site which is there to help you and your Clan get some matches going on, get a website or some forums.

Well, Xbox Live Evolved are starting up their Halo 2 Leagues for both single players and Clans. Set to start the evening of the 13th August, the Leagues will take place every week for 11 weeks, after which there will be a 2 week break before the Winter '06 Leagues begin.

The Rumble Pit League is expected to be the most popular League, with matches consisting of up to 12 people duking it out together in a range of gametypes, including:

Slayer
Slayer BR
Slayer Covenant
Snipers
Oddball
Multi Ball
Crazy King
Apocalypse (Juggernaut gametype)

On the other side, there are 4v4 Leagues as well - we are expected to see a few rivalries develop between teams as the weeks go by and the Leagues develop. Just make sure that all you team members attend, or you're most likely going to get owned in gametypes such as these:

Team Slayer
Team Slayer BR
Team Slayer Covenant
Team Snipers
Minimum Slayer
Team Ball
Low Ball
1 Flag CTF
Multi Flag CTF
Assault
Multi Bomb
Neutral Flag
Neutral Bomb
3 Plots
Land Grab

There is still plenty of time to register for the Leagues, which can be done either by the Xbox Live Evolved Forums or by the Halo 2 Leagues page on the Xbox Live Evolved website (currently under construction, so it might look empty!)

The Leagues also undergo constant editing by request of the players - adding new gametypes, removing others, defining rules, etc. - so if there is some part of the Leagues that you don't like, don't live with it - try and change it! Also, make sure to keep in touch, so you don't come back to a huge barrage of unexpected changes.

The first league match to be played will be the Rumble Pit League 1A match, taking place at 10pm CDT on the 13th August - hopefully you'll be playing!

There've been a lot of rumours flying around this past week that we've somehow rolled out a stealth auto update. These silly netizens allege that we added a tree with coconuts on Ivory Tower. Also, rumour has it that we have or plan to reset the ranks. Allow me to address these rumours with a flat-out denial.

Rolling out an auto update isn't something that we can do secretly, nor is it something that we'd do just to add a coconut tree on Ivory Tower.

We don't have any plans to reset the stats at this time.

Remember folks, the guy on those forums on that site who totally knows this dude works for Bungie is actually just a dirty liar who needs to find a better way to enjoy his summer vacation. Unless it comes straight from Bungie, it's not true.

The Intel Summer Championships wrapped up this weekend in Grapevine, Texas and the winners have been announced. In the Halo 2 category, MLG Str8 Rippin walked away with the top spot and a cool five grand, with MLG XiT Woundz and MoB BigChili.com rounding out the top three, respectively.

You can find the full results for all of the tournaments held at the Intel Summer Championships on the WSVG website.

The latest trend among the online Halo 2 community has been online tournaments.  One of the newst sites to follow this trend is www.h2carnage.com, hosting weekly online tournaments to break that summer boredom and build a strong community. Sign up at H2Carnage today for tourneys and a great community!

Run by myself(x BaiL x), Bradyok, and ImmeNeNt, H2Carnage is devoted to giving players highly organized and efficient online tournaments, played MLG style.  Aside from tournaments, we offer forums for players to chat, meet new people, and satisfy their other grunty thirsts.  If you would like to become a part of this growing community, visit H2Carnage today!

The Halo 2 headset is now being sold by Plantronics for $14.95 with one dollar going to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It'll work with either the Xbox or Xbox 360. If you need the communicator as well, they'll throw that in for another five bucks.

If you've been holding off on picking up this headset, now is definitely the time. It's a great headset, sound quality is crisp on both ends.

This may not be news to many of you, as it broke on Ars Technica a few days ago, where HBO picked it up.

There's a slew of MLG Anaheim coverage over at MLGPro.com. Despite some really interesting 4v4 results in the beginning of the tournament, Final Boss remained unshaken atop the leaderboard. Karma was also able walk away with the 1v1 title yet again. Congrats to the winners, which is everyone, because we're all winners on the inside.

Trunkers filed a preliminary report on the goings on early on Sunday detailing the travails of top pro teams which were upset in the early rounds. Later he reported the final prize report and wrote a in-depth piece of the experiences of Carbon at MLG Anaheim. Finally, Jason posted the saga of the 1v1 tournament earlier today.

MLGPro.com has cranked out some new content in preperation for this weekend. There's a 4v4 Preview, they announce locking down some Pros and Overswarm put up an article on MoBDeep earlier this week.

The 4v4 preview is pretty interesting and gives a pretty good description of what we can expect of the action. The announcement is standard fare, congrats to Final Boss and their newfound dough-rolling. Overswarm does an excellent job, as always, detailing MoBDeep, worth a read.

Maimum FEAR writes:

Games in Action are hosting a non-Bungie Team SWAT tournament in four weeks time over Xbox Live.  Teams of four will battle out against each other for a chance to win cash prizes from GiA, not Bungie.  If you are interested then read on.

In light of the release of the brand new playlist Team SWAT and its immense popularity Games in Action has decided to host a Team SWAT tournament, which is scheduled to begin in four weeks time.  The tournament will consist of teams of four players, battling it out with other teams in an attempt to get to the finals.  The games will be played using Team SWAT classic rules and monitored to ensure no cheating.  Prizes will be awarded as follows:

1st Prize: $200
2nd Prize: $100
3rd and 4th Prize: $50

So if you are interested in taking part for a chance to win $200 and show everyone who the best is then simply go to Games In Action and sign up in the forums.  You will be able to read the full rules and more details on the tournament there.  Good luck!

[Shishka's note: This is NOT an official tournament. It is being held by the Seventh Column group Games in Action. If you wish to participate, you will need to join their group. You must join their group before you can participate on the forums.

Again; this is NOT an official tournament. Bungie is not responsible for difficulties with the tournament or details. Contact Games in Action if you need more information.]

Over at MLGpro.com, Trunkers has taken a look at the upcoming MLG event in Anaheim. The article covers the up-and-comers in the pro scene, highlighting three teams in particular, as well as the possibility that we could be seeing some changes on the leaderboards in Anaheim.

MLG Anaheim takes place June 23-25, find out more on their event page.

Regular readers will be familiar with some of the stats I’ve excavated in the past from the murky depths of the terabyte-plus Halo 2 stats database: 3.33 billion player-games, half a billion unique games, the recent games-per-month graph. But today I offer you what is unquestionably the most Earth-shattering, momentous stat ever stated in the state of statdom: The Average Gamertag.

That’s right, about a year ago we were batting around ideas for stats to pull, and Multiplayer Design Lead Max Hoberman pondered what the average gamertag was (in more ways than one!) Today, after a full year of scientific analysis (or a year of doing other things followed by a few minutes tinkering with database queries) I am honored to inform you that the average gamertag in the Halo 2 stats database is:

xArKKAAaEX
 
How do I figure? First of all, these are "modal" averages, making use of the most-common values rather than in-between values, since seeing an A and a C doesn’t mean that B is most expected. The most common gamertag length is 10, so that’s what I used here. In each letter position, I found the frequency distribution of letters at that position, blended it halfway against the expected letter distribution in English to call out the statistically significant differences, and took the most heavily weighted resulting letter for that position. The average gamertag starts and ends with X -- no surprise there -- and after that starts with "Ark". Coincidence? I don’t know.

-Roger

Now with Clanmatch removed from the playlists, some clans are very frustrated and tossing their controllers against the walls. Although, as long as Bungie allows clans to represent their social network by letting players have a clan name there is still a way to do Clanmatches!

The Halo 2 clan member recruiting site, Clantacular.com, will remain a community for sponsoring custom clan tournaments and other clan related events to help clans keep their sense of community and identity. It may cause clans a little ease of mind to know there is still a place that is trying to give Halo clans a place of belonging that currently supports a nice community of clans already working together.

This summer we will sponsor custom clan slayer challenges and other clanmatch game variant challenges never seen before like clan swat challenge and more!

Register your clan or recruit new members and join the tournament!

http://clantacular.com

After just 24 hours online, the new playlist Team SWAT has already eclipsed Team Snipers as the second most popular matchmaking playlist, and is within a hair's breadth of beating Team Slayer, the most popular matchmaking playlist ever.

If you haven't tried team SWAT yet, you're doing yourself a disservice. it's fast and furious, and hardly spurious, so for the gaming curious, this is not injurious.