Just had to talk a bit about Halo 2. The good news and the bad news. Of course like any good samaritan, I'll start with the bad news and wrap it up with some good news:

Bad News:
- Release of the game was delayed AGAIN this time 2 months later than was previously announced. The official day is now Nov 9th.
- With the new release date, it just happens to fall right in the period where mid terms start and lead into finals for the first semester.
- Some mofos already got to try the beta test of the game, so there will be that many more geeks who can kick our asses at the game.


Good News:
- Xbox Live compatible of course including large scale wars b/w covenant and the humans as well as real time voice communication (so you can listen to more of that joyous southerner accent everyone just loves..)
- The Master Chief is now able to wield an energy sword which was previously used in the first game by the cpu to kill you over and over again until you've gone insane.
- I'll just let this quote finish up this section really nice:

"Halo 2 is a lot like Halo 1, only it's Halo 1 on fire, going 130 miles per hour through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas, and the ninjas are all on fire, too." - Jason Jones, Bungie Studios head.

Our code squeezes every drop of power out of the Xbox. We're doing dynamic lighting and shadows, per-pixel everything, rendering gigantic, lush environments. The graphical features we're using are so advanced we don't even have buzzwords for them yet." - Chris Butcher, one of the sequel's engineering leads.

With all of that said, Halo 2 should be one sweet game. And hopefully this picture will work.