Author: halo@bungie.org

September numbers are expected to be announced today – but there are plenty of people already predicting what they’ll say. Next-Gen has an article which quotes Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter as predicting that the Xbox 360 numbers for the month of September will be around 450,000, beating out the Wii, and due in large…

Play N Trade stores will be hosting a Halo 3 tournament in most of their stores through the US, with national winners competing for thousands in in-store credit and Halo merch. You can read all the details in the press release, over at BusinessWire. Tournament rules are on Play N Trade’s website.(Louis Wu 12:03:15 UTC)

I woke up to a mailbox full of older Google News Alerts – a few dozen messages from Saturday through Tuesday, that all came in together. Much of the news they contained has already been mentioned, but here’s a roundup of the interesting tidbits we hadn’t gotten to: MSNBC.com has an article about how Halo…

Wow. I’m as disturbed by the fallacies presented by last week’s The Morning Show as GamePolitics is. Someone needs to open a dialogue like this when there HASN’T been a school shooting in the past few days; we need people to be thinking rationally when they’re making decisions on concepts like this. Thanks, GryphonOsiris.(Louis Wu…

Sh0rtBusKid found an interesting picture at DeviantArt – it’s generated a lot of discussion on our forum, but I’m not sure everyone’s seeing the same message. What do you see?(Louis Wu 21:24:24 UTC)

Kevin Graham is one of the artists tapped by Topps to create sketch cards that have been inserted into their Halo card packs. Kevin wanted to share his work with the Halo community – so we’ve put up a page containing almost 3 dozen sketch card images. Check ’em out – they’re beautiful!(Louis Wu 20:43:41…

AnTi PRO let us know that ArmTheFlag.com is in the process of creating the first episode of a Halo 3 machinima project titled ‘ Oregon Trail: Pioneering Evolved’. They released a trailer a month ago, using the Halo 2 engine… but didn’t want to spread the news too widely until the Halo 3-based first episode…

Rampancy.net has posted another installment of their Halo 3 Weapons Guide – this one looks at the Carbine. (Louis Wu 13:46:03 UTC)

deadox is kicking off a new blog, showing off motivational posters made from Halo 3 shots. He’s looking for your input.(Louis Wu 13:21:42 UTC)

Interesting – 1Up’s review of Super Mario Galaxy (coming out for the Wii next month) draws parallels between this platformer and Halo 3 – in a good way. Interesting read! Thanks to Gravemind for the heads-up.(Louis Wu 13:18:31 UTC)

Tied the Leader has a writeup of their farewell to Halo 2, a LAN they held this summer in Chicago. Great pics, great words. Go read! (The summary by XerxdeeJ is just the tip of the iceberg; there’s a whole raft of content linked from the blog story.) We’re indebted, as always, to deeJ for…

reprobate gives praise to Final Boss, who went undefeated through their final Halo 2 tournament – MLG’s final Halo 2 tournament, to be more general – and swept their biggest rivals, Carbon, 6-0 in the final match. What a way to end an era!(Louis Wu 05:02:21 UTC)

There’s a great article in the New Zealand Herald, looking at Chris Butcher, an Engineering Lead on Halo 3, and how he got to where he is today. Seems he was pretty sharp from the get-go… he got his Bungie start with Marathon, and never looked back. (He contributed to the fan communities of Marathon…

EnergyPigeon let us know that KidConfidence rated Halo 3 an 8.5/10 – they suggest that although it’s an M-rated game, it’s actually “at the lower end of the ‘M’ scale” and should be fine for many children. (They recommend limiting online play to friends and family if your kids are under 12.) Interesting writeup for…

Z let us know about The Splatter Tage, a Halo 2 montage of (yeah, you guessed it) splatter kills. It was put together by the Fighting Wombats, and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch. (I could have done without the blurry stuff from Ascension – that gave me a headache – but for…

Both Red_Breast and Black Six noticed that Amazon was offering the Legendary Edition of Halo 3 for $110 yesterday – apologies for not getting the news to you sooner. However, its not such a bad thing; Black Six pointed out a news post at gamerawr! that also had a listing for a site selling it…

TrueDarkFusion wrote to us about Forge Hub, a new site designed to give you a central location to learn about and download high-quality Forged maps. There are a few already on the page, with many more to come – and they’re looking for people interested in helping out. Go download, and build some fun!(Louis Wu…

PEZ is looking for help from the HBO community. The Medals Talk page at halowiki.net has a question from bark0de – “Has anyone seen anybody that has earned the second Bungie.net-only medal? The first one is Perfection, the second one I’ve never seen, the third is the Steaktacular, and the fourth only appears if you…

DunnyPanMan pointed out ‘Face It’, a song commissioned by Xbox Australia (it’ll be used in future marketing) and performed by Phrase, a notable name in the Australian hip-hop scene. News about the piece is at Xbox Australia’s website, the song itself can be heard (and watched) at a special Halo 3-themed site set up for…

kapowaz has started collecting Halo 3 screenshots on Flickr – he feels that the sorting and tagging system there (not to mention the unlimited storage space) makes it a better choice for sharing these. He’s looking for help in both tagging his shots, and growing the corpus of Halo 3 shots overall; join him!(Louis Wu…