Cinema Blend Games has a series of pieces by Steve West they’re calling their Halo 3 Primer. It covers:

• Multiplayer
• UNSC weapons
• Covenant weapons
• Equipment
• UNSC vehicles
• Covenant vehicles
• Characters
• Story
• Community
• Editions/Accessories

A lot of information there– most of it not new, but it’s nice to have it all in one place.

Jason “Gravemind” Goodman (also known as ShadowoftheVoid) has written up part one in a series on the history of medium-range weapons in the Halo series, this one focusing on the recent nerf of the Covenant Carbine between the Halo 3 beta and now.

TrackZero at Evil Avatar got to see a closed-door demonstration of two campaign levels from Halo 3. His verdict? It’s a keeper if you like Halo, at least a rental if you don’t.

It takes all the best of the series and kicks it up a notch. I never encountered any issues during gameplay at all to speak of. The single player campaign missions that I saw merely came off as a tease, as I wanted to grab the controller and play the whole time. The multiplayer is a large improvement over Halo 2 (which I wasn’t a fan of) and hits a great balance that’s sure to please people.

Read the full post for more details about Halo 3, as well as impressions of several other games.

Kotaku has the story that says that eighty-eight Best Buy locations have been chosen to open at midnight to sell Halo 3 on September 25. See Kotaku for the full story or click the thumbnail on the left for the complete list.

New look? Hang in there. We’re working on the layout for the website. We’ve kept the website online so that you can still use it. Expect the website to look different in the short while ahead.

Trust us. On the backend we’ve done a lot of work.

In yet another example of Halo becoming so cool that the only way to make yourself look cooler in comparison is to dump on it, Steve Tilly at the Edmonton Sun drops this pearl of wisdom: Halo 2 is the #4 most overhyped game ever, just ahead of Daikatana:

One of my biggest regrets as a so-called professional game reviewer is giving Halo 2 a five-star review in 2004. But journalists are human too, and like so many others I got caught up in the tornado of hype surrounding Master Chief’s triumphant return to the Xbox.

First– you gotta be kidding me. More overhyped than Daikatana? Halo 2 was more overhyped than a game Romero advertised by promising to make fans “his bitch” and in the end delivered only schizophrenic level design, robotic frogs, and a helpless, stereotypical sidekick? More over-hyped than that?

Secondly, you should stand by what you write. If you’d predicted Halo 2 would be the best game ever before you played it and then got a chance to admit you were wrong later, that’s one thing. Admitting that you got “caught up” in the hype and gave a game a rank it didn’t deserve is something else entirely. It’s just as likely that right now you’re caught up in a backlash against Halo. How can anyone tell?

Call them like you see them– and stick by what you’ve said. All else is pretense.

Thanks to chewpathingy for the heads-up in the HBO forum.

This has to be one of the strangest Halo tie-ins. Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in Las Vegas, Nevada has added a wax statue of its first videogame hero: Master Chief from Halo.

You really sort of want to know whose idea this was, and then who thought it was a good enough idea to actually do it.

Kotaku is as good a place to get the story as any; they’ve posted the entire official press release.

UPDATE: Joystiq has some more details, including a picture from the unveiling.

Whagi in the Xbox Live Forums warns that US and UK subscribers to Xbox Live may be targets of a phishing attempt. An email arrives that claims to require you to login to XBL due to changes to your account, but the links in the message go to a fake XBL login page that allows the perpetrators to record your username and password.

Check the forum post for full details and don’t fall for it.