urk posted a bunch of movies for your watching pleasure (if, you know, you’re not burned out on X hours of ODST footage):

• Watch for Falling Crates is a tiny gameplay clip showing off a funny Matchmaking moment
• TM22 created ‘Orima’, a Halo 3 Campaign montage – gorgeous
• Kampy built ‘Apex’, a 10 minute multiplayer montage – lots of multikills.
• BlackLightProductions released Phil – Day Nine: “Morals”. Some people take Matchmaking far, far too seriously. (Fun fourth-wall breaking, though.)

A fine way to spend a chunk of time…(Louis Wu 18:22:01 UTC)

pete_the_duck put together an overhead map of New Mombasa by combining pieces of ODST HUD – he’s speculating that this might not be the final map, due to the surprisingly symmetric nature of the composite, but hey, you never know! Interesting display of fan love in any case!(Louis Wu 18:21:12 UTC)

Fragclone found pictures of the McFarlane Rookie prototype on the Spawn.com website. Cool beans! (It drops in October, a little later than the game.)(Louis Wu 18:20:42 UTC)

xoools pointed out that during IGN’s half-hour ODST special, Joe Staten confirmed that Heretic, one of the three new Mythic maps to be released with Halo 3: ODST this fall, is indeed a remake of Halo 2’s Midship. Due to some leaks in the past year, many people had already guessed that this was the case… but this is the first time that a Bungie employee has confirmed this publicly. Nice!(Louis Wu 18:19:58 UTC)

mendicantbias00 found some info at Gamestop that suggests that the Limited Edition Halo 3: ODST package (the one with the special controller) will be available exclusively from them. If we find that this is not accurate, we’ll let you know!(Louis Wu 18:19:25 UTC)

Bryan Simon let us know that voting for his Mythic Song Challenge is now open for voting – go watch the explanation video, then swing by Bryan’s blog to watch the finalists and cast your vote!(Louis Wu 18:18:16 UTC)

Last week, we mentioned The Halo Gophers’ Forge contest – they’ve posted the results on their front page. Thanks, DE4TH DEAL3R.(Louis Wu 18:17:52 UTC)

UGO has posted a review of the Halo: Uprising Hardcover release – interesting timing!(Louis Wu 18:17:23 UTC)

With a smaller staff than most groups at E3, it’s difficult keeping up with the flood of ODST data, but we’ll try to do a roundup now. There are hands-on/previews from:

• CraveOnline
• IGN (including demo footage)
• Eurogamer
• Joystiq
• Kotaku (more a clarification of Firefight)
• Gamespy (including video footage)
• Game Stooge
• IGN (Firefight playthrough)
• Gamespot’s Stage Demo (video)

In addition, there are three more clips at Gamespot, including the entire first cutscene (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3) – thanks, urk – and Gamespy has something they call Spy Libs, with fill-in-the-blanks answers about ODST from Bungie and Gamespy employees. I’m sure there’ll be more as the day goes on – it remains to be seen if we’ll be able to find a place to update from.(Louis Wu 17:11:35 UTC)