Crispy Gamer’s James Fudge pointed us to this news bit about a Bollywood movie that apparently revolves around a fictional designer of Halo 3. As CG says, the trailer mentioned in the article has no Halo content at all… so we’ll have to take their word for it. (A Google search turns up a bunch of synopses of the film – but again, no Halo mention.)(Louis Wu 14:33:20 UTC)

Earlier this week, Bungie’s Hao Chen was at SIGGRAPH, the technical computer graphics conference, as an instructor in the ‘Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games‘ class. ATI has posted the proceedings of the conference course notes for his work, ‘Lighting and Material of Halo 3’, on their Technical Publications page. (It’s currently second from the top in the ‘Siggraph 2008’ section – just search the page for ‘Bungie’.) The 22 page PDF is very, very heavy on math – but if you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s gold. (It’s much, much, MUCH more technical than the presentation with the same name on Bungie’s Publications page.) Almost makes me miss graduate school…(Louis Wu 10:18:48 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy has posted What If, Halo Style: Round 3 over on her site. There are results from last week’s question (a ridiculous number of people want Blood Gulch back), plus a new question, asking you about armor permutations. Go read and comment!(Louis Wu 10:15:16 UTC)

Weta has put the final silver Halo statue on eBay – the gorgeous Halo 3 Cortana jumped to $1,275 in the first six hours of its listing. (Reserve has not been met yet.) As with previous auctions, you can get a high-res look at the workmanship on our gallery page – and if you check the Weta eBay Store, you’ll see all four auctions at a glance. Master Chief and Grunts will be the first to end, Sunday night just before midnight Eastern. Cortana has nine plus days to go…(Louis Wu 10:03:28 UTC)

SonofMacPhisto beat TTL Demag0gue in announcing Reclaimer 77 – Reticent Mystery and the Reclaimer have begun to become one. Things are gettin’ funky!(Louis Wu 09:46:43 UTC)

There’s a fascinating inside view at the development of the Halo 3 Believe diorama, as told by the ad agency that put it all together, over at Shoot Online. They couldn’t get art assets from Bungie, so they got them from McFarlane. They were able to repurpose scale models from Aliens to save some time in set building. They discovered that their Brutes had the wrong dimensions, necessitating a reconstruction of about 100 models. And on and on. With all that happened, it’s amazing how well the final product turned out!(Louis Wu 09:38:42 UTC)

Comic Book Resources has posted a review of Halo: Uprising #3 – it’s a bit kinder than most of the opinions we mentioned yesterday. (Louis Wu 09:30:38 UTC)

Just four new pieces this week in the Fan Fiction section – but there are some familiar names there…(Louis Wu 09:26:03 UTC)

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for Double XP Weekend to begin – this week, it’s Grifball. From now until Monday morning at 2 am PT, you can get your fill of hammers and bombs!(Louis Wu 18:18:51 UTC)

So, I’ve never heard of “Mighty Muggs” before, but apparently, they’re a style of action figure – and someone at Etsy is painting custom versions, including a Master Chief. Thanks to GadgetHeat for the heads-up.(Louis Wu 16:59:56 UTC)

If you live in Vancouver, BC, you’ve got a chance to play Halo on the big screen, whenever you want. Apparently, Cineplex Entertainment is going to be offering two-hour blocks of time in their theaters, outside of normal movie viewing showtimes, when a full surround-sound theater can be rented for $179. Get 16 friends together, that’s less than $11/person, for two hours of giganto-screen Halo 3 goodness. (Louis Wu 13:29:34 UTC)

Not really Halo-related, but a boon for Bungie fans – HaLo2FrEeEk has put together a Bungie Webcam image archiver and will be offering the images at some point in the future. If you have suggestions for new functionality, let him know!(Louis Wu 13:28:24 UTC)

Dragoncoals pointed out a video on YouTube promoting a Bungie.net Group that wants weapon-lowering to be enabled in Halo 3 on Xbox LIVE (currently, you can only do it offline). While I believe that the goal is not one that can be accomplished by this sort of lobbying, the demonstration in this video (the same short machinima story, shown with and without weapon-lowering) is well-done. Bungie’s done their own thinking about this issue, and my guess is that if the functionality hasn’t been added to AU2, coming next month, we’ll probably never see it – but it’s clear that Bungie thinks about machinimators. I don’t think a several-hundred-person boycott of Xbox LIVE gameplay is going to make the point that a year’s worth of lobbying has failed to make. However, if you disagree, you should watch the video, join the group, and add your voice to the cause!(Louis Wu 13:27:10 UTC)

IGN wrote up a short review of Halo: Uprising #3, released nationwide yesterday. They weren’t impressed. (You can get some other reviews right on our own forum – Neloms was the first, but there are comments throughout the thread.) (Louis Wu 13:20:21 UTC)

Bungie has released REAL versions of both the G-Phoria acceptance speech vid and the Edge acceptance speech vid – up to 720p versions. What are you waiting for?(Louis Wu 23:59:06 UTC)