I spent yesterday evening at the birthday party of Miguel “Ding” Chavez’s oldest – and yes, it was a Halo party. We discovered that old and wily often beats young and fast… remember that.(Louis Wu 13:35:40 UTC)

3Suns let us know that the championship films from MLG Las Vegas, showing the Final Boss shutout of Carbon (among other matches) are now up in the Video on Demand section of MLGPro.com. Nice! (Louis Wu 13:31:07 UTC)

Hawty “if it’s on eBay, I’ll tell you about it” McBloggy found a Covenant Elite costume for sale on eBay – it’s made of hard plastics and latex, and fits folks between about 5’11” and 6’2″, and can be shipped by Halloween. Starting bid is $900, and you’ve got a day and a half to get your bid in. I don’t think I’ve seen one of these for sale before! (Louis Wu 13:27:49 UTC)

The Bungie Weekly Update is live – and it’s full of useful info. There’s stuff about the banhammer, the rank system, meleeing, a resolution issue that affects a small group of people, info about upcoming downloadable content, direct downloads of Halo: Landfall, and info about the Recon armor. You want goodies? You can’t HANDLE goodies! (Okay, maybe you can.) As always, if you need it, it’s up in the Weekly Update Archive, too.(Louis Wu 00:54:52 UTC)

Whoa. The Cyberathlete Professional League is hosting a Halo 3 tournament during the Extreme Winter Championships – with a purse of $1,000,000. First place gets a quarter of that, as an instant cash payout… the rest is split between at least 64 places. More details are at the announcement page on the CPL’s website, with registration opening on Monday at Halo3Competition.com. That’s some serious cash!(Louis Wu 18:26:13 UTC)

blackouTT let us know that ClazM49 found a pretty cool way to get rid of your weapon for filmmaking; it’s much easier than the built-in button combo. You can only do this in Forge – but that means all multiplayer maps are accessible. You need two people: first, spawn a missile pod. Then, time it so that one person picks up the pod at the same moment that the other person deletes it; the person picking up the pod will be left open-handed. Do not press ‘Y’, or you’ll lose the effect… and you can only do this as a Spartan, not an Elite. Coolness!(Louis Wu 18:19:04 UTC)

DigitalPh33r, the guy behind the ‘Master Chief Sucks at Halo’ series, started a new Halo 3 series called ‘Deus Ex Machina’, about a superhero involved in helping out the little guy. Major Silva found the first two episodes on YouTube (one | two), or you can download them from machinima.com. Pretty nice work!(Louis Wu 18:11:06 UTC)

Stuntmutt looks at an inadvertent (I hope) side effect of making all the online achievements available only in ranked FFA play in today’s One One Se7en. (Louis Wu 15:43:26 UTC)

Spectacular. The Neil Blomkamp pieces have been available only partially – and for only some of the world’s denizens – on Xbox Live Marketplace; as of today, that’s changed. You can download ‘Halo: Landfall’, a single 315 mb piece that’s been edited together from the three separate movies, from the Game Videos section of Xbox Live Marketplace – or directly from Halo 3 (hit the start button, then scroll down to ‘Marketplace’). It’s free. Thanks to Xboxtoday.com.br‘s Marcelo Vega for the heads-up!(Louis Wu 14:53:29 UTC)

gryphonosiris pointed out a site that’s selling ARTFX Kotobukiya statues for $85 (green variant only, apparently) – even when you tack on the $11 or so in shipping (it varies by destination), it’s still cheaper than buying it locally. (Then again – if you’re a Barnes and Noble member, it’s $90, with free shipping… so make sure you look around. )(Louis Wu 14:40:21 UTC)

pete_the_duck continues his experimentation for getting outside those pesky invisible barriers Bungie added to many levels (to keep you in the playing field). He’s come up with pretty innovative ways of getting outside of ANY campaign level – he gives specific instructions (and provides cool pictures) for The Storm and Floodgate. Check it out!(Louis Wu 14:27:18 UTC)

finalcuthalo has put together a script that will let you grab screenshots from Bungie.net’s RSS feeds. (He’s using the same open-source software, and doing the same thing sorahn did to create his haloscreenshots.net website – the difference is, he’s releasing instructions so that you can use it yourself without having to work out the details.)(Louis Wu 13:57:38 UTC)

So, yesterday, we let you know that High Speed Halo had kicked off a ‘Million Point Challenge’ – they were looking for campaign runs that added up to at least a million points. One of the first runs mentioned in the thread had over a quarter-million points in it, for The Ark; when it was suggested that a million points might be low, Cody Miller replied that only a few levels had the potential for REALLY high scores. Heh. At 8 am this morning (just over 17 hours from the point at which the challenge was announced), goatrope let us know that the challenge had been met – with only 6 levels. Anyone want to try for 2 million?(Louis Wu 13:41:41 UTC)

ZZoMBiE13 isn’t letting up on his comic submissions – Another Halo Comic Strip has yet another new funni for you today. This one contains Halo 3 story spoilers; don’t read it unless you’ve finished the game. If you HAVE finished the game, though… it’s pretty funny.(Louis Wu 13:25:10 UTC)

Earlier this week, we mentioned a guy who was creating stereoscopic screenshot from Halo 3. He recently added a tutorial so that you can make your own. And Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, did a little research so Mac users could play, too.(Louis Wu 13:22:52 UTC)

Advanced Media Network is giving away a copy of the Halo 3 Legendary Edition to the person who submits the longest list of entertainment-related websites. (Read the contest page for more complete details.) You’ve got until November 1 to enter. Heh – $130 seems cheap for this sort of datamining…(Louis Wu 13:20:16 UTC)

Z pointed out that Stats Reloaded has introduced a new feature – custom leaderboards. You can create your own leaderboard (sign up your clan, for example, or your website community) – and your own scoring method. To show you an example, he pointed out a custom leaderboard someone’s created, which contains (scroll down a little) the algorithm used to calculate positions. It’s interesting to see how the position within this leaderboard compares to the overall SR leaderboard position (shown in the last column). Go try it out! (Louis Wu 13:16:09 UTC)

I find this more interesting more for how rumors get started than for the actual news… but let’s break it down: Gaming Target noticed a two-sentence comment in December’s EGM that contains, on its surface, some basic info about a new game coming out of Microsoft in the near-to-middlin’ future, along with some speculation about which studio might be involved. They expanded the speculation considerably by suggesting that Peter Jackson might be involved, and that the whole thing might be Halo-based. Xbox 360 Fanboy picked up on this – they counsel caution, but still, the rumor chain grows. By the time the story makes it over to 2old2play, the focus has shifted from the fact that it’s a Microsoft-driven MMO to “The latest rumor surrounding the unrevealed Peter Jackson game is that it will be an MMOFPS.” How did this become about the Peter Jackson game? That was pure speculation on the part of the first reporting site! Thanks to Wires, who found it at 2o2p. (If we learn anything that definitively ties the EGM rumor to Halo, we’ll certainly let you know.)(Louis Wu 13:05:40 UTC)