If I was apprehensive about anything in Halo 3, it was the Flood.

Halo 1 has reached a certain legendary status amongst fans, but even it has a sore spot for many: the Library, where you navigate endless repeating dark corridors with endless hordes only four enemies to fight: Human Flood combat forms, Elite Flood combat forms, Carrier forms and Infection forms. The level goes on a floor or two longer than it really has to, and only has a few tricks up its sleeve to make it seem fresh.

If Halo is built on a foundation of “thirty seconds of fun” then the Library was built on six helpings of five seconds of fun: shotgun a Flood form in the face, run away, repeat.

Of course, other Flood missions fared much better; they had better unit mixes, more varied terrain and encounters, as well as vehicles. 343 Guilty Spark had atmosphere oozing out of every pore as the Flood gave you the first real scare of the game. Two Betrayals gave you the dark side of Assault on the Control Room as Flood, Covenant and Sentinels took aim at each other and you while you tried to stop Halo from firing.

The Maw mixed it up by varing your objectives a bit, and by allowing you the chance to watch some interesting fights play out. The Flood themselves, though, were interesting to look at, but not so much interact with. When they didn’t see you, they gurgled. When they did see you, they charged straight at you, firing whatever they had. If you had superior firepower and room to maneuver, it was no problem. If you had only one of those, or neither, you’d be in a world of hurt, not because the Flood outsmarted you, but because they overwhelmed you with numbers and clogged up your travel lanes with dead bodies. Or even dead Grifs.

Halo 2 added a significant twist to the Flood, but the game could only get so much mileage out of it. Instead of merely giggling with glee as you set off cascading explosions of popcorn Infection Flood, this time around the little devils scurried around more unpredictably, and raised dead Flood from the battlefield to face you once more if you didn’t dismember them with a sword or blow them up with a grenade.

Once so raised, though, they were still the same old Flood. Four flavors, and one tactic.

How, then, would Halo 3 handle the Flood? More of the same?

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What’s up everyone!

It’s now time to get your BR’s and Carbines out and get your team of 4 ready because on October 13th at 6:00PM EST Podtacular will proudly bring to you the first Online 4 Players Co-Op Halo 3 Tourney around.

In this touryney teams will compete against one another for the maximum score on 3 maps played on the Mythic dificult (Legendary with Mythic Skull activated). We will use the META scoring system to gather the points and see who can score more points on the 3 maps within the time limit given to all teams.

So what are you waiting for?! If you’re not registered at podtacular yet go ahead, register and check out our forums for all the info you need regarding this great tourney.

Click HERE for rules and FAQs.

See you on the flipside!

Shishka saved Bungie from humiliating defeat in the first post-launch Halo 3 Humpday, as the boys from Kirkland waded into Social Slayer and got socially slayed.

Check Bungie.net for the full writeup as well as links to the Saved Films; this is the first time we’ll be able not just to read about the humpday, or pore over the statistics, but actually see the matches themselves. No more lying embellishment!

Brian Szabelski at Blogcritics.org gives a thumbs up to Halo 3:

Halo 3 is just about everything we’ve been led to think it would be. It falls short in some areas of campaign, where things seem like the generic FPS cliché of “here’s a room full of bad guys, kill ’em!”, but it absolutely shines in multiplayer modes. And guess what? The game’s difficulties aren’t just cosmetic changes like in some other titles – it’s insane on Legendary, but you’re rewarded more for it. No 360 owner’s collection is complete without this title.

Check out the complete review for his list of pros and cons.

Creativity Online interviews film director Neill Blomkamp about the promotional shorts he did for Halo 3, and in the process, finds out that the Halo movie project is a lot more dead than most fans think, and that the shorts were entirely separate, and not part of an attempt to lure Hollywood back into the project:

There’s such a massive misconception about what those are. In essence, those pieces have zero to do with the film. Like less than zero. I worked on the film for a few months and we developed a lot of things during that time, and none of that has anything to do with the shorts. Long, long long after the film died, Bungie and Microsoft asked me if I wanted to be involved in the Halo 3 promotional stuff, just because I knew all of the guys at Bungie, and I was like Yeah, sure, that sounds like fun. I went about starting to make those three pieces back with a lot of the guys from Weta who had made the original film. All of the design and everything that we’d made for the film is just locked up in some locker somewhere, so all of the stuff for the shorts is specifically for the short films, from scratch.

Thanks for the heads-up on this story to Louis Wu at HBO.

The Bungie Store has got the blue filter you can use with Halo 3’s video calibrator in stock now. For a limited time, it’s free with any other order!

Halo 3 zoomed from its first day US sales of $170 million to a first week total of $300 million, according to GamesIndustry.biz. It was also heavily played on Xbox Live, garnering the top spot:

Microsoft stats reveal that more than 2.7 million people have played Halo 3 over Xbox Live in the past week, with the first day of release seeing a total of 3.6 million hours of online play, increasing to 40 million hours by the end of the first week.

Yowza. There are no unit sales figures yet, but if the average price of Halo 3 was, say, $90, to account for a distribution of Standard, Limited, and Legendary editions, that’s 3.3 million copies. If there are fewer Legendary editions than Standard and Limited, then that number goes even higher.