Most people long since acceded that Halo 3 would sell well, and it has. The big question for the platform, though, was whether it could move consoles; whether it could take back some of the ground gained by the Nintendo Wii since it launched last year, as well as ensure they’d stay ahead of Sony’s lackluster PlayStation 3.

Early indications are that the answer to that might be “yes”.

Spong is reporting that Chart-Track, a market statistics aggregator, says that during Halo 3’s launch week Xbox 360 sales doubled compared to the previous week. Even more unexpected, Halo 3 topped the Japanese software charts, which perhaps goes to show that there’s nothing out there for the Wii that people don’t already have, and just plain nothing out for the PS3 yet.

One of my favorite things about Podtacular is how it’s not just my community, it’s your community. It’s so cool how the community takes ownership of itself and puts together some great stuff, making friends along the way. Here are some perfect examples:

• Pod TV is putting out new episodes – You’ve seen the first grand slam Halo 3 show, and there’s plenty more in the hopper for Cryptoflix and the Pod TV team. They recently got a nice influx of talented help so they’ve got quite a team going.
• Halo News is on it’s way back! – Chevelle65 and the Halo News crew are working hard to bring back one of the most genuinely funny machinima series ever. The ones that assembled the Halo Voltron are coming back soon with a bang!
• Monthly Porridge is in the works… – You thought Quality Jeverage had retired his regular Podtacular comic? Think again! No seriously, think again.
• Podtacular Radio is returning! – DJ Painkilla05 is frantically spinning his wheels of steel to bring us more music to frag by.
• Podtacular Review Frenzy – Killazilla and the review crew are ready to provide you with a full and complete review and all of the insights for all the brand new and upcoming games to hit shelves this year.

Yes, new life has been breathed into the old favorites. But it doesn’t have to end there. You can start your own project and work together with the Podtacular community! If you have an idea, share it in a thread on the forums and see if people like it and will help. Then get crackalackin’! I look forward to seeing what you come up with. You could also contact the leaders of Pod TV or Halo News and see if they’re looking for any help, I’m sure they’d appreciate the offer. Let the community projects return and begin!

DevinOlsen, goatrope, jayWHY, and EA demonstrate that with the right settings it’s possible to get through any soft elastic barrier on Halo 3 in the latest in the Trickity Trick series.

The Zero Punctuation videoblog at The Escapist proves that it’s much easier to be funny when criticizing something than praising it, and their review of Halo 3 is indeed funny. I just can’t figure out if it’s funny for the sake of it, or whether the reviewer honestly dislikes the game as much as the review says and being funny is just a byproduct of that.

However, all I can think of watching the recycled criticisms (the game is short, the story is incomprehensible) is that I don’t see the basis for them. At all. Estimates of game length are all over the board, from 8 to 20 hours. And yet all of these are called “short”. Compared to what? Oblivion? Are all games supposed to deliver the same number of hours of play for a single price point? Is it fair to hold Halo 3 to that standard while saying “I don’t give a flying blam about multiplayer”?

Would this stuff be deemed funny if someone lampooned the plot of The Return of the King from the perspective of someone who had neither read nor seen The Fellowship of the Ring or the Two Towers and therefore didn’t know anything about these wacky short people called Grunts Hobbits and this all-powerful Halo Ring everybody is on about?

 Click here for the complete text.

Back in August, before Halo 3 went gold, OXM senior editor Andrew McCaffrey got to visit Bungie and play Halo:

We were fortunate enough to actually make it past the locked doors and get to step inside the heart of Bungie’s newsroom-style studio on Day 2, being taken up into the “loft” area where Frank and the Bungie.net team sits, so we could be given a walkthrough of the redesigned website features and how they interact with Halo(R) 3. It was a quiet and focused environment, despite the fact that many on the team were on vacation, and the game was 99.9% done.

For the complete story see Xbox.com.

Version 1 of MLG’s official gametypes and settings for Halo 3 are now available for download and playing on your very own Xbox 360. No word yet on whether or not every single weapon has been replaced by a Battle Rifle, or if Luke Smith has had an orgasm yet.

UPDATE: Yes, the primary weapon for all gametypes is the Battle Rifle. Way to be consistent, guys. Still no update on that other thing.

Saved Films is a great feature. It lets anybody who has Halo 3 and an Xbox Live account share game films with each other. It’ll be great for documenting tricks, speedruns, the works.

However, it can’t do everything. It’s not a video editing suite; you can’t add effects or music, and you need to have Halo 3 running on an Xbox 360 to play these films back. So there’s still a need, sometimes, for an actual video file.

Don’t have a capture card? No problem. Steve Chamblin at YourHalo3Vids.com says he’ll take your Saved Films and convert them into video files. Just keep it ten minutes or less.

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

Editor’s Note: Here’s betting this guy gets completely overwhelmed with requests in short order.

Inside Pulse reviews Halo 3, and in the process, invents more subcategories to assign ratings to than I could possibly imagine would be relevant or useful, including truly subjective things like Appeal, Originality and Miscellaneous. As the kids say, whatever. They liked the game:

It’s Halo 3. It fixed everything that was wrong with Halo 2, which was in its own right pretty damned stellar. I’m a little sad to see it go, but I know there will be more. Microsoft isn’t stupid. Having said that though, the fight has been finished. For now.

Hard to disagree with that unless you try real hard. After all the dust settles, Halo 3 gets a solid 8 from Inside Pulse. Must be the new math.

Journalist Dean Takahashi is having a lot of fun, not just playing Halo 3, but utilizing the new features, like saved films and screenshots. He asks readers to write in with their experiences playing Halo 3.

Wired takes a look at the psuedoscience of Halo weaponry and gadgetry, including the Spartan Laser and the Bubble Shield:

Some of the equipment came about through happy accident. One of the most popular new tools — the “bubble shield,” a pocket of temporary protection from weapons — nearly didn’t make it into the game. Bungie’s designers had been bandying it about as a concept, but didn’t fully commit to developing it for the game until it was featured in a TV advertisement last December. The ad showed the Master Chief throwing down a bubble shield — with its distinctive, honeycombed shape — to survive a missile attack.

Almost sounds as if the existence of the advertisement itself swayed Bungie into actually developing the bubble shield as a deployable!

This is the most definitive link I can find for what is so far a non-story story about Microsoft somehow letting Bungie become independent again.

The official Microsoft response to reports in Jacob Metcalf‘s blog that allege Bungie is leaving Microsoft was:

There’s been no such announcement.

That’s the kind of non-denial denial you’d expect from a company that is the subject of so many non-story stories.

Todd Bishop, on his Seattle Intelligencer blog, gets Robbie Bach at Microsoft to comment on that non-denial denial, and ends up getting an explanation of why the non-denial denial exists:

“The problem is, I can’t comment one way or another on any of these rumors. Because then, every time you ask me a question about a rumor, I have to comment definitively, and there’s times when I don’t want to, and times when I do want to. I just don’t. You should interpret it that way. You should interpret it as a neutral ‘don’t.’ “

All in all, it seems very likely that people in Bungie might want to, you know, work on a game that isn’t Halo, or isn’t a shooter, or, God forbid, isn’t a Halo shooter. Farming out Halo Wars to Ensemble and Halo Chronicles to Wingnut seemed to me like Microsoft setting up the Halo franchise to continue while Bungie moved on to other things; but perhaps it was just a move to try and maximize the revenue from the Halo property by developing ancillary products with a series of Halo shooters at the center, developed by Bungie.

 Click here for the complete text.

Frankie says that if you post a question relating to Halo 3 in this thread, they’ll try to provide answers in the next Weekly Update.

Bungie.net has a guide on how to use the gold skulls in Halo 3 to change your play experience.

Amazing how people always choose last year’s blockbuster Xbox 360 shooter, Gears of War, when they want to suggest that Halo 3’s visuals are weak. Because Mark Rein, the guy who runs Epic Games, developers of Gears, likes Halo 3 just fine even if it doesn’t have the flashiest effects:

Speaking about the enduring appeal of the entire Halo series, Rein states: “I don’t look at Halo and go, ‘That’s the greatest graphics’. I don’t look at Halo and go, ‘Wow those are the coolest enemies ever’. I look at Halo and go ‘They nailed it’. This game is so fun to play, everything works just right.”

Fun more important than graphics? Who knew?

Think Gabe is having trouble finding skulls? Yeah. Could be.

At HaloWars.com there’s a new monthly update about Halo Wars, written by Thunder. It’s mostly about the game’s AI:

Ultimately, the philosophy that we’ve had at Ensemble Studios is that the most fun games are when you think you might lose but don’t. The CPAI should attempt to provide the player with this challenge in each game. We want to set the difficulty levels to where most players will find a challenge, but there will be a level that can beat them if they start making mistakes.

Check out the update in the Halo Wars forum.

With the release of Halo 3, players will not only see the return of the staples of past Halo games, but also see some new rides that have their own set of strengths and weaknesses, and all with more details and versatility than ever before. Let’s take a look.

Mongoose M274 Mongoose ULATV

Being the smallest of all the vehicles in the game, the Mongoose has a lot to live up to and very little to do it with, but in the heat of action, this two-passenger ATV has speed and agility on its side. Easy to maneuver and fast enough to outrun other vehicles, the Mongoose serves as the best method of quick troop movement and speedy extraction from enemies. The Mongoose only sees limited use in campaign, but in multiplayer, it shines in gametypes like Assault and CTF, where a two man force can quickly get to the opposing team’s base and get the job done with little hassle.

The trade-off? Don’t get in the way of any heavy weaponry or you’ll be toast. Anyone carrying weapons like the Rocket Launcher, Spartan Laser, Brute Shot, turrets, and even sniper rifles will have no problem picking off a Mongoose. That and it carries no on-board weapons, so you’ll need to bring your own if you expect to run into trouble, and above all else, it’s best to stay low, stay fast and keep moving with this little guy.

Ghost

A long time favorite for noobin’ it up on the playing field, the Ghost still retains most of its strengths as a durable, highly maneuverable vehicle that can dish out a real beating. Not much has really changed about the Ghost itself, so if you’ve mastered it as part of your repertoire, you’re going to get more of the same.

What has changed in Halo 3 is the countermeasures that other players have been given to combat it. With the introduction of equipment, the Power Drainer, Trip Mine, Flare and even the Portable Grav Lift can pose trouble for anyone looking to rack up easy kills on a Ghost, not to mention the possibility of getting hit with the Red Laser of Death. This is a big change in the balance of the game, and while the Ghost remains an effective vehicle, it’s also now susceptible to new vulnerabilities.

Warthog – M12 LRV, M12G1, M12 APC

Ah, the trusty ‘Hog. It’s served many a Spartan well over the last several years in Halo and Halo 2. Still as rugged and nimble as ever, the Warthog is the standard vehicle of choice for moving through an area while also providing a steady dose of heavy firepower for cover. With the standard M12 and M12G1 “Guass ‘Hog”, a new variant, the M12 Warthog APC troop transport, makes its appearance in Halo 3.

Overall, the Warthog hasn’t changed much from its original Halo design. It’s still a tough customer when rolling out on a mission, but with new vehicles like the Mongoose and Hornet, it’s been my experience that the Warthog has become more of a standby transport, as players are taking to the field with the newer vehicles.

Chopper

As menacing as the Brutes themselves, the Brute Chopper shows little remorse for anything that gets in its way. It is a formidable beast to encounter on the battlefield if you’re on foot (or even in other light vehicles, for that matter). While it’s not as fast or maneuverable as other vehicles (in fact, it can be a pain sometimes if you get turned around), it makes up for it in sheer strength and durability. In most cases, simply ramming another vehicle is enough to take it out, and racking up splatter kills is a breeze, assuming you’re good enough to dodge all sorts of fire that will be most definitely coming your way.

Prowler

An obvious cousin to the Brute Chopper, the Prowler has a feature set all of its own, including a heavy plasma turret near the front and the ability to carry three passengers. Probably the closest equivalent of any other vehicle is the Warthog, considering the capacity and weaponry on board. Something to keep in mind, however, is that the Prowler doesn’t so much roll on wheels as it does slide across the ground. It can make for some troublesome handling, but if you’re in wide open spaces, you should have no problem.

Hornet

In campaign, the Hornet gets an especially extravagant introduction, and this vehicle certainly lives up to its potential. A three-passenger flying vehicle, the Hornet is capable of carrying a pilot in the cockpit and two players on each skid. And with dual rocket launchers on-board, the Hornet makes easy work of targets on the ground. While it’s highly effective at moving players across a map in relative safety, it’s still vulnerable to heavy weapons and with passengers fully exposed, even snipers. And going up against a Banshee can be a risky proposition, considering that the Hornet has none of the aerobatic tricks up its sleeve.

Banshee

The one vehicle that you’ll encounter immediately in campaign as you’re taking your Hornet for a spin is the Banshee. While it doesn’t seem as big of a threat in campaign as it was in the past games, should you manage to snag one from the Covvies, it’s still a useful tool. In multiplayer, the Banshee excels once again as a prime nuisance to anyone on the ground, as it now returns with the built-in Fuel Rod Cannon, in addition to the two plasma guns.

For some players, the Banshee is the vehicle of choice to take flight and lay down covering fire, while also being extremely agile and tough to knock out of the sky. Unfortunately, with new weapons like the Spartan Laser and turrets, as well as the new limitations on how far down the nose can point, in the hands of an inexperienced pilot, the Banshee is now a sitting duck.

Wraith

There aren’t many instances in Halo 3’s campaign when you’ll need to pilot a Wraith, but it still poses a threat as the Brutes bombard you with plasma throughout the game. And while you’ll probably get more use out of it in multiplayer, the Wraith has been given a facelift and even some performance enhancements for making killy-kill on your enemies.

The new Wraith also has a manned turret, which allows a second player to board the vehicle and lay down covering fire. It’s also been made a bit speedier overall. It’s still a lumbering giant, but the boost seems to have cranked up a bit and the main cannon also seems to be a little easier to handle and level at close-by targets.

Scorpion

Arguably the most powerful vehicle in any Halo game, the Scorpion also returns in Halo 3, but with some subtle changes. Gone is the secondary-fire machine gun turret, and performance and speed are adjusted up just a notch, presumably to help players make their way around maps like Sandtrap a bit easier. Like the Wraith, the Scorpion now comes with a manned turret, but beware of snipers when you jump in that seat .

While these changes seem unnecessary at first, they significantly affect how players use the Scorpion during the game, even in campaign. In a co-op game, no longer does one player have to simply sit on the side of the tank and take all the punishment, while the other mows down everything in sight. And in multiplayer, it’s seems clear that Bungie wanted to Scorpion to become more of a tool for team movement and cover, rather than a single player’s fantasy.