It has begun.

Hushed Casket members are beginning to get their sweaty hands on copies of the most hyped game of all time. At the moment, Bungie does not have any multi-player playlists online. Therefore, you can’t play MP with others unless you’ve got gamers on your list that also have the game. Other than that, the game seems pretty complete. Several of us have already bought Bungie Pro accounts and have been unlocking achievements.

TeamXbox has the story of Montreal animation studio damnfx, tapped by Bungie to help produce some of the in-engine cinematics of Halo 3.

“Having recently worked on two large format stereoscopic films for IMAX theatres, it was refreshing to focus simply on delivering outstanding animation, while letting Bungie’s Halo 3 game engine worry about lighting, rendering and compositing the shots!” said damnfx executive producer Peter Skovsbo.

damnfx’s work apparently applied to about 20 minutes of Halo 3’s cinematics; the game is purported to have less cinematic footage overrall compared to Halo 2, with more plot points being revealed during scripted events.

HBO notes that they received a strange image, apparently one of many. Fan project? Another prong of the Iris ARG, thought finished last month? Who knows.

Chris Martin at Games First writes that between glitchers, hackers, and eight-year-olds, he’ll be turning in his copy of Gears of War to pick up Halo 3 next week. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

IGN has put together a piece on the history of the Halo franchise; Louis Wu at HBO notes a few inaccuracies they’ve made, but if you weren’t a Halo fan eight years ago you might find some of this “old stuff” interesting.

SlashRF notes at High Impact Halo that zOMGWTFUDIED has gotten ahold of an early copy of Halo 3 and discovered what he thinks is a superbounce while dying near the Froman base on Last Resort (Zanzibar).

Bungie’s Jonty Barnes, talking to GameSpot at the Tokyo Game Show, mentioned that Bungie had to triple its server capacity to handle the increased load from Halo 3. Not sure whether that meant matchmaking, or community features, or what; but from the latest podcast it seems that stat-tracking will be vastly expanded, and Bungie is aiming to keep player career stats more or less completely and indefinitely.

Rapture at The Hushed Casket has posted three videos from GameTrailers showing the Halo 3 multiplayer levels Construct, Isolation, and The Pit.

That’s the question posed on the latest podcast at C|Net. With Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 vying for the spot of top dog among next generation consoles, Microsoft has to be counting on their flagship franchise, Halo 3, to provide that final push to original Xbox owners to pony up for a 360. Will it be enough? We’ll know soon.