This vid made me smile. Thanks, Mad Tom.(Louis Wu 21:57:05 UTC)

Today was the day for comics, I suppose – we heard from Sane Intolerant, whose latest Halo Toy Box speculates (with NO foundation) about the ending to Halo 3, and Haloplayer, who let us know about the fourth Countdown Comic from Injured Knee Productions. (Louis Wu 21:53:34 UTC)

Up on Bungie.net, you’ll find a really cool story – they’ve posted one last VIDOC, this one covering Saved Films and Forge. It’s called Cinema Paradiso, and I’ll let Frankie’s words describe it:

Take a closer look at two of Halo 3’s coolest features. Saved Films let you replay your games, Campaign or Multiplayer, from any angle, with near complete control over the 3D camera and DVD-like functionality. The Forge map and object editor lets you recreate Halo 3 multiplayer maps to suit your style, or cooperate with up to eight other players to build a new game experience. Both features are explained clearly in this in-depth feature, with input and commentary from Bungie and the game designers.

This film is available on Marketplace, as well as being available online. The download links on B.net are for the WMP9 versions; there are three. They range from small (320×180, 32 mb) to medium (640×360, 84 mb) to huge (1280×720, 338 mb). We’re handling the QuickTimes for them – but there’s a small glitch. The versions I got from Bungie, while gorgeous, might give folks on slower machines headaches. They’re H.264-encoded. You can grab the small (47.8 mb) or medium (154 mb) ones directly from us – but the large one is too big (424 mb) to offer you as a direct download, so we’re torrenting it, and providing some healthy seed bandwidth. We are also providing versions that do not require H.264. Here’s where the glitch comes in – these aren’t fully ready yet. The 720p version will be available via BitTorrent, as well (it’s just under 300 mb), within the next half hour – but this article went up a bit earlier than I’d expected, and the other two versions are still a couple of hours away from being ready. If you need/want the smaller Sorenson 3 Pro versions… please, be patient, they’ll be up very soon. Thanks to the billion people who were clearly hitting F5 all day for new content from Bungie – we got an inordinate number of emails within ten minutes of the article going up. Update: The Sorenson 3 flavor of the large version (1280×720, 294mb) is now available via BitTorrent, as well. And, as before, we’re providing a healthy swath of seed bandwidth. The two smaller versions will be online shortly. (Louis Wu 19:30:19 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy continues her countdown to Halo 3 – yesterday was “Make a Master Chief out of Play-Doh” Day (a much better choice than Talk Like a Pirate Day), and a bunch of people participated. Today, she’s asking folks to rewrite songs with Halo lyrics, and she kicks off the festivities with ‘I’m a Halo Girl, in a Halo World’. (I’d love to hear someone record this!) Check it out – keep yourself entertained!(Louis Wu 18:00:17 UTC)

Winner: Lamest Halo Article of the Day.(Louis Wu 17:42:36 UTC)

We’ve mentioned the ‘Believers’ events in Singapore before (here, and here), but today we got copies of the preorder forms availalbe to folks in that country, from Qdepartment (image 1 | image 2 | image 3). Looks like you get a nice schwag bag when you show up at the Launch event!(Louis Wu 17:01:36 UTC)

Stuntmutt pointed out an interview with Brian Jarrard and Frank O’Connor at Toyfare – not a ton of new info, but apparently, the current issue of the mag has several pages of pictures of toys, including a Hammer-weilding Master Chief HaloClix figure. Go look for it!(Louis Wu 16:54:20 UTC)

Veegie sent us a pretty interesting pamphlet this week; he received it in the course of his job at Target, and while it doesn’t hold any company secrets, I found it really interesting, in terms of how a large retail outlet approaches a marketing campaign like Halo 3’s. Check it out!(Louis Wu 16:39:02 UTC)

IGN has posted an article, with several streaming vids, about a demonstration at the Tokyo Game Show this week. Jay Weinland and Jonty Barnes walked the IGN folks through some campaign coop stuff, as seen through saved films – there are definitely some minor spoilers in here, so if you’re looking for a pristine campaign experience, do NOT watch the first two videos… but if you want to see gameplay you’ve never seen before, and get a sense for how saved films work (and how Coop works), take a look. There’s also a demonstration of Forge, with some clever pointers on use – these start in Part 3, so you can visit the movies page, and just watch this, if you want to avoid the campaign content in parts one and two. Part 4 continues the Forge demo… and shows off ‘Rocket Baseball’, as mentioned in an interview not too long ago. Thanks to Eric Max and Sean Kelly for the heads-up(s).(Louis Wu 15:25:45 UTC)

Wow, lots of stuff slipping through the cracks. I took a look at this Reuters article yesterday, and passed over it because it seemed to be yet another “Halo is making a lot of money” piece. Xbox 360 Fanboy read it a little more carefully, and noticed, buried in the second-to-last paragraph, a short list of rejected marketing ideas. Cortana lingerie… hmm. I know a few people who’d actually buy that.(Louis Wu 14:43:37 UTC)

Warbow’s thinking about what would happen if real life acquired some of Halo 3’s enhancements… check out the newest Calvin and Halo.(Louis Wu 13:29:29 UTC)

Yesterday, GryphonOsiris sent us a link to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. I took a quick look at it, saw that it was about 49rs quarterback Alex Smith, and sent him a link to this article (Alex Smith and Shawne Merriman playing Halo 3 in Bungie’s studios) – I figured the Chronicle was just a little behind. Well, I was wrong. This is a NEW story; Microsoft PR found some NFL players willing to host Halo 3 house parties, and set ’em up. The 49rs faced off against the Redskins and the Bengals, online… you can read the Washington point of view in the Washington Post (thanks, Free at Last). That story even has a video of the action… loos like a sweet setup! (Louis Wu 13:27:00 UTC)

Piggyback has put up an article explaining their Halo 3 Strategy Guide – it sounds like it’s going to be a pretty impressive piece of work! They do their best not to spoil you… in a strategy guide. That’s a first.(Louis Wu 12:15:53 UTC)

PROPH37 pointed out that you can now download a wallpaper created from yesterday’s Ctrl+Alt+Del (Spartan vs Spartan). Nice!(Louis Wu 11:54:48 UTC)