Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian says Halo 3 sales should reach $200 million, quoting Microsoft executives who expect $155M in first day says, up $30M from Halo 2’s total.

Next-Generation has the story.

Our homeys at Split Reason have some of the coolest gaming shirts on the planet, especially for Halo fans. And they want to give you one for free! Here’s how it works. The Podtacular logo is hidden in a five places on splitreason.com. If you’re one of the first three people to find all five, click submit news & tips on the right side of the page and send in links to the five pages that have the logo. The winner gets a Split Reason shirt of his choice sent to him for free! What are you still doing reading this? Your friends are searching for the logos right now…

UPDATE: So far we have two winners. Still one more shirt to give away!

Adowaki has done a speedrun through Wideload’s Stubbs the Zombie, on the Insane difficulty. Check out part one and part two.

The second new Halo 3 ad is out, the one called Believe. It builds on the same theme as the previous ad, Museum.

Joystiq thought it was a little strange, I can’t help but agree a little bit. I half-expected the gruesome diorama to morph into ActionClix figures. They don’t, however.

Shacknews asks Frankie how it feels at Bungie now that Halo 3 is all finished. They also get to cover a few other bases: such as baseball in Forge:

Shack: How long do you think it will take before you start seeing things made with Forge and the gametype editor that you had never planned for or anticipated?

Frank O’Connor: Specifically about 23 hours ago–when those guys made [a] baseball [gametype] with rockets and gravity hammers–and that was their first pass at something!–and they even got bases in, we said, “Okay, all bets are off.” We had no idea.

Also a few notes about DOA and Halo Wars.

Frankie has posted at Bungie.net that Best Buy may be your best friend come Halo 3’s launch day:

During the launch period of Halo 3, the 25th, 26th and 27th of September, Best Buy will be sponsoring the Xbox Live Gold service and making it free for everyone. Think of it as Halo Free Gold Days. That means that even if you only have Xbox Live Silver, or you picked up a 360 just for Halo 3, that you’ll be able to try almost all of the features – online co-op, Multiplayer, Forge editing, viewing networked Saved Films – however, you will not be able to use our File Share system unless you subscribe to the paid Xbox Live Gold service.

Interesting restriction. Looks like nobody wants a lack of a Gold subscription to get in the way of Halo 3’s online multiplayer numbers.

While many Halo fans are trying to keep themselves off the Internet to avoid spoilers, I’ve had trouble getting on it– the new DSL line is installed, but not yet working, and the old line decided to go on vacation for the past 24 hours. With that in mind, here’s a summary of the news in that time:

• Zanzibar played multiplayer Halo 3 at the Pontiac “First to Play” event and wrote up his impressions at Evil Avatar.
• The live-action Halo 3 commercial Museum is out on Xbox.com and is drawing praise from most quarters and scorn from others; the latter I’d not have mentioned were it not for Anton P. Nym‘s scathing rejoinder. You can get the video on XBLM as well.
• Free Halo 3 Gamerpics and Theme are available in Xbox Live Marketplace.
• Retronauts finished off its contribution to 1Up’s three-week Halo 3 coverage by looking back at Marathon Infinity.
• 1Up loves twice as many things about Halo 3 as it hates. Even those things it hates aren’t really that hateful.
• HBO confirms that Halo 3 has leaked, and that it is shutting down its forum until after the official release day.
• 1Up put up a passel of new screenshots; they’ve been added, as appropriate, to the main Halo 3 (campaign) and Multiplayer Halo 3 galleries.

Mitch Gitelman posted today was the official last day of employment for those who had not moved on to other positions. About half of the team has found positions at Microsoft game studios. It is always sad to see a studio close, especially one like FASA.

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