Frankie is currently taking questions about the Halo 3 trailer over at Bungie.net; some of these will be answered in tonight’s Weekly Update. Swing by and toss your musings into the mix! Thanks, darthbob.

Sorry for the delay, with people out at E3, I forgot to mind the store. Check out the lead story on Bungie.net related to their return from Los Angeles and some discussion of what happened behind the scenes.

Most of us seem to have missed a short little interview that Major Nelson conducted with Marty O’Donnell outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Tuesday; Marty discussed the musical choices they made, and why the trailer felt as it did. An interesting little piece – and visual evidence that the shirt that Kotaku mentioned a couple of days ago was, indeed, a Halo 3 shirt. You can watch it in both high- and low-res streaming versions from this page on Xbox.com (scroll down to ‘Halo Audio Director’) – and for those of you who simply can’t deal with .asx files, you can grab a 4 mb QuickTime version from us. Thanks to jman571 for the heads-up.

Over at Rampancy.net, Narcogen has lost no time organizing the Halo 3 content out at this point; you’ll find a new Halo 3 Movies page, containing local mirrors of the announcement trailer, a Halo 3 Articles page, containing local mirrors for Bungie’s Halo 3 comments, and a Halo 3 Image Gallery, which contains both official screenshots and some interesting screengrabs that have been intriguing forumgoers everywhere for the last couple of days. Go look!

A few quick news posts before I sign off (what the HECK am I doing up less than three hours before I need to leave for the airport?)… PEZ has put together a small script that works in Firefox (with the help of Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension) that fixes the bug that keeps most people from viewing the Player vs Player stats on Bungie.net these days. Just tested it – works pretty nicely!

Today’s USA Today (May 10) has a 2-page spread on the Halo Graphic Novel; some of the text (but none of the pictures) can be found online on the USA Today website. Anyone who wanted to scan this… we’d be happy to host. 🙂

Normally, we let speculation run its course on our forum – trying to decipher what Bungie meant with some obscure tidbit is more than half the fun, after all. Sometimes, though, the little stuff really gets in the way; our forum has been swamped today, for example, with debates about one of Cortana’s dialogue snippets in the trailer – half the debaters believe she’s saying ‘I am your sword’, and the other half hear ‘I am your source’. Well, according to Marty O’Donnell, who really should know… it’s ‘sword’. Carry on. (Hey – did you notice how I slipped in a small Dialogue Databank update there, courtesy of KMS Ahrnaieanin? Slick, eh? Sorry it’s in the Halo 2 bank; I don’t have time to make up a Halo 3 bank right now. Soon.)

That Finn guy… looks like he dove right in, and pulled out some of the choicest morsels in the forum for the Story Page. Good stuff in there!

BARBARIC RAGE ran across a Flickr photo, shot last October (a Halloween costume?) of a really nice-looking Master Chief costume. Check it out!

Stuntmutt’s secrets, revealed, in today’s One One Se7en.

More news that has nothing to do with Halo 3: Broken Console, the team behind ‘The Squadron‘, has released Conquest, Part 1. It’s a pretty massive piece of work; 21 minutes long, more than 120 mb in hi-res format – it tells the story of an attack on a pair of UESC ships, the Conquest and the Endeavor, and the subsequent aftermath; voice acting is great, cinematography is great, mods are used in pretty clever ways. Overall, a fantastic first half of a pretty cool miniseries. We’re offering BC mirroring, because this puppy is big – you can grab the full-size versions (640×480) if you’ve got a larger pipe, or a half-size version (320×240) if 125 mb is too much for you.

WMP9: High Res (127 MB) | Low Res (67.1 mb)
QuickTime: High Res (124 MB) | Low Res (69.5 mb)

Most of these versions are available on the Broken Console site as well (links there are probably faster for EU residents).

So… if you like the screenshots over at Bungie.net, but feel like they’re not hi-res enough (they’re only 1280×720, after all), or you’re unhappy with the Bungie watermark… swing by the Xbox.com Press site, and grab the official press screenshots (70 mb, zipped). What do you get for those 70 megs? You get the 5 images in uncompressed TIFF format – 10-16 mb each – at the absurd resolution of 6400×3600. Wonga.

There’s a bit of totally non-Halo-3-related news, as well, today – for example, Toynews International reports on an upcoming exclusive action figure – a Halo 2 White Multiplayer Elite; only 3000 will be made. You can only buy this, though, if you show up at the San Diego Comic-Con in July (though if there are any left after the show, Toyrocket.com will be selling them on their website.) Thanks, Littlebigman.

There are a whole bunch of sites offering mirroring or re-encoding of the Halo 3 trailer; I really don’t see a need to list them all, because the official sites (Bungie.net and Xbox.com) are doing an admirable job of keeping up with demand. (Bungie.net has actually re-released the WMP9 versions, because the original ones had some odd aspect stuff going on.) The one link that’s probably worth passing on, though – at least if you’re on a Windows box with a pretty fast processor – is the official press release of the 720p WMP version – 5.1 audio and all. It weighs in at 132 mb, and is USELESS for Mac users (it’s encoded with Windows-only codecs), but it’s as high-res as you’re gonna get on the web. Thanks, MC Smoke. (And I’ll mention the Halo: Portable versions, too, because there aren’t a lot of places out there to grab versions for your PocketPC/iPod/PSP.)

Predictably, the forum has exploded with speculation about yesterday’s released trailer. Much of the discussion could be considered spoiler-laden, for folks either avoiding the trailer or still in the dark about the first two games… but I’m of the opinion that there’s nothing here that Bungie doesn’t want you to see. A few intriguing threads (by no means ALL the stuff worth reading):

• Dogchow was the first, but Big Lou’s version is nice, too – it’s Cortana’s voice, but who’s really speaking?
• Many, many threads are discussing the re-emergence of content from the Cortana letters, released 7 years ago, but left behind after some overzealous use by a now-ex-Bungie employee. Search for ‘Cortana Letter’, all, to find a few.
• There are lots of people happy to see the Assault Rifle back, there’s plenty of speculation about the Chief’s visor reflection, people noticed stuff like missing Banshee pilots, and there are folks looking at some of the images flashing through the trailer, attempting to decipher hidden meanings. Pixel by pixel analysis continues apace.
• Rachda and GLuebben took a look at the forerunner glyphs once again, in light of this trailer (check this post for a clearer version of GLeubben’s PDF).

Again – this is by no means a comprehensive list. Over 1200 new posts have appeared on our forum in the last 24 hours (before this announcement, we were averaging 2-300/day). It’s just a random selection of fun stuff. See what else you can find.

Of the three lucky winners of the Dean LAN fest raffle, only ONE has replied! So please, Brian Kirchhoff and Ben Thompson, check your email and get in touch with me! If I don’t hear from you soon, you will forfeit your prize!

For what it’s worth: The Halo 3 content at Bungie.net is available. (Up until now, clicking any of the links in the Top Story or on B.net’s home page simply redirected to the home page… but the section is now live.) The screenshots are all from the trailer (though they’re considerably clearer than screengrabs), and the only wallpaper available is a ‘Finish the Fight’ one. The FAQ is worth reading – especially the bit about how the trailer is a real-time piece of work. That is: this trailer is NOT like the X02 trailer, which was rendered in-engine, but not in real time; this was recorded in real time, off stock Xbox 360 hardware. Yes, it looks that good.

Swing by Bungie.net – now back up, and with a pretty amazing top story. The announcement trailer is available for all – in QT and WMP9 formats (with more options coming soon, looks like) – plus Screenshots, Storyboards, Wallpapers, a new FAQ, an About page, and a new forum. WONGA. Go take it all in. Update: hmm… looks like the non-trailer content isn’t actually accessible yet (I just get redirected back to the main page). Patience. 🙂 (The movie links work fine, though.)