Fragclone found pictures of the McFarlane Rookie prototype on the Spawn.com website. Cool beans! (It drops in October, a little later than the game.)(Louis Wu 18:20:42 UTC)

xoools pointed out that during IGN’s half-hour ODST special, Joe Staten confirmed that Heretic, one of the three new Mythic maps to be released with Halo 3: ODST this fall, is indeed a remake of Halo 2’s Midship. Due to some leaks in the past year, many people had already guessed that this was the case… but this is the first time that a Bungie employee has confirmed this publicly. Nice!(Louis Wu 18:19:58 UTC)

mendicantbias00 found some info at Gamestop that suggests that the Limited Edition Halo 3: ODST package (the one with the special controller) will be available exclusively from them. If we find that this is not accurate, we’ll let you know!(Louis Wu 18:19:25 UTC)

Bryan Simon let us know that voting for his Mythic Song Challenge is now open for voting – go watch the explanation video, then swing by Bryan’s blog to watch the finalists and cast your vote!(Louis Wu 18:18:16 UTC)

Last week, we mentioned The Halo Gophers’ Forge contest – they’ve posted the results on their front page. Thanks, DE4TH DEAL3R.(Louis Wu 18:17:52 UTC)

UGO has posted a review of the Halo: Uprising Hardcover release – interesting timing!(Louis Wu 18:17:23 UTC)

With a smaller staff than most groups at E3, it’s difficult keeping up with the flood of ODST data, but we’ll try to do a roundup now. There are hands-on/previews from:

• CraveOnline
• IGN (including demo footage)
• Eurogamer
• Joystiq
• Kotaku (more a clarification of Firefight)
• Gamespy (including video footage)
• Game Stooge
• IGN (Firefight playthrough)
• Gamespot’s Stage Demo (video)

In addition, there are three more clips at Gamespot, including the entire first cutscene (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3) – thanks, urk – and Gamespy has something they call Spy Libs, with fill-in-the-blanks answers about ODST from Bungie and Gamespy employees. I’m sure there’ll be more as the day goes on – it remains to be seen if we’ll be able to find a place to update from.(Louis Wu 17:11:35 UTC)