DarkSky Forever noticed it Sunday morning… but Bungie got around to posting fun stats on Monday afternoon. Sometime this weekend, the one billionth online match of Halo 3 was played, and recorded by the tireless databases living under the bedrock of Redmond. (Okay, I know they’re not really in Redmond. Shut up.) RocketMoose did some calculating, and figured out that since Halo 3 hit the net a year and a half ago, more than 64,000 years of playtime have been spent playing Halo 3 by fans on LIVE. (Bungie also gave away two more Mythic codes in that newspost… all the more incentive to read closely!)(Louis Wu 01:12:50 UTC)

The latest episode of Red vs Blue: Relocated is now online – Part Three shows what the Rooster Teeth boys can do with the Mythic maps. (Caboose is starting to worry me, too.) I’m wondering if Lopez’s Spanish isn’t getting WORSE, over time…(Louis Wu 23:24:21 UTC)

More Mythic Overviews – GameZone has taken a quick look at the maps (very quick), but a fan blog, Virulent Aesthetics (a blog offshoot of Halo Social) is going a bit more in-depth. Their Orbital and Sandbox reviews are up now, with Assembly coming tomorrow. Check ’em out!(Louis Wu 22:49:01 UTC)

It’s Monday, so it’s time for another flexing of the Bungie.net tag system’s muscle – this time, urk’s picked ‘Sunset’ as the key. Great shots! (Louis Wu 22:48:16 UTC)

More Halo Wars stuff – Maybe Luke’s right, maybe we should change our domain to Halo.ensemble.org…

• mendicantbias00 found an official Halo Wars flash site on Xbox.com – high on glitz, pretty low on actual information. Fun to browse, though. A pair of Wallpapers (one UNSC, one Covenant) are available for download, once you’re past the region/faction choosing phases.
• Joystiq’s giving away copies of the game – one per day for the next three days. Swing by for today’s chance.

Who was that other company that made Halo games?(Louis Wu 20:49:33 UTC)

Last week, we got word from Sk1ll4x3D of a rather bizarre glitch he experienced in The Storm – it was a case of multiplying marines. He’d kicked off a thread on Bungie.net… but there were no videos, and I was in no shape at the time to go watching in-game videos. I set it aside… and forgot about it. This weekend, another user, rewep, went in and captured the footage and put it on YouTube, and Sk1ll4x3D let us know about it this morning. The video’s really long (almost 10 minutes)… but you can get a good sense for what’s going on in just a few of those. Pretty weird – I wonder if anyone will figure out how to re-trigger it?(Louis Wu 19:41:08 UTC)

Over at the Bungie Blog, a really interesting film is highlighted – it shows off a jump style that takes advantage of kinetic transfer of energy. These guys got to some great places in the Halo campaign!(Louis Wu 19:34:23 UTC)

sorahn had a friend who worked for a street sign company last year… it’s always good to take advantage of your friends.(Louis Wu 19:09:31 UTC)

Hard Justice, Episode 13 (Resignation Act Three) is now online – it closes out the series. This series began as a light-hearted farce (almost too MUCH of a farce)… but it was pretty serious by the time it wrapped up. If you’ve been following, go watch the end! Thanks, urk.(Louis Wu 19:01:54 UTC)