YankeeHotel has started up a picture blog called abstrakt, art from inside the Halo 3 engine, featuring artsy, unmodified screenshots. Check it out! Thanks for the heads-up to Louis Wu at HBO.

c0rps3K1lla008 at High Impact Halo has posted a guide to maximizing your campaign score on Halo 3. It makes a good companion piece to the guide on skulls posted at Bungie.net. This one line, however, is genius and bears quoting:

Turning on Catch for Floodgate, Cortana, and Halo gives a free 1.5x multiplier! Why? Because the Flood do not throw grenades!

Nthro Sraom wrote up a quick guide to the terminal locations in Halo 3. Don't forget, finding all of them grants an achievement, and viewing all of their pages (which are different on Legendary difficulty) grants access to a lot of Halo 3's backstory.

After Halo 2, VVV didn't hold out much hope that he'd like the next installment, and he's found that the game met his low expectations. Check out his review for a counterpoint to all the pro-Halo 3 enthusiasm. He does like the game-- better than Halo 2-- but there's a bittersweet flavor to it for him.

Those of us steeped in Halo 3 and Bungie Breakaway news might be forgiven momentarily for forgetting that online communities for Bungie's Mac and PC RTS games, Myth, are still hanging in there a decade after the game was released.

Unfortunately one of them, PlayMyth, has now shut down. Server administrator Blades, apparently posting as elusivemind, says he no longer has the time or energy to keep up with it.

Here are more links to articles on Bungie's bombshell announcement:

Nobody asked Bungie about the rumored separation in the thread for this week's update, but Frankie dished on it anyway. Effective October 1, Bungie is an independent company with a long-term publishing agreement with Microsoft Game Studios for Halo games.

Shishka saved Bungie from humiliating defeat in the first post-launch Halo 3 Humpday, as the boys from Kirkland waded into Social Slayer and got socially slayed.

Check Bungie.net for the full writeup as well as links to the Saved Films; this is the first time we'll be able not just to read about the humpday, or pore over the statistics, but actually see the matches themselves. No more lying embellishment!

Version 1 of MLG's official gametypes and settings for Halo 3 are now available for download and playing on your very own Xbox 360. No word yet on whether or not every single weapon has been replaced by a Battle Rifle, or if Luke Smith has had an orgasm yet.

UPDATE: Yes, the primary weapon for all gametypes is the Battle Rifle. Way to be consistent, guys. Still no update on that other thing.

Saved Films is a great feature. It lets anybody who has Halo 3 and an Xbox Live account share game films with each other. It'll be great for documenting tricks, speedruns, the works.

However, it can't do everything. It's not a video editing suite; you can't add effects or music, and you need to have Halo 3 running on an Xbox 360 to play these films back. So there's still a need, sometimes, for an actual video file.

Journalist Dean Takahashi is having a lot of fun, not just playing Halo 3, but utilizing the new features, like saved films and screenshots. He asks readers to write in with their experiences playing Halo 3.

Meyeselph is working on compiling an easily accessible guide to Halo 3's weapons, with an eye on how to maximize the effective use of each. The first weapon so examined is Halo 3's venerable Assault Rifle. Visually evocative of the Colonial Marines' pulse rifle from Aliens, maligned as an inaccurate bullet hose in Halo 1, missing from Halo 2 in favor of the even more maligned dual-wielding bullet hose, the SMG, the Assault Rifle makes a triumphant return in Halo 3.

Stuntmutt attended the Halo 3 launch party in Waterloo and walked away with a free copy of Halo 3, which he immediately went home and played, uncharacteristically eschewing an open bar.

GeezerGamer has a nice article explaining in detail some of the uses of the file share feature in Halo 3 and how to make them work for you.

The Wideload reports on an IRC chat with Wideload Games' Matt Soell; he says that things at the Load have been busy, but that fans can expect some developments Soon™.