1Up continues their "three weeks of Halo 3" online series to accompany their chocked-with-Halo 3-goodness December issue. The latest addition is a Humpday Challenge writeup where Bungie cheats and multiplayer lead Tyson "Ferrex" Green graciously stops at the appropriate number of 7 kills to leave 1Up with some self-esteem. Just not much.

Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards spends a lot of time online playing Halo 2. He brings an Xbox 360 to the hotel with him on the road and connects to Xbox Live through their Internet connection.

What does he want to do next? According to Xbox.com, he wants to be a modder.

"First it was just a lot of team play, then I got into sniping," said Arenas. "Now I'm into modding. I want to mod. I've been modded against so many times it's messing up my ranking. As soon as I'm about to get up to a higher ranking, I get modded three times in a row. I'm getting my mod box."

Here's hoping Arenas is joking, or that Bungie and Microsoft won't be treating celebrity cheaters any differently than the garden variety.

You'd have to have been under a rock (or on a business trip, natch) to have missed the revelations about Halo 3 multiplayer from Swedish gaming magazine, Level, last week. Similar material is upcoming from EGM, and their online presence, 1Up, is doing a special Three Weeks of Halo 3 page. They also summarized the information in that issue. MyGen summarized the information from Level, as did XboxAddict.

Out of respect for Bungie's wishes, we aren't hosting any scans, or links to scans. If you really must find them, you know where to go, you don't need to ask me.

However, nobody owns the rights to the information that's in that article, which seems to boil down to the following:

• Halo 3 will have new weapons.

  No huge surprise there. Bungie added quite a few weapons to Halo 2 after Halo 1, as well as making changes to old weapons and adding in the dual-wielding system. New weapons appear to include the "Brute Spiker", the "Spartan Laser" and the "Nail Grenade".

• Halo 3 will have new vehicles.

  According to the article, the Mongoose ATV that was originally slated for inclusion in Halo 2, but was removed because there was no good mission placement for it, will be in Halo 3. It supposedly seats two and is weaponless, so unless you can fire a weapon while driving (now there's some dual-wielding action) the only support fire you're going to get is from your passenger.

• Halo 3 will have a new Man Cannon.

  I'm not sure what happened to the old Man Cannon. In fact, I'm not even sure what a Man Cannon is. Some articles have likened it to jump pads from Quake and Unreal Tournament, but Halo 2 multiplayer already had those-- the jump platform in Ascencion and the air vents on Foundation and in other levels. Others seem to think this is an object you carry, like a weapon, that you can aim at the ground and use to launch yourself in the air, or perhaps the Halo version of the gravity gun from Half-Life 2, allowing you to manipulate enemies and objects in the level from a distance. That last idea would be cool; the gravity gun was easily the most fun thing about HL2.

• Halo 3 will have new controls.

  The Xbox 360 has moved its black and white buttons to the shoulders, above the triggers. It has the same number of buttons as the previous controller. Apparently, in Halo 3, the shoulder buttons independently reload the gun on each hand; left shoulder button, left gun reload. When there's no weapon in the left hand, the left shoulder switches between plasma and frag grenades. There's no word on where the headlight/active camo function is going, and tantalizing hints about what the X button will do now that it doesn't need to do reloading duty.

• Halo 3 will have new eye candy.

  Your secondary weapon will apparently be visible on your body, hanging from your shoulder. Personally, I think it's a small touch, but it's great to see. Halo's two weapon restriction is a great example of a less-is-more philosophy, and while realism is not really a priority in this game, eliminating the "where does that huge sniper rifle go when I switch weapons" question is worth it. Whether there is tactical value in being able to see an opponent's slung weapon is yet to be seen, but it's a nice touch anyway.

• Halo 3 will have new packaging.

  Supposedly there will be as many as three editions of the game, culminating in a collector's edition, called the Legendary Edition, that will come with four discs of content and be packaged in a Spartan helmet (or a package shaped like one). At least one source mentioned a Halo movie sneak peek in this content, but with no studio backing for the film now, that sounds a bit premature unless it's just interviews with Peter Jackson, director Neill Blomkamp, and the Bungie gang. Not that there'd be anything wrong with that.

Spong is reporting that the X06 Korea event gave details on a 100Gb hard drive unit for the Xbox 360. No official confirmation, or word on pricing or availability. Not sure why such news would surface first in Korea, so take this with the usual helping of salt you reserve for Spong stories.

UPDATE: Microsoft in Germany is denying this, according to Kotaku.

Ok, you have to be kidding me. Supposedly this is nothing more than an outlandishly freak coincidence, but according to the developer blog of Ensemble's Bruce Shelley, the internal codename used for the Halo Wars project is Phoenix-- the same codename used for a scuttled project at Bungie a few years ago that was rumored to be a strategy game of some kind, perhaps a fantasy game in the vein of Myth.

Shelley's entry doesn't give a lot of information about the game, but it does tell us who at Ensemble is working on it so far:

The Halo Wars team is the fastest growing at ES right now. Much of The WarChiefs team is rolling over to it and many of our new employees are also joining. The team is being led by veteran ES producer Chris Rippy and Lead Programmer Angelo Laudon. Both have been with ES from the start, nearly 12 years ago. Angelo was Lead Programmer on Age I and Age II. The Art Lead is Mathew Goldman, an industry veteran with many titles to his credit from years at Bioware. Lead Designer is Graeme Devine, another industry veteran with 20+ years experience. We think the project is in great hands.

The name Graeme Devine at least should be familiar to those fans perhaps new to the RTS genre but familiar with first-person shooters, as he worked with Id Software on Quake 3 and Doom 3.