homicidal insomniac blogged something he came across in the Se7enSins.com forum; the aftermath of one of the unauthorized Epsilon players that The Hushed Casket mentioned awhile back.

The upshot?

Banned. Until December 31, 9999. Not just the XBL gamertag, but the console as well.

So, yes: it is possible to override the per-gamertag restriction on closed test executables like the Halo 3 Epsilon test if you can get access to the gamertag account of an authorized user.

It is also very, very easy for Microsoft to find you. So don't bother.

UPDATE: It is worth noting that this entire process is very similar to that surrounding the COD4 Beta. News outlets have been claiming that Microsoft recently banned over 20,000 XBL accounts for unauthorized access to this beta, but Major Nelson is denying this, despite admitting that unauthorized access to such a beta is a violation of the Terms of Service.

Also, this dialogue between | Scar | and another banned Epsilon player on the Xbox.com forum is nothing short of hilarious.

Video Gaming Refugees Blog Confessionals has a two part interview with Bungie's interface guru, Dave "Evil Otto" Candland. It covers a wide range of topics, but perhaps of most interest to fans now that Halo 3 is almost in our hands is-- what will Bungie do next?

Evil Otto: Well, who knows? I'd love to push out an Xbox Live arcade title just for a change of pace but that's really not up to me. Whatever the case, I just hope that 10 years from now I'm not working on Halo: the next generation part 5. People won't pay for a dead horse, especially one that continues to be beaten. Bungie isn't a one-trick pony. We've done RTS games that have received multiple game of the year awards, the Marathon series was extremely successful - it's still considered by many to be the greatest Mac game ever. Halo 3 may not necessarily be the last Halo related game Bungie ever makes, but we are certainly thinking hard about what our next "big thing" will be.

Thanks for the heads-up on the interview to Louis Wu at HBO.

Ma1agate tipped us off that IGN has started offering a walkthrough for Marathon: Durandal. It's got a section on basics to familiarize players of more modern games with the Marathon series and its unique quirks (no jumping, no reloading) as well as a section on gameplay tips and a level-by-level walkthrough.

Freeverse's XBLA port of Bungie's FPS classic Marathon 2: Durandal recently got an auto-update; you may have noticed the last time you played the game. Freeverse's web page has a news post up about the update. The highlights are:

• Survival mode in demo
• More sensitivity controls
• FOV setting (for people with motion sickness problems)

For a more complete list of changes, see Freeverse's site. Thanks haveblue for the heads-up on Freeverse's post.

According to GameDaily Biz, Bungie Studios' own Director of Cinematics, CJ Cowan, will be giving a special feature presentation at ADAPT 2007 in Montreal. The presentation will be on Halo 3, focusing on the in-house use of Maya along with Bungie's proprietary cinematic tools. Cowan's presentation will be on September 27th; the conference runs from the 24th to the 28th at the Hyatt Regency.

The Hushed Casket has details on how some people with access to the Epsilon build of Halo 3 got duped into offering access to the game to unauthorized persons by getting access to those users' gamertags on their own consoles, and using that gamertag to download the build.

Check the story for full details; there are no real plot spoilers in the story itself, but there are fuzzy image captures from both multiplayer action and campaign play from Tsavo Highway.

John "JCal" Callaham has written another of Firing Squad's quarterly updates on the console wars; the page on the Xbox 360 has a number of suggestions to Microsoft on how to win the console wars. FS thinks a flawless Halo 3 launch is important:

Even though the game has gone gold there are still things that could happen that could make the launch an issue. There could be copies of the game that are unplayable due to issues in manufacturing. Pirates could gain access to the game early. A rush of online players on Xbox Live on launch day could cause slowdowns in the network. Microsoft has pretty much everything riding on Halo 3 being a huge success. It can't have anything happen that could cause the Xbox 360 as a whole to suffer.

That's probably an exaggeration. The Public Beta had a few bumps in the first few days, mostly for Crackdown buyers. If some problem prevents everyone from getting online the first few days, somehow I doubt that will affect Halo 3 sales or the 360 platform that much.