Rampancy

The second-to-last Bungie Weekly Update before Halo 3's official release date is well worth the read. The highlights, though, are you should stay out of random Bungie.net player profiles from now on, since you may end up seeing screenshots taken by people who've gotten copies early. Also, Miguel Chavez, invited to play through the game last week, says the ending is "perfect". You've heard it from Bungie's #1 fan.

Of course, Halo 3's street date has been broken about two weeks early.

Rumors are flying that the missing clan features in Halo 3 may be supplied by an XBL update.

Kotaku wonders if Halo hype has gone too far, and I can't help wondering the same thing-- even if I am, for the most part, isolated from it.

Adowaki has done a speedrun through Wideload's Stubbs the Zombie, on the Insane difficulty. Check out part one and part two.

Shacknews asks Frankie how it feels at Bungie now that Halo 3 is all finished. They also get to cover a few other bases: such as baseball in Forge:

Shack: How long do you think it will take before you start seeing things made with Forge and the gametype editor that you had never planned for or anticipated?

Frank O'Connor: Specifically about 23 hours ago--when those guys made [a] baseball [gametype] with rockets and gravity hammers--and that was their first pass at something!--and they even got bases in, we said, "Okay, all bets are off." We had no idea.

Also a few notes about DOA and Halo Wars.

While many Halo fans are trying to keep themselves off the Internet to avoid spoilers, I've had trouble getting on it-- the new DSL line is installed, but not yet working, and the old line decided to go on vacation for the past 24 hours. With that in mind, here's a summary of the news in that time:

• Zanzibar played multiplayer Halo 3 at the Pontiac "First to Play" event and wrote up his impressions at Evil Avatar.
• The live-action Halo 3 commercial Museum is out on Xbox.com and is drawing praise from most quarters and scorn from others; the latter I'd not have mentioned were it not for Anton P. Nym's scathing rejoinder. You can get the video on XBLM as well.
• Free Halo 3 Gamerpics and Theme are available in Xbox Live Marketplace.
• Retronauts finished off its contribution to 1Up's three-week Halo 3 coverage by looking back at Marathon Infinity.
• 1Up loves twice as many things about Halo 3 as it hates. Even those things it hates aren't really that hateful.
• HBO confirms that Halo 3 has leaked, and that it is shutting down its forum until after the official release day.
• 1Up put up a passel of new screenshots; they've been added, as appropriate, to the main Halo 3 (campaign) and Multiplayer Halo 3 galleries.