Frankie and Sketch just got back to Bungie from E3, and when they did so, Frankie posted a new story at Bungie.net covering the background behind the demonstration and hinting that behind closed doors, some journalists got a look at a little bit more of it to prove that it was, in fact, realtime.

There wasn't much to show at the moment, since we're keeping things under warps for now, but CJ clued everyone in on the 3-mile wide Forerunner artifact, Cortana's state of mind and the Chief (no it's not Linda, or Kelly...) battered Mjolnir armor.

Douglass C. Perry at IGN has posted a blow by blow description of the Halo 3 trailer. It's awkwardly worded at points-- the reference to "two remaining Spartan soldiers" has some fans scratching their heads, but I think it's just an oblique reference to Kelly, who obviously does not appear in the trailer, and the Master Chief, who does.

In addition to the annotated version of Bungie.net's own Halo 3 FAQ, posted at the same time as the announcement release and the trailer, we've now started a separate Rampancy.net Halo 3 FAQ. If you have a question to suggest, please add a comment! Both FAQs are on the Halo 3 Articles page.

CVG has a recap of some of Microsoft's E3 goings-on, focusing primarily on the advantage that Shane Kim believes Xbox Live gives to the 360, as compared to Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3.

Of course, some recently announced games also got mentioned:

"Hopefully we've put to bed any concerns or confusion about what Bungie is doing with the Halo universe. They're very focused on Halo 3 and they're going to make it bigger and better and everything everyone expects."

Louis Wu at HBO pointed out a short video interview that Xbox Live's Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb did, presumably for his unofficial Xbox blog, MajorNelson.com.

We've put up a second copy of the Halo E3 2006 Announcement Trailer; this one weighs in at a much lighter 25 megabytes and is encoded in DivX 5, suitable for Macs or PCs, for those who don't like QuickTime or whose computers (like mine) have a bit of trouble keeping up with the high-resolution H.264 version.

Louis Wu at HBO has put up a summary of links to interesting forum threads; many of them touch on issues I mentioned in the Annotated FAQ, which also included a short analysis of the Announcement Trailer. And before everybody goes nuts, I had to go ahead and do that without checking any of the forums first because I was already behind by 12 hours, so no, I didn't steal anyone else's speculations or screenshots.