Happy free Heroic Map Pack day everyone! For those with a little patience, you'll be rewarded today with Halo 3's former $10 set of maps for the cost of air (but not PerriAir; that the Spaceballs still charge for). The pack includes Standoff, Rat's Nest and Foundry. While we'd love to tell you all about these levels, we're getting our first taste of them today.

With all that said, there's currently a hiccup in the system and the content – which was supposed to be free at 2AM pacific last night – is still listed for $10 on Xbox Live Marketplace. Bungie's forum has a nice thread (about to break 100 pages) on the issue and we're trying to get an answer from Major Nelson for the Microsoft angle. We'll update when the map pack actually becomes, you know ... free.

Update: It's free now, go get 'em.
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Have you or someone you love been egregiously injured either physically or emotionally by Bungie Studios, whose mega-blockbuster Halo 3 displayed at an upscaled output of 640p, despite being advertised as displaying in full, 720p HD? Do feel like you've been cheated out of 80 pixels that you paid good money for? Has it been a while since you sued McDonalds for selling you hot coffee that you proceeded to pour on your genitalia?

You may be entitled to recover some of the precious funds you spent on the game, according to Class Action Connect, a site that allows possible plaintiffs to find class action attorneys to represent them for a number of different class action suits. It's like MySpace for lawyers! Just click the new lawsuit link, titled "Possible False Advertising: Halo 3 Is Not Native High Definition," and reap the rewards of our country's justice system.

After we successfully get an 80 pixel refund from Bungie, we'll being going on a suing spree of developers who didn't include things they promised would be in their games. Peter Molyneux, you might as well go ahead and start liquidating your assets.

Halo 3 may be a distant memory as gamers' collective eyes and thumbs have since moved on to other things, but this hasn't stopped organizers of Vancouver's Game Design Expo 2008 to invite representatives from developer Bungie to take the stage and wax poetic about their FPS darling. The event will take place at the Vancouver Film School, and will also include talks led by designers, producers, and CEOs from such companies as Activision, BioWare, Eidos, EA, and Stormfront Studios. Tickets for the Game Design Expo 2008, which runs from January 19-20, go on sale November 21.

Bungie's speakers, namely audio lead Jay Weinland and director of cinematics CJ Cowan, are expected to talk at length about the tools and techniques used to create Halo 3's visuals, though we imagine once the microphone is turned over to the audience it won't take long for the topic to turn to what life is like after the dev's much-publicized divorce from Microsoft, including how they are holding up and, more importantly, who got to keep the dog.

No, we didn't vomit on the picture above. That's a Halo 3 heatmap, an upcoming feature of Bungie.net. This technology (which Bungie has actually been using for a while to help balance their levels) allows players to look at a number of statistics for each map, including the locations of kills, and the weapons used most often. It's just one neat addition the Bungie crew announced in their weekly update.

Considering Halo 3's ridonkulously successful launch, the guys and gals at Bungie should be sitting on some private beach right now, drinking out of diamond encrusted goblets, smoking tightly-rolled cigars made of money. Instead, they're hard at work, fixing various in-game bugs and updating the Matchmaking playlists (Rocket Race FTW). We've got a complete list of those updates after the jump.

No downloadable content was officially dated, but hopefully, we won't be waiting too much longer. According to Bungie, "things are in motion and the DLC bullet train is making a bee line straight for your face."

[Via X3F]

Well, you thought maybe he was down for the count with the release of Halo 3, right? Master Chief would be far too busy to make a sequel. Perhaps even too busy to utter a single lolololololol. Well, you were wrong. Here's the proof. He's been drinking Halo 3 Mountain Dew, reading Halo novels, and wearing the Halo 3 helmet.

You get to see how Master Chief puts his little videos together, how he types, and how l33t he is. Just check out the headshot he manages to get. We can hardly wait for Master Chief Sucks At Halo 4. There's gonna be one, right? RIGHT?! We'll be here, waiting.

If you haven't seen the original Master Chief Sucks At Halo, or the sequel, then you've been missing out. Check 'em out, and then take a gander at part three.

Dean Takahasi of The San Jose Mercury News (and recent panelist on the Joystiq Podcast Roundtable) has apparently found the world's oldest person playing Halo 3, and it looks like that honor falls to a 95-year-old Japanese grandmother.

Sure, her gaming skillz look a bit weak, but we've seen younger players do just as poorly the first few times they played. We wonder if she's gaming online at all, because she dishes out some smack talk to the TV at one point ... at least, we assume it's smack. Plus she might want to sit a bit further back or else she'll need glasses. Oh, wait.

If you've got an older Halo 3 gamer in your life, let us know about it. Better yet, drop some suggestions in the comments for what this player's gamertag should be.

It seems like if you want some guaranteed internet traffic these days, all you have to do is slap Halo tags all over the place. In fact, it's probably standard practice by now for sites offering things like FREE VIAGRA and GET RICH NOW NOW NOW to put Halo in the metatags. Darned 'Halo' branded little blue pills.

However, if you actually go out and create something all your own as a fanatical tribute to the Halo universe, then you have our respect. When it involves recreating the Zanzibar map from Halo 2 completely to scale in Lego, then you have our allegiance. In fact, we'd love to have something like this gracing the front window of the 'Stiq offices. If you've ever read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, then hopefully you get the reference. If you haven't read it, then you probably just think we're dorks.

Anyhow, check out the video of this incredible Lego creation, and then go raid your old toy closet and pull out the bricks. Time to get crackin' on your own Lego version of Lockout. Ping us when you're done.

Boy, we didn't expect the crowds in line for the Halo 3 launch at Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles to start screaming like little girls when Zac Efron appeared, but they certainly did. We'll be hearing those shrill screams in our ears for days to come. Unless we pump up the volume on Halo 3 while we get into some fragoffs.

So, having attended the Halo 2 launch at the same spot, this launch was incredibly lackluster. There was no music, no local radio DJ pumping up the crowd, no bikini-clad babes handing out samples of Mountain Dew, no one hurling t-shirts into the crowd, and no big countdown and fanfare. The most noise made by the crowd was whenever Master Chief would stroll by, and everyone would go nuts trying to take a photo of him. Then there was the guy handing out free swag for ... The Kingdom. Everyone mobbed the poor guy, thinking it was Halo stuff, but they were bummed when it turned out to be notebooks and pins from the upcoming movie.

Ladies and gentlemen, Master Chief is back. This time he's in for a double whammy, learning that The Arbiter taped over his movies with episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, and finding out that the Halo 3 beta has expired. Poor Master Chief.

He tries to soothe the pain with some Halo 2 action, and also serves up today's video in the process. It's not quite as good as the original (not enough Master Chief laughing lolololololololololz), but it'll kill some time between now and the release of the retail version, which looms ever closer.

Bungie's Frankie took time behind closed doors to show us a new feature in Halo 3 ... Game Films. What's that, you ask? Since the hearing has started to return to our ears, post the Rock Band party in Hollywood, we'll let you know. We've started forming coherent thoughts again.

As you can probably figure out from the title, these are saved films of your played games in Halo 3. The cool thing is, they can be from either multiplayer or campaign games, can be saved, and you can also select your favorite clips from your films and upload them to be shared with others via Xbox Live. Pwn a warthog with a Spartan Laser and make it flip 47 times? Clip it out and save it. Snipe some from across the map? A few button clicks and it's immortalized forever ... or until your console dies.

Bungie's Frankie took us through a tantalizing tidbit of Halo 3's opening single-player campaign level last night, although they wouldn't show us the full opening, since "It gives away a few twists that we want to keep secret until the game launches." Curse you to the ends of the universe, Bungie Boy! We wanted some deets. We were his last walkthrough of the night, and he would've gone over the edge if we'd brought him a cocktail, but we were bone dry. Reminder to pack the Joystiq Official Developer Tongue-Loosening Flask (tm).

Thanks the the wonders of developer magic, we skipped those scenes which were denied us, and after seeing the cool new Halo 3 loading screen -- a blizzard of white pixels snowed vertically across the screen to form a computer model of a rotating Halo. It's a much faster loading screen than Halo 2 had ... we remember that thing taking forrrreeeeverrrrrr sometimes.

You read about it live, now watch the Halo 3 trailer that finished out Microsoft's E3 '07 press conference for yourself.

Tomorrow is Bungie Day for the Halo 3 developer, as they've celebrated every July 7 in recent memory. Since it will be 2007 (i.e. 7/7/07, or triple 7s), there is some "extra special content" coming to Xbox Live Marketplace, according to the developer's website, in addition to new content on Bungie.net itself.

As to what the goodies will be, exactly, Bungie isn't saying -- "don't get too excited, it's not Halo 3," said the newsbrief. We're predicting gamertag pictures, themes, and the like, of either Halo, Marathon or their long-running joke Pimps at Sea.

Regardless of what the content is, there's only a small window of opportunity, as the mysterious content will only be available from 5:00 am ET until 3:00 am on Sunday.

[Via X3F]

The Halo 3 hype has hit the Land of the Rising Sun, with Bungie's shooter placing second on Amazon Japan's list of bestselling videogames as of this writing, sandwiched between Dragon Quest Swords at three and Capcom's Gotcha Force for GameCube at number one.

The only other Xbox 360 title to place in the top 25 is Oblivion at number seven, which is likely bolstered by 2,300 yen (US $18.75) discount if you buy the American RPG with Halo 3 or with Trusty Bell (known elsewhere as Eternal Sonata).

Savings aside, Halo 3 has a lot going against it in the Japanese market -- an American-made first-person shooter for Microsoft's unpopular Xbox 360 -- and it still managed to be popular. Master Chief invades Japan September 27, and we'll be interested to see how the Japanese hardware sales are affected by the release.

A recent visit to Bungie has left IGN with some new details and an ample number of screenshots from a post-beta Halo 3. In addition to new images and impressions of maps Epitaph, Shrine and Zanzibar 2 Last Resort and new vehicle the Brute Chopper, Bungie also gave some new information on the Armor Permutations, which are implied as being unlockable in single-player campaigns for use in customizing your multiplayer character.

The previously-announced replay videos aren't "videos," per se, but stored data of every action in a match, which therefore creates a smaller file that can be replayed in high-quality (and hopefully allow for a free-roaming camera). Replays can be cut down to specific moments, exchanged with friends, and watched as a group. You can also capture your own screenshots and trade those as well.

Replays, screenshots and even custom game preferences can be transferred between players via a file share option that comes up by clicking on a player's gamertag. As IGN put it, "easy." Judging by the images, Halo 3's graphics are looking better than the beta. The game is due out September 25.

[Via X3F]