Halo 3 Planet

Arguably Halo: CE’s most popular map, Chill Out was put on display last night by Bungie at the MLG San Diego event, the second stop on the 2008 MLG Pro Circuit. The new map - dubbed ‘Cold Storage’ - was displayed by Luke Smith and Shishka in an exhibition match against two MLG stars. The boys from Bungie made no mention of the intended release date.

MLG has kindly hosted some images from the event. Follow this link for the gallery.

We’ll be keeping you updated on the new maps as they are announced, and we might even help a few lucky readers pay for the pack.

This is just a friendly reminder that the Halo 3 Legendary Map Pack is due for release, tomorrow, April 15th. If you get a chance, you’ll probably want to start downloading the new map pack as soon as it’s released, as it will take some time to actually download all of the files.

For those of you looking for a recap of the Legendary Map Pack, here are the 3 maps that will be released tomorrow:

• Avalanche - A brand new rendition of Sidewinder. Not exactly a remake.
• Blackout - A remake of Lockout!
• Ghost Town - A brand new map, which some say slightly resembles Turf from Halo 2.

Tomorrow’s going to be an awesome day!

EDIT: *YAWN* Ok, the maps are live for all you night owls who stayed up.

Bungie has released a trailer for their upcoming Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3, and this time, no one’s pulling an April Fools on anyone else (sheesh… I am April Fooled out). You can grab an HD copy directly from them if you’d like, or from the Xbox Live Marketplace eventually. We’re really excited about the launch of the three new Maps, Blackout, Avalanche, and Ghost Town.

Remember, you can grab em on live starting April 15th! Mark your calendars!

The flash video appears to be down, so I recommend using this link to the Bungie.net story and downloading the videos from there.

I am pleased to announce a Grifball tournament that we are planning to start sometime in early march. The tournament will consist of 6 round robin games (5 within conference and 1 outside of your conference), and an 8 team medal round. The finals will be a 3 game playoff, with both the winning and losing team receiving prizes.

Here is the forum where sign-ups and all other dealings with the tournament will take place.

And here is the rules thread in that forum. It is taken largely from Rooster Teeth’s league rules, but there are some key changes (prizes, etc).

We’re hoping for 20 total teams in the league, split into two conferences (named Hammer and Sword), so get your team in early. Preference will be given for active teams on the Rooster Teeth Grifball forums and active members of the Halo3Planet.com forums.

Prizes are as follows:

1. The first place team’s roster during the final match-ups will receive a Microsoft Points card (We’re estimating 500 MS Points each).
2. The team finishing second overall will receive 500 MS Points each for their final roster only.
3. Both finalist teams will receive the rank of “Grifballer” on the Halo3Planet forums, regardless of whether they actually played in the final games.
4. A tournament MVP will be chosen from the two finalist teams, and they will be awarded a year’s subscription to OXM (Official XBox Magazine).
5. A prize of a Bungie Pro year subscription will be awarded to the Team Captain who schedules and plays all of his/her games before any other team has completed their schedule as an incentive for teams to schedule games early and on time. If the tournament round robin has been completed early, the playoffs will start early.
6. We’re trying to organize some nifty shirts with our Grifball Spring Smash ‘08 logo, and will hopefully be giving out a few of those to deserving players as well.
7. Prizes may change for better or worse.  We’re having trouble gifting MS Points now that Microsoft canceled that service.

In the most recent Bungie Update, Frankie sheds some light on the anticipated new Downloadable Content.

There are three brand new maps in their “Content Complete” stage as of now, meaning that they are all technically finished, and just have some testing to go through before they are ready for release.  We recommend reading through the udpate yourself, but here’s a quick run down.

Note:  These are the codenames for each map.  Final Map Names have been decided, but have not been announced according to Frankie.

Cottonball

• Very Large Map.  Unless you’re playing a Big Team Snipers game, it would be a joke to play without vehicles.
• Set on a Halo Environment.
• Symmetrical (for the most part).
• Best played on Assault and CTF Game types.

Purple Reign

• Somewhere between Small and Medium sized.
• Going out on a limb here, but to me this sounds similar to a remake of “Prisoner”.  Obviously from the text, not an exact remake, but holds very similar concepts.
• “Verticality” is an important aspect of this map.  There are lots of ways up, and bridges connecting gaps between opposite sides.
• “Central Hub” which will certainly be fought over (Remind anyone of rockets from “Prisoner”?  Again, totally making assumptions here, and I’m not even good at predicting these sorts of things.)
• One way glass to see incoming enemies.

OK Corral

• Medium to Large.
• From the description, sounds like a worn down city landscape of sorts.
• Confined spaces make vehicles only worth using in emergencies.
• High and Low Routes on the map make it tough to know where you’re enemies are coming from.

We’re already foaming at the mouth for more information.  The maps still seem quite a ways off, but they sure do seem promising…