Yes, a few weeks ago we posted some stuff from the manual. And yes, on September 13th, Powet was shut down for a period of 20 hours for not removing the material at Microsoft’s request.

Now, as if to rub it in our faces, Microsoft has posted the entire book, using this new Silverlight app, which I’m installing and will probably never use again.

So here you go. Halo 3 Manual. Thanks for enforcing that DMCA stuff, Microsoft.

13 hours until I can play this game…

The edition of Halo 3 every one is talking about is finally revealed!

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Weta Workshop started work on the Halo movie some time ago, and even if that’s been put on hold, they continue to work on the Halo short film series thats been leading to the Halo 3 release, as well as developing an as yet unseen game set in the Halo universe. Part of this is making props, replicas, miniatures, and in this case, functional vehicles from the game.
Bungie’s Frank O’Conner elaborates.

Some of the Bungie boys are in New Zealand this week, working with Peter Jackson on the Halo project. For fun, they got to drive around in a real, functioning Warthog. At the wheel, Curtis Creamer, producer extraordinaire –on the turret, Mr. CJ Cowan our cinematics director, and Harold Ryan, studio head rides shotgun. The powerful, four-wheel steering and almost perfect replica of the Hog is fast and agile. Amazing then that Curtis uses these abilities to smash it into what he describes as “the illogical wall section” at a parking lot near Weta.

For the regular readers, you may have noticed the site has been down for the better part of the past two days.

The reason for this was that we were served with a DMCA copyright infringement letter from an internet investigator on the behalf of Microsoft. Last month, we posted a leaked copy of the Halo 3 manual (which several commenters exclaimed that it had to be a fake). All seven of these images were listed in the email specifically by filename. Our host, who received this letter, shut the site down. When we got in contact with the host, they forwarded the letter to us. After reading the letter and getting back in touch with our host we were given a 5 hour window today to remove all traces of the images from our site.

We have done so and the site has been restored.

We are going to further review the policies of our host regarding further instances such as these and based on that, make a decision to move to a new host or not. While we are willing to comply with letters such as these when they are valid, we are more than discontented that the host decided to shut our site down for such a length of time without any type of notice before, or during the outage, until we were forced to reach out to them.

I have copied the infringement letter after the jump.

But first, Zac made a couple videos about the fall and rise of Powet.

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This is the latest in the Halo live action video series.

A veteran remembers the day he fought along side Master Chief.

There is no possible way to set these up and have them make sense.

This second one is even better. Starts out slower, but leads up to great action.

On screen text translation
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The next installment in the live action Halo series, “Combat” show ODSTs (orbital drop shock troopers) warding off a Brute threat and calling in air support. This is the follow up to Arms Race, which was shown at E3.

Above is the final round of Penny Arcade Expo’s Omegathon, where this year’s contestants faced off on the final build of Halo 3, complete with a new map, Guardian, and lots of new weapons. The second part is embedded after the cut.

Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany wasn’t left out. Gamersyde has an extensive look at the third level of the Halo 3 Campaign. and by extensive I mean huge and long. 1.3 gigs of video in high definition.

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