The Mongoose is actually a modified Kawasaki ATV and was used rather publicly during the big Halo 3 launch event in New York City a few years back. Should still be in good shape if the seller’s appraisal checks out, but Halo 3 purists please note: No mention is made of whether you can actually snuggle two adults together on the thing or not.

Mongoose @ Craigslist [via Joystiq]

Developed by Microsoft’s Halo group, 343 Industries, in conjunction with game development studio Certain Affinity, Waypoint launches in November. It is intended to be a must-visit digital location nestled into the Xbox 360 dashboard.

Waypoint will allow Halo fans to watch Halo videos, track their quest for new Halo gameplay awards, brush up on Halo lore and learn about great Halo players. It will also likely be something that they can someday play.

The gameplay aspects that Waypoint creative director Jason Pace hinted at to Kotaku won’t be apparent at launch on November 5. Ideas for it are still in development.

“I think it’s safest to say that it would be a game-enhancing experience,” Pace said. “It will be a much more deeply interactive one.”

Responding to suggestions from Kotaku that Waypoint’s gameplay could involve anything from a Halo character running through the Waypoint hub to an interactive Halo timeline filled with secrets, a la the PlayStation 3’s Metal Gear Solid Database, Pace said, “My answer to that is that both options are fully on the table.”

While Waypoint may become some sort of game down the line, what it will be on November 5 is a nexus of Halo content that, in Pace’s words, “aggregates your experience across the Halo franchise.”

Waypoint will retroactively pull the Xbox Achievements accomplishments from players’ Halo 3, Halo Wars and Halo 3: ODST save files. It will apply those Achievements toward Halo Waypoint Awards. An example of an Award is a Vehicle Specialist, which will be offered in several tiers. The lowest tire might require a player to have just a few of the vehicle-based Achievements in any of the Xbox 360 Halo games. But to reach the second tier of that award, a player would probably need to have and excel at more than one.

Another sample of an award would be a career-completion tracker than levels up as players finish each Xbox 360 Halo game. Halo games that don’t support Achievements — the first Halo and Halo 2 — will not be tracked.

The development team is pondering awards that would require group efforts, but none is planned for Waypoint’s initial release.

At launch, pride will be the only reward for achieving the awards in Halo Waypoint’s first iteration. But that seems likely to change. “Moving forward, absolutely we feel it is important to pin that achievement to something tangible,” Pace said. By “tangible,” he said he was referring to anything from additional game content to Avatar add-ons.

The roll-out plan for Waypoint at launch involves an offering new content, seven days a week. Mondays are spotlights on people who play or make Halo games. Tuesday focus on non-video-game Halo projects. Wednesday’s are days to showcase Halo gamers’ best screenshots and saved films. Thursdays’ highlight machinima. Fridays are strategy days. Saturdays are premiere days for portions of the Halo Legends anime series. Sundays are days for delving into Halo lore.

All of this content and the award-tracking is intended to feel like it’s being presented as taking place within the Halo universe. Pace said he doesn’t want to mess with the established fiction and go so far as having, say, Cortana doling out Achievements to players, but the team’s intention is that “the information being presented to you on the screen is coming from a UNSC source.”

The launch of Halo Waypoint is not a shutdown of Bungie.net, the longtime hub for Halo info and deep stat-tracking administered by the now-independent inventors of Halo at Bungie Studios. That site will continue, and Pace said that Waypoint won’t be trying to duplicate what Bungie’s site does best. “They do stats so well it would be silly for us to re-invent that wheel,” he said. “There is such a wealth of information there I wouldn’t imagine we would look at changing that for Halo 3.”

As Bungie moves beyond making Halo games — it’s last announced one is next year’s Halo Reach — and Microsoft continues to make them, it makes sense that a Microsoft-backed Halo nexus would be built. The teams involved in Bungie.net and Halo Waypoint will coordinate with each other to ensure the ideal content is available at both virtual locations, Pace said.

Waypoint will launch for all Xbox Live users for free on November 5, before switching to premium Xbox Live Gold-only access later in the month. As to whether there could be a mobile version for a Zune or iPod, Pace said he couldn’t comment other than to say “mobile is very important to us.”

Pace said Halo fans can expect the Waypoint team to “continue to push new features and content all the time.”

As of the time this post was written, ODST’s 24-hour figure for total players was 949,306; the 24-hour total for games played was 5,708,031. Divided out, that’s six games per player, on a school night/in the middle of a work week. And you know there were some out there blowing the curve and staying up all night with this.

For comparison’s sake, Halo 3 saw 1,340,550 games yesterday, so, ODST more than quadrupled that. Some have tried to hazard quick guesses on ODST’s first day sales; we’ll wait for NPD. But if this is any indication, yeah, it’s probably gonna do land office business.

Halo 3: ODST Logs Over 900,000 Players in One Day [Joystiq]

The level had its first outing at Cologne’s Gamescom this week, drawing crowds to Microsoft’s booth to spend ten minutes each with the game in a four-person coop firefight.

ODST’s firefight mode is Bungie’s answer to Gears of War 2’s horde mode, throwing never-ending waves of enemies at the four Orbital Drop Shock Troopers controlled by players.

The walled-off ODST area took up the largest section of Microsoft’s Gamescom booth, allowing 32 players at a time to check out the game.

When I swung by this weekend, the main line into the area had a 45 minute wait. Xbox Live gold members were able to sign up to wait in a shorter line and after playing were giving a free hat or poster. Players who scored more than 15,000 points in the timed firefight were also given a Halo 3 backpack.

My 10 minutes with the game netted me a mere 5,000 or so points and two deaths, but I didn’t manage to bring down the Wraith that spent the early part of the firefight peppering us with plasma mortars.

As with the three other firefight maps already shown off in ODST, Rally Point is drawn from an area in the single-player campaign. Because the maps have the potential to weaken the single-player experience if seen early, Bungie has been very tight-lipped about how many there are in total.

Rally Point is set in sector 10 of New Mombasa. This piece of the city forms a natural crossroads, making certain parts of the relatively small map killing zones. The spawn point for players is in a bunker of sorts that opens up onto the map near a series of plateaus leading down to the ground. There are also some rooms higher up on the map where covenant troops can spawn and flank what initially appears to be a relatively defendable position.

The bunker spawn point has areas for grabbing extra ammo and grenades. There are also mounted weapons that can be manned or pulled off to help mow down incoming troops.

The initial wave of enemies come from drop ships, but as the level progresses enemies begin to spawn in those rooms at the top of the map, forcing the four players to move back and forth between the high and low ends of the map to prevent getting flanked.

It’s a map perfectly suited for the four-player coop mode, providing enough cover and enough enemy access points to create a difficult, but not impossible challenge.

The key to survival, as with any map in this mode, is to remember to stick together, something that becomes increasingly difficult as enemies begin to spawn at different ends of the map.

I’ve only played two of the Firefight maps so far, but this was my favourite because it felt a bit more like an arena than a big rectangle with a monster closet on one end.

Check out our Bungie-guided tour of the three other maps if you’re interested in the coop that ODST has to offer when it hits the Xbox 360 in September.

How popular? According to Bungie, on average, every single day, there are over 1,000,000 unique Halo 3 users. Over one million. Every. Day.

Nutso.

Halo 3 Still Popular [IGN]

The new Heretic map revisits Halo 2’s Midship map, allowing players to plasma grenade each other all over the interior of the Pious Inquisitor. From purple reign we move on to the Forerunner Citadel, which features tight spaces where communication is key. Finally we make a stop off at Old Mombasa in the Longshore map, built for large scale battles over control of this strategically important port.

The maps and Halo 3: ODST will be out this September.

Thanks Casey for the tip!

Only around 25% of those eight million people who bought the game, according to Bungie’s Curtis Creamer, are playing Halo 3’s competitive multiplayer.

Creamer, who is serving as producer on Halo 3: ODST, says this was a big factor in the type of content they’ve produced for the “expandalone” game. ODST’s new cooperative multiplayer mode Firefight is really geared towards the other 75% of the Halo 3 audience.

“You know, a lot of people find that kind of competitive experience intimidating,” says Creamer. “Where you’re playing against strangers who could be way better than you… you could get matched up with a 12-year-old who is screaming obscenities into your ear all night. That’s kind of an intimidating experience.”

In Firefight you and up to three friends battle wave after wave of Covenant forces in areas taken from the campaign mode. Bungie hopes this will expand the appeal of the series’ multiplayer experience.

“In a lot of ways Firefight is set up to be similar to the competitive games but in a more friendly, cooperative environment,” says Creamer. “We wanted to have that same feel and a lot of the rewards you get out of playing the competitive game… so you can get medals for multi-kills and kill chains, all the same sorts of thing you can do in the competitive game. You’re still playing for points and all those things get uploaded to the leaderboard so you can see how you’re doing against other teams. It’s got a lot of those cool things going for it, it’s just a lot less intimidating.”

I’m in the 75% camp. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not interested in playing with strangers. Sometimes I think we lose sight of just how hardcore and niche competitive multiplayer gaming really is.

Taking our cue from a question posed by Kotaku reader Aliasalpha, we asked Bungie’s Curtis Creamer, producer of Halo 3: ODST if they would ever remake the earlier Halo games.

Surprisingly, Creamer admits the idea is not something Bungie has ever talked about internally. He said it might be an interesting thing to try at some point, but as a team right now they are more focused on looking at new things they can do.

“ODST is a great example of that,” says Creamer. “In some ways it is going back to some of the gameplay styles from Halo 1, like for example bringing back the health and stamina mechanic… But it’s more exciting for us because we are doing it with a new character, we’re doing it in a little bit of a new setting, and on top of that we’re adding a new way to try to tell the story. That’s more exciting for us than going back and recreating something that’s already been done.”

So I asked Creamer to speculate for me. Hypothetically speaking, just how much work would be involved in a full Halo 1 remake using the Halo 3 engine?

It would not be a simple undertaking, he explained. Between every Halo game, Bungie has made massive updates to the underlying technology that it would be impossible to simply re-import the Halo 1 levels into the Halo 3 engine.

There’s also the element of how fans might react to a remake that wasn’t 100% faithful.

“One of the things about trying to do something like that would be that you don’t have any latitude,” says Creamer. “You’re trying to make something that already exists so there’s no space in which to move. Is it easier to paint an exact portrait of something standing in front of you or of whatever just happens to be in your mind at that time?

“It happens all the time when we do remakes for some of the multiplayer maps. There’s always a lot of people who get super upset that there’s that one vert that’s not in the exact right spot… and that [whiney voice] completely ruins gameplay on the map!”

So, as nice an idea as a Halo remake might sound in theory, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be something we’ll see any time soon. Besides, it’s not as if Halo and Halo 2 really need remaking just yet; they’re both still perfectly playable and not too unattractive today.

Have there really been that many great remakes anyway?

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“I’ve always been a fan of video games, and my wife told me that Halo 3 is the best game on the 360,” Aramaki stated in the most recent Famitsu. “I just sort of got addicted after that. It’s a very intricate world. It’s hard to do such an epic story in movie form these days, but it’s easy to get into it as a game. There’s just enough humor in it, too. It’s a great piece of pure entertainment.”

Aramaki, best known for directing the Appleseed anime, is one of the noted anime bigwigs working on the Halo Legends animated series of seven short films. Aramaki worked with Halo franchise development director Frank O’Connor to select seven plotlines from the ten or so stories Aramaki hammered out about the Halo universe.

The five production houses involved in creating these Halo anime shorts are some of the biggest names in the industry: Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio4 C, and Toei Animation.

“I wanted to develop the world of Halo from many different angles in the anime,” Aramaki said. “I gave each studio the episodes they’re most suited to develop and told them to add whatever unique touches you like. The resulting variations you see turned out very well, I think.”

Halo Legends Wouldn’t Have Happened Without Director’s Wife [1Up]