Losing to Tied the Leader last week was like having Officer John McClane kill our brother on an upper story of Nakatomi Plaza. We wanted blood. After last week's loss I assured my Bungie compatriots: “You’ll have it! We’re playing McFarlane toys next week.”

Bungie

• Eamon
• JonnyOthan
• New0001
• TJ Scoot

McFarlane Toys

• playerpoo
• respawn in 10
• ZEUSalphaONE
• Electron Shell

McFarlane Toys, as we’ve talked about at length before, is working on an extensive line of Halo 3 action figures. Just this week, they launched a new Halo 3 Action Figures and Vehicles home page using a UI that will be very familiar to Halo 3 players. Check out that preview here. It includes a bunch of info about each figure, inc luding images, Quicktime turnarounds and shots of final packaged figures. Over at Spawn.com, they’ve explained where the different multiplayer permutations that comprise Series 2 of McFarlane’s Halo 3 figures can be purchased.

Game 1
Team Slayer, Guardian

Snipe 1, Snipe 2, Gold, Dance Floor, Blue, Green. It sounds a bit like co-ed Twister, with a Tom Berenger film playing in the background, but it was Guardian Team Slayer, all default. The full (ridiculous) power of the Gravity Hammer was on display in this game, at one point New and I both had them in our hands -- there was a tinge of guilt beneath our laughter, I swear. We sort of just ran roughshod over the McFarlane guys in game one, despite playerpoo having by far the most impressive service record of all of us.

He’s a 46 in Team Slayer, has a ranked kp/d of 1.66 and his top two weapons of choice are scoped weapons (Battle Rifle, Sniper). His Service Record was so impressive in fact, that before the Humpday began I was concerned for how it would turn out. Granted, we had the still-unbeaten in all Humpdays engineer Jon Cable playing with us and skilled stalwarts Eamon and New were both playing, but still, while the numbers don’t tell all stories – they also don’t lie.

Final Score: 50-27 (Bungie Wins)
View the Game Assets and watch the game here

Game 2

Team Slayer, The Pit

While it’s not the prettiest map in all of Halo history (seriously, the upcoming map nicknamed Spacecamp very well might be, IMHO), The Pit is without a doubt one of my personal favorites and is a great map for almost every gametype. Having our choice of gametypes in game 2, we picked the Gametype That Matters, Team Slayer. Now I know you can rank up on a variety of hoppers in Halo 3, but everyone knows that the only one that actually matters is Team Slayer (we’re joking, sort of). But the main reason we picked it is because we won the first game and while it’s great to play with an excellent partner like McFarlane Toys, it’s even better to win.

Despite complaining almost the ENTIRE game about not getting kills, the scoreboard showed otherwise for New0001. After this game was over, the McFarlane guys made a couple of mentions of “At least we can still make action figures” and asked us if we’d like to do a “Figure Creation Humpday.” We politely declined, fully aware of our inability to refine a plastic brick into a 15-points-of-articulation war machine.

Final Score: 50-13 (Bungie Wins)
View the Game Assets and watch the game here.

Game 3

Three Ball, Construct

Three Ball is a gametype we toyed with inserting in a previous version of the Valentine’s Day hopper. This version of it is probably a little bit duct-taped and janky, but Larz thought the Humpday was at 9 p.m., instead of 8 p.m., so I (jokingly) blame him. Three Ball is a version of Oddball which introduces two extra balls at different starting points on Construct. It functions the same as Oddball but with a longer time to win and more balls. It's hard to write about balls, I suddenly realize.

At some point an officially sanctioned version of this mode will probably pop up on Bungie Favorites or in Matchmaking, but with Cable and I trying to just tweak the dials on the fly, we don’t know if this is the ready-for-primetime version of Three Ball or not. Customize your own version of Three Ball and let us know what settings you use.

There wasn’t a whole lot of killing happening in this match, just a lot of running around and hiding, which unfortunately doesn’t make for the coolest film in the history of Halo cinema. One that was pretty cool, however, was a montage created by Bi0slayer from our Humpday against Saved By Grace a few weeks ago. It’s available for download at Filefront and he does some cool stuff with filtering.

Final Score: 200-131 (Bungie Wins)
View the Game Assets and watch the game here.