As of 10:30p CT the downloadable Halo 3 Beta appears to be working. I was playing Crackdown and noticed I got disconnected from Live. When I tried to reconnect, there was a new update available. I did that, checked back in on Crackdown and there she was! It's a whopper of a download though. 911.18 MB. And apparently no downloading in the background! Now, I sit and wait and fire up my PS3....

Victor update: Finished downloading last night around 1 am, and got busy cracking some skulls. It took awhile to get used to some of the new controls, such as tapping the shoulder buttons to reload and using X for the bubble shield and other equipment, but overall I think the changes are improvements.

The three maps were fun and big, almost a little too big for some of the smaller matches. The graphics, though, were a major letdown. Bungie has apparently indicated that what we see in the single-player mode will be prettier than the multi-player, since they want to avoid any lag during online gameplay (and they did, at least in the beta). But, man, I kind of wondered at first how Halo 3 had ended up on my GameCube.