I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Halo fan. The trailers for Halo 3 were for more interesting and epic than the game itself. However, I am a pretty big fan of the game’s soundtrack. For many people it’s as iconic as the score from Indiana Jones, Star Wars, or Back to the Future.

The soundtracks for each of the games has been available before, but now they are being bundled into a five disc set featuring one disc for Halo: Combat Evolved, one for Halo 2, two discs for Halo 3, and one disc featuring four tracks from the upcoming RTS Halo Wars. The Halo Wars disc will also include other bonus features about the recording of the tracks and the opening cinematic from the game.

The boxed set is available at retailers today, and is also available for download from Sumthing Digital.

Hot on the heals of the Black Friday sale on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Major Nelson has announced the first Holday Deal of the Week. There will be a new deal each week of December.

For this week, the Halo 3 Legendary map pack has been discounted from 600 MS points down to 400. The deal starts today, and a new deal will be announced next Monday and start the following day.

If you’ve been putting off the purchase of the map packs, now’s your chance. We’ll keep you posted on the following weeks’ deals as well.

Wanna play Halo 3 with HCG?  Tonight at 8pm Central send a message or friends request to SOG Froobin or Twispby and tell them you want to play.  The games are invite only so please make sure you give the guys a heads up so they can get you in the room.

A few days ago we posted the results of a Eurogamer test that showed installing Halo 3 to the hard drive with the new NXE actually caused load times to increase. Bungie has posted an update on their site explaining the reasons for this. It’s fairly technical, but the short answer is that Halo 3 already copies data to the hard drive, so when you install the game to the hard drive, the hard drive is doing twice as much work to read information from the cached data and to also read information from the installed game. A hard drive can’t read data from two places at once.

The full explanation is over at Bungie’s site. They also don’t seem optimistic that a fix for the issue will be forthcoming.

It looks like just about every game is getting a limited or collector’s edition, and Halo Wars is no exception. For $79.99 you get everything in the picture to your left.

What that all includes is the game (thankfully!), a graphic novel called Genesis, a unique in-game vehicle, six leader cards, and a “Spirit of Fire” patch.

What’s not shown, and may entice players to spring for the game when they wouldn’t otherwise do so, is the inclusion of the upcoming Mythic map pack for Halo 3. The maps are titled “Assembly,” “Orbital,” and “Sandbox.

Much like Crackdown before it, Microsoft seems willing to lure players with the promise of goodies for Halo 3 in order to get people to try something different. Crackdown of course was a pleasant surprise and a great sandbox gaming experience. Halo Wars is less of a risk because of the brand name, but it’s likely that some people are skeptical of a Halo game that doesn’t involve alien genocide from a first person perspective.

Bungie.net was updated with a new Career Stats page and announcement concerning the Halo 3 title update coming next week.  And just as has been surmised throughout the interwebs- looking closely at the achievements section, it now says “xx/59″ and “xxxx/1250″.

So speculators and PAX attendees alike can point at you and say “I told you so!  10 achievements for 250 points!” and also “PWND!  AGIRAFFEONLOLLERSKATES!“