24 Hours of Halo 3

May 16, 2007. The sun has yet to rise, but Brett and Charlie are already at the office, in their pajamas, ready to start. Unfortunately, Bungie and Crackdown have other ideas...

GamesRadarCharlie (4:58 AM): We're here! We're powering up the 360s and sticking in Crackdown. I'm basically just posting this to get the time stamp and prove that we were really here at 5:00 AM (Yes, for us, it's 5:00 AM in the morning! Yay!)

GamesRadarBrett (5:07 AM): I've been attempting to use Crackdown, but my brand-new-just-for-today Gamertag says my downloaded CD content is "invalid or corrupt." So now I'm trying it with my original tag and that message never showed. How very strange. With my actual GT loaded, I can enter the game but guess what? The Halo 3 Beta Download tab isn't lit. It could be because we already have the Friends and Family Beta on the HD, dunno. If it's not lit for everyone else that could be pretty damn annoying.

GamesRadarCharlie (5:28 AM): After a few minutes of trial and error, I discovered that the "invalid or corrupt" message in Crackdown had something to do with shiny new Gamertags mixing with crusty old save files on the hard drive. Probably nothing at all to do with the Halo 3 beta. I doubt that any of you will have to worry about it. In fact, once I got past the scary message, I immediately got a nicer one: "New content available to download!" Ohhh yeah. It's time!

GamesRadarCharlie (5:30 AM): OR NOT. As of 5:30 AM PST (8:30 AM EST), the "Halo 3 Beta" button in the Crackdown menus is still NOT lit up. It is not available for download yet as far as we can tell. Poor East Coast folks trying to sneak in a game before school or work...

GamesRadarBrett (5:35 AM): "Folks are reporting problems downloading the Halo 3 Beta via Crackdown this morning. We have alerted the appropriate Live authorities and they are taking care of the problem as we speak. More news as it comes in." That's straight from Bungie.

Darkangel494 (6:11 AM): y isnt it workin i didnt go 2 work 2day bcoz of this

Edgey788 (6:24 AM): why doesnt it just light up i want to play it now.

LJEProductions (6:30 AM): Anyone having problems downloading the Beta using crackdown? We get the button that says download the beta but underneath it we read something like come back at a later date. anyone have a solution ???? Help!!!!

Zombie_killer (7:34 AM): darkangel494 i just sent you a friend request lets play crackdown until the H3 beta comes out

Above: Brett reacts to the terrible events unfolding...