No doubt a lot of you have been sampling the Halo 3 Beta at some point over the last couple of weeks, but Pitchfork and Onion A.V. Club game writer Chris Dahlen points out something smart on his Save The Robot blog - the gameplay is fine, but it's the Internet-posted stat aggregation on Bungie.net that's almost more exciting to him.

Dahlen notes that "...the thing that fascinates me most about it aren’t the new controls or the grav lift or the high-def graphics, but the fact that every statistic from every match I’ve ever played can be found at the Bungie site."

Indeed, it's almost freakish that a random game I played a few weeks back is captured in detail, even down to average life and 'best spree' stats - and yes, I'm really not very good at the game, so enough snickering from the peanut gallery. But my goodness (or not) is available for perusal in perpetuity. And Bungie.net is just where the statistics rabbithole starts, my friend.

In particular, the unofficial Stats Reloaded has executed some even more hardcore Halo 3 stats crunching, with the help of the information made available by Microsoft to any third-party web app who wants it - look at the mass of data available for 'ChipGM', the current top player on the Statsreloaded leaderboards, for example. Blimey.