Halo 3

On early Tuesday morning - 12:30 a.m. to be exact - I make the trek around the block to EB Games. I was planning to wait until 10:00 a.m., but as anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm an impatient fool. When I got there, I had successfully waited out the posers who had sat in front of the store since 5 p.m. and was the 4th person in line. After getting home, I tore open the package - nearly ripping the case apart -- popped the most highly anticipated game ever into my XBox 360. I stayed up until 2:30 a.m. that morning playing the game. Then I woke up at 8 a.m. and played another two hours before getting ready for a work meeting. God knows, why my client decided to schedule a meeting on that particular day. Didn't he know it was the greatest day in Video Game History?

After playing another 4 hours or so that night, I'm going to give you my early review of Halo 3. I've played only a little bit of the single player campaign and like it so far, but it's not much different than Halo 1 or 2. The graphics are slightly better and I definitely think the enemies react more realistically than they did in previous iterations of the game. Overall though, but I'm not falling over impressed with the single player campaign. Maybe I'll feel differently after spending a little more time with it.


What I am falling over impressed with is the multiplayer. It's similar to the past two Halo's, but the menus are much tighter, matchmaking is much better and they do a great, great job of charting your progress and success rate on the game and later on Bungie.net. They make you feel a great sense of reward and accomplishment. As you play, your skills are rated and you slowly but surely are promoted from the rank of Apprentice to General and Up.

Bungie.net literally has stats on how well you do on each map of the game, how well you do with specific weapons, etc. etc. I've played 30 or so online matches so far -- most of them taking 15-20 minutes - and have loved it. From King of the Hill to Capture the Flag to straight up shoot the other guy, the multiplayer is everything that it's cracked up to be.

New in this edition of Halo is the ability to tape your matches and later take screenshots of your crazy skills. You'll see a couple of those screenshots in this blog here. I'm a bad, bad man. If you see Tony B 23 on XBox Live, run away as fast as you can.

To sum things up, I believe a game is truly great when you're thinking about it when you're not playing it and when it holds your attention more than an hour or two. Halo 3 does both for me as I want to end this blog and my real day of work as soon as possible to play the game again. It'll be a part of my XBox library for at least the next two years - something that my wife won't enjoy hearing. When our newborn baby cries (in two years or so), I'll tell my wife I'll change the baby after I'm done beating down some aliens in Halo 3.

I guarantee it.