I intend on writing a more complete review later but I wanted to add some comments while my first experience with Halo 3 is fresh in my mind. To provide a little personal context, I loved the first Halo. I played the campaign all the way through three times, mainly on split-screen co-op, and different individual parts of it many more than three. I’ve never played a campaign mode in any game all the way through more than once, much less three times. Beyond that, since there was no online play my friend Rodney used to drag his Xbox over a lot and we’d play 1v1 on system link, on two TVs, taking somewhat extreme measures to ensure we didn’t get any audio clues from each other’s games (we had the tvs in the same room): I wore headphones with the volume turned way up and we had an industrial fan going to create enough white noise that we could guarantee neither one of us was getting an unfair advantage by hearing what his opponent was up to.

When Halo 2 came out, I played the campaign on 2 player split-screen co-op but was not particularly enthralled. Almost anyone into Halo will tell you that Halo 2’s campaign was…disappointing. On the other hand, the multiplayer via Xbox Live was phenomenal. Bungie pioneered a new way of letting players play together (I will go into it in the full review), and I played countless hours online. I’m not very good but I just play for fun, so even the obnoxious teenagers throwing inane insults every other breath didn’t really bother me. (Though my god was Halo 2 ever an example of how important it is to do whatever you can to influence the tone of your community in a positive way. Horrible, horrible online community after the first few months.)

After picking up Halo 3 at Best Buy this morning, (and finding that it would have been much less hassle to just walk in and buy the game than to have pre-ordered and pre-paid for it….the retail clerk had to fill out a form by hand! And make a photocopy of the same by hand!), we were ready to go by 11:15 am. In this case, we is four of us who had arranged to play the campaign together on co-op.

We fire it up and were immediately impressed. I’ll go into details on the UI and the concepts behind how Bungie lets people play together later, but it’s a flat-out improvement over the already excellent Halo 2 in that regard.
Four hours after beginning, we were as enthusiastic as when we had started. The AI is excellent (it makes a mockery of Bioshock’s AI, for instance, which is best described as “run straight at you” 95% of the time), the world is gorgeous (it doesn’t have the fidelity of Gears of War or the style of Bioshock but it’s ultimately much more satisfying to me on a graphical level due to the scope. Epic vistas that they do a decent job of disguising as mere background, etc), and the gameplay is a blast. (Though I understand that w/ four players if you’re playing on anything less than the ‘Legendary’ difficulty we’re playing on, the campaign is a bit easy due to the fact that it doesn’t scale the challenge up from one player proportionately.)

Of course, with anything Halo, the campaign is really only a small part of the full game. It’s sort of the appetizer before the main course, which is, without a doubt, PvP. We played 4 hours of of it, hitting all the maps but way less than half of the available game variations (which are numerous). Absolutely superb. Beyond superb really. It’s definitely the best multi-player FPS I’ve played. The vehicles (some of which can hold three players simultaneously), the maps, the weapon balance: It’s all as close to perfect as I’ve seen in a video game, and I’m old enough to remember, if only vaguely, playing Pong in the late 70s at a friend’s house. My sole complaint so far is that jumping around like a monkey on speed while shooting an opponent is rewarded a bit much, but it’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things (especially when I accept going into it that I’m never going to be very good anyway).

Anyway, we’re starting some more multi-player PvP in 20 minutes, at 10 pm, and will likely do 2-3 more hours, for a total of 10-11 hours in one day. The last time I did this kind of video game marathon was on the release day for Halo 2.

Full review coming in a few days! I need to finish the campaign, play some more multiplayer, and investigate the Forge options in Halo 3 (nothing to do with this blog), in which users can alter the maps for multiplayer PvP, apparently in real-time.