Trickity Trick 6
DevinOlsen, goatrope, jayWHY, and EA demonstrate that with the right settings it's possible to get through any soft elastic barrier on Halo 3 in the latest in the Trickity Trick series.
Halo 3 Needs No Punctuation. Period.
The Zero Punctuation videoblog at The Escapist proves that it's much easier to be funny when criticizing something than praising it, and their review of Halo 3 is indeed funny. I just can't figure out if it's funny for the sake of it, or whether the reviewer honestly dislikes the game as much as the review says and being funny is just a byproduct of that.
However, all I can think of watching the recycled criticisms (the game is short, the story is incomprehensible) is that I don't see the basis for them. At all. Estimates of game length are all over the board, from 8 to 20 hours. And yet all of these are called "short". Compared to what? Oblivion? Are all games supposed to deliver the same number of hours of play for a single price point? Is it fair to hold Halo 3 to that standard while saying "I don't give a flying shit about multiplayer"?
Would this stuff be deemed funny if someone lampooned the plot of The Return of the King from the perspective of someone who had neither read nor seen The Fellowship of the Ring or the Two Towers and therefore didn't know anything about these wacky short people called Grunts Hobbits and this all-powerful Halo Ring everybody is on about?
Andrew McCaffrey Breaks Into Bungie
Back in August, before Halo 3 went gold, OXM senior editor Andrew McCaffrey got to visit Bungie and play Halo:
We were fortunate enough to actually make it past the locked doors and get to step inside the heart of Bungie's newsroom-style studio on Day 2, being taken up into the "loft" area where Frank and the Bungie.net team sits, so we could be given a walkthrough of the redesigned website features and how they interact with Halo(R) 3. It was a quiet and focused environment, despite the fact that many on the team were on vacation, and the game was 99.9% done.
Major League Gaming Posts Halo 3 Downloads
Version 1 of MLG's official gametypes and settings for Halo 3 are now available for download and playing on your very own Xbox 360. No word yet on whether or not every single weapon has been replaced by a Battle Rifle, or if Luke Smith has had an orgasm yet.
UPDATE: Yes, the primary weapon for all gametypes is the Battle Rifle. Way to be consistent, guys. Still no update on that other thing.
No Capture Card, No Problem
Saved Films is a great feature. It lets anybody who has Halo 3 and an Xbox Live account share game films with each other. It'll be great for documenting tricks, speedruns, the works.
However, it can't do everything. It's not a video editing suite; you can't add effects or music, and you need to have Halo 3 running on an Xbox 360 to play these films back. So there's still a need, sometimes, for an actual video file.
The Fight Has Been Finished
Inside Pulse reviews Halo 3, and in the process, invents more subcategories to assign ratings to than I could possibly imagine would be relevant or useful, including truly subjective things like Appeal, Originality and Miscellaneous. As the kids say, whatever. They liked the game:
Takahashi Publishes A Screenshot
Journalist Dean Takahashi is having a lot of fun, not just playing Halo 3, but utilizing the new features, like saved films and screenshots. He asks readers to write in with their experiences playing Halo 3.
One Shot Is All It Takes
Wired takes a look at the psuedoscience of Halo weaponry and gadgetry, including the Spartan Laser and the Bubble Shield:
Ask Ultra Questions, Get Ultra Answers
Frankie says that if you post a question relating to Halo 3 in this thread, they'll try to provide answers in the next Weekly Update.
Get More Out Of Your Skull
Bungie.net has a guide on how to use the gold skulls in Halo 3 to change your play experience.
Mark Rein Doesn't Hate Halo
Amazing how people always choose last year's blockbuster Xbox 360 shooter, Gears of War, when they want to suggest that Halo 3's visuals are weak. Because Mark Rein, the guy who runs Epic Games, developers of Gears, likes Halo 3 just fine even if it doesn't have the flashiest effects:
In A Ditch
Halo 3 Weapons Guide: Assault Rifle
Meyeselph is working on compiling an easily accessible guide to Halo 3's weapons, with an eye on how to maximize the effective use of each. The first weapon so examined is Halo 3's venerable Assault Rifle. Visually evocative of the Colonial Marines' pulse rifle from Aliens, maligned as an inaccurate bullet hose in Halo 1, missing from Halo 2 in favor of the even more maligned dual-wielding bullet hose, the SMG, the Assault Rifle makes a triumphant return in Halo 3.
Assault Rifle
| Rounds per magazine: | 32 |
| Capacity: | 384 |
| Rate of Fire: | ~8 rounds per second |
| Rounds to kill(body): | 16 |
| Rounds to kill (head): | 16 |
| Rounds before melee kill: | 6 |
| Rounds before close frag nade kill(body): | 6 |
| Rounds after close frag nade to kill(body): | 6 |
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First Impressions Of Halo 3
It's tired cliché that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Despite rampant accusations of having a story that's derivative pulp, the first half of Halo 3 is not a tired cliché, nor does it need a second chance to make a first impression.
Hearing from a number of reviewers and community members who played through the game in a single sitting under Bungie's purview, I've decided to play no more than two campaign levels a day in order to savor the experience. To get my Halo 3 fix the rest of the day, I watch films of those levels, hunt for skulls, or play around in Forge. I understand why those people wanted to get through the game right away, and why Bungie wanted reviewers to play the whole game. Community members knew they wouldn't be able to go on much longer without someone spoiling the ending for them. Bungie knew it would be best for reviewers to have a complete experience-- at least, the most complete experience you can get from 8-15 hours of a game that probably has as much if not more replayability value as Halo 1 and 2 combined. However, I refuse to be rushed.