Halo 3!

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Asher

Well:
1) This was already discussed
2) Your understanding is completely inaccurate
3) Citing local papers further obfuscates a technical understanding

If you want to understand more, check out the Beyond 3D thread where industry experts (including engine developers of competing games) explain the solution more and even "defend" Bungie's technical choices.

Well:
1) This has gone for two threads and lots of time now, do you expect me to follow every bit of the discussion and remembering it?
2) Might very well be. And that's why I came here and raised the question.
3) It's one of the biggest online gaming sites in Norway IIUC. It's said to be up and down with the quality, and it seems it was down on this one. Still no reason to get so upset.

4) Link to that thread?

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Asher

Of course it's HD. It outputs at 1080p in widescreen with DD5.1 surround sound with high dynamic range lighting and enormous emounts of polygons, rendered at a resolution substantially higher than SD.

But after what I've read, those 1080p are a smaller resolution being enlarged, so it doesn't have a 1080p pixel number? Is it then HD?

[Asher]

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=44556

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=44492

[Nikolai]

Thanks.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Nikolai

But after what I've read, those 1080p are a smaller resolution being enlarged, so it doesn't have a 1080p pixel number? Is it then HD?

First of all, this whole "is it HD" nonsense is stupid to begin with. What is HD? Is it 720p or 1080p and nothing else?

HD is a widescreen digital signal that is higher resolution than standard definition (SD).

Halo 3 may render the frame at 640p. PGR3 rendered at 600p. Both are gorgeous games. Pixels aren't everything. They're both HD, still, but instead of adding more pixels they chose to do more calculations with existing pixels. FWIW, this is the approach John Carmack (of DOOM/Quake engine fame) is championing as well.

Halo 3 outputs at either 720p, 1080i, or 1080p depending on what the console is set to. There is a hardware chip in the 360 called a hardware scaler that uses algorithms to interpolate and expand on the pixels in the framebuffer to fit the target resolution. When it outputs in 1080p, it still outputs 1920x1080 pixels. And that is HD.

[Asher]

While ArsTechnica gave the SP Halo 3 a 7/10, they just reviewed the MP portion and gave that a 10/10 -- 9/10 overall.

Here we dismantle the opinions of Wiglaf (people buy for the SP, Halo 3 is a rehash, Halo 3 is not innovative) and Agathon (Warhawk is better multiplayer):

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/halo-3-multiplayer.ars

We've already reviewed the single-player campaign of Halo 3, and our thoughts on that experience speak for themselves. But the single-player game is only a very small part of why people buy Halo 3, and the online features of the title are almost insanely ambitious. In this review we're going to look at what Bungie wanted to accomplish with the online portion of Halo 3 and how well they achieved those goals. People are still playing Halo 2 online in large numbers after almost three years, so Halo 3 has some big shoes to fill.

This review isn't an easy thing to write: Halo 3 features many, many multiplayer options spread across 11 maps, a co-op game with its own built-in scoring system, a new level editor called The Forge, and, of course, you have to take into account the numberless game types and downloadable tweaks that the game supports (not to mention the social aspect of playing with the unwashed masses of Xbox Live). For the past week I've been playing at home, at friends' houses, online, offline... I've been living Halo 3 with other players. It's not a bad assignment to be given.

So let's see what is added when you throw more than one player into the mix. I'll drive, you grab the gun, and we'll see who we can shoot.

Load up on guns, bring your friends....

When you play through the campaign of Halo 3 in single-player mode, you start the scene, move forward, kill everything, move forward, see a cut-scene, move forward, repeat. The gameplay can feel a little monotonous, and the AI-controlled soldiers who are supposed to be fighting with you don't do much. God help you if you grab the Warthog’s turret and let the AI drive.

The enemy AI gets better on Heroic and Legendary, but it mainly makes you a more conservative player. I played through the entire game in two sittings, thinking I would never again play the campaign mode. For me, it was competition play and the Forge from now on.

How wrong I was.

During my first co-op game I was riding on the back seat of the Mongoose, Halo 3's ATV-like transport, zipping between the Covenant Wraiths (large tanks) as they battered our forces. We were outgunned, surrounded by enemy turrets and vehicles, and didn't know what to do. So we kept moving, dodging fire where we could. "Get me close to that Wraith; I have an idea," I said, and my partner did so. I leapt off the Mongoose behind the Wraith, jumped on, and slammed a sticky-grenade onto the side of the vehicle. Of course, then everyone knew where I was, and opened fire. My shield was almost gone when I heard...

"I have ya!" my cohort said and pulled a quick U-turn, allowing me to again jump onto the back of the Mongoose and zip away, still alive. It was, if I say so myself, a daring maneuver on the difficulty we were playing at, and I was impressed that we both survived. This never could have happened in single-player; the coordinated attacks you can pull off with another good player are amazing to behold. The co-op in Halo 3 allows up to four players at once, and in the games I've played so far, I haven’t seen a hint of lag. You haven't lived until you've attacked an enemy's fortified position with a Scorpion tank providing covering fire while three of your teammates assault the base on foot. The co-op play makes the campaign feel alive, and you can do things working together that you wouldn't dream of alone. While playing the campaign by yourself can feel clunky and artificial, playing with other skilled players is like living the best buddy-action movie you've ever seen.

Playing through the first two Halos on co-op was fun, but nothing matches playing four-player co-op on Xbox Live, with each player having a full screen, voice chat, and no lag. This is the best possible way to play the game, and it is incredibly addicting.

The other aspect that makes co-op so enjoyable is the co-op scoring feature of the game. If you turn this on, the game begins to track who kills what and awards points for your performance. What you kill, how you kill it, how quickly you finish the mission, and how many times you die can boost or diminish your score, and at the end of each mission you get a nice little tally that lets you know how well you did in comparison with the other players.

This adds a whole new level to co-op play, with players either competing for the high score or choosing to work as a team, and you'll learn more about your style of play from your totals. For instance, I tend to get many more kills than the people I play with, but I also die a whole helluva lot. Learning this, I held back instead of charging in for melee kills, which helped the entire team as I stayed alive much longer. Replayability also goes through the roof with this feature enabled. Can you beat each mission while beating your old scores? Can you beat your times? Can you try to get double the kills of someone else?

You can also help your scoring by scouring the game for a series of skulls hidden in each mission. These skulls give you point multipliers and other effects as you carry them around. While there are guides to finding these, you'll have much more fun finding them for yourself.

Keep in mind that the best way to play co-op is online. The game offers splitscreen, and it's fun, but for some reason the game becomes letterboxed, eating up some of your screen real estate. No fun at all.

Co-op, along with the optional scoring system, adds literally hundreds of hours of play time to the campaign. There is always something new to try, new tactics to perfect with new players, and higher scores to go after. It's a thrill that playing alone just can't match. Time to make some friends.

The co-op is fun and all, but sometimes you just want to blow stuff up, and that's where competitive play comes in. There is still no in-game server browser, so you have to either start your own custom game and invite friends or wait for strangers to join, or subject yourself to the matchmaking service that pairs you with people who are hopefully near the same skill level and then hope it gives you a game type and map you like. I'm not thrilled at this lack of control, but it didn't seem like I would ever have to wait long for a game to come up. However, I was often playing maps and game types I didn't care for, and I soon built up an extensive friend list so we could control what we played.

The game ships with eleven maps, which is a smallish number, but of course the for-pay map packs are more likely than not right around the corner. Also keep in mind that some of these maps are based on older ones; Valhalla is basically Blood Gulch, and Last Resort is a Zanzibar remake. Even with the retreads, the 11 maps do a good job of keeping you interested, and each one is ideal for a different sort of play.

Also helpful is the limitation of being able to carry two weapons at once. This makes things much more tactical than other first-person shooters where you can carry a seemingly endless amount of guns. The combination of guns you can dual-wield also adds a layer of complexity. Your choices for attack while carrying a rocket launcher are much different than when carrying dual spikers. The new deployable items such as the bubble shield also give you some options in play. Halo has a much different feel than almost any other first-person shooter, and that very distinct feel is one of the reasons the series has such a dedicated following.

The game types and variants are too numerous to list. There is Slayer, which is every man for himself. There are also one or two Capture the Flags, as well as Oddball, a game where you have to hold onto a skull to gain points while everyone else tries to kill you. Then there is Infection, where you infect others to turn them into "zombies" while the living try to hunt you down. This is just scratching the surface, and it’s hard to play everything, especially given how easy it is to tweak maps. You want to play Capture the Flag with low gravity, using only swords and no grenades? You can do it. Slayer with nothing but pistols? Simple. In many gaming sessions, players spent much of the time experimenting with the maps, variables, and weapon loadouts to create our own play ideas. The sky is the limit, and this is before we even get to the Forge, which we’ll touch on later.

In matchmaking, the game also awards experience points based on how many games you play and how well you do, allowing you to level up and find games that match your skill level. You can choose playlists that stick to team-based games, or games for beginners, or games that are made for single players, the "Lone Wolves." The matchmaking does a good job of keeping things hopping and allowing you to find games that match your taste, but more fun can be had in custom games.

Matchmaking too often throws you into lame game types with racist and snotty players; the stereotype of the annoying and immature Xbox Live player wasn't made up. The key to enjoying Halo 3 online is find a good friends list of players you enjoy spending time with. Custom games felt like hanging out and having a great time, and matchmaking felt more like I was forced to attend parties in places I didn't want to go where I hated everyone. No, thanks; I did enough of that in college.

With the power of my mind, I can create grenades
Have you ever wanted to change the basic mechanics of a map? The Forge is where things get really interesting. This is a game mode that operates much like Team Slayer, but the catch is that any player can change into a floating Guilty Spark-like monitor and edit the level. While the map itself can't be changed in terms of terrain and textures, you can spawn any weapon, change spawn points, move or add vehicles, or simply remove everything and start with a blank slate. You may wonder what would happen if you had ten fusion coils under a Warthog and then blew it up; the Forge allows you to try this in a matter of seconds. The ability to change the dynamics of levels and how they play is a welcome tool, and very soon you’ll begin to see the possibilities.

Take for instance, my favorite new game type: Mounts. We downloaded the Sandtrap "Race" map variant, a version of the huge sandy level that Bungie changed to include nothing but the ATV-like Mongoose. Then in the Forge we dropped in a ton of rocket launchers and made them spawn in almost instantly. We changed the player spawns to put each person right beside a Mongoose. We then split everyone up in teams of two players each, with one player driving, and the other firing the rocket launcher. It turns into a fast-paced game of chicken as teams zip around each other, trying to ram the other players or blow them up with a rocket launcher. I can play Mounts for hours, and it's a new game type that only took about fifteen minutes to put together. The Internet community is going to be inventing new ideas like this constantly; we've only seen the beginning of what the Forge will let us do.

Keep in mind that on every map you have a budget: a total amount of "money" you can spend on items, and each item has a different dollar amount attached to it. A Scorpion will be much more expensive than a plasma grenade. To give you as much freedom as possible, a very nice member of the Bungie.net community has released "canvas" versions of each map, with all the items removed. These give you a very nice template to start with.

The Forge is fun to play games in, with players spawning vehicles and weapons left and right and causing mass chaos, but careful and slow map creation in order to save your creation and play in custom games is where this mode really shines. It's a powerful tool to allow you to play to your own tastes, and I can't wait to see what players come up with.

The kid stays in the picture
Movie-making was one of the most hyped features of Halo 3, and while I’ve enjoyed playing with it, I have a few problems with execution. The game automatically saves the games you play as videos, which you can then view from the Theater. During the playback you can pause and take screenshots, either in first or third-person view, and you can also view the action through the eyes of any player involved. If you want to get more cinematic, you can remove the camera from the players and move it wherever you'd like on the map. This makes a kind of forensic analysis of your play possible: if you want to know how the opposing team got to an area so quickly, jump to those players and watch them in the playback. There is no more lying; everything you do is on the record. Video or it didn't happen.

But the videos taken automatically are only part of the fun. Hit "record" and you can then direct a video clip of particularly cool scenes with your own camera moves. Pretty neat, huh? This feature allows you to create little movies and take cinematic screenshots, but there are a few problems.

For instance, while you can take clips of matches, there is no way to edit them together into a sort of "best kills" compilation. There is also no way to export videos from your system without a capture card and a computer. Games like skate allow you to move your videos to places online where you don't need a 360 to view them; I wish Halo 3 included the same feature. I also wish I could edit movies together in-game. You can also freeze the action, watch in slow motion, or make it play forward more rapidly. The problem is that there aren't as many features for rewind, which simply jumps you back in chunks. If you've missed your shot, it's not possible to go backwards with any precision to find the perfect starting point. It's not very intuitive, and it can be very annoying.

Still, the movie mode is a fun feature, even if it isn't as powerful as we might have hoped. The machinima crowd is going to go crazy with this; expect to see a flood of movies starring Halo characters any minute now. There is nothing better than getting a masterful kill, saving the clip, and then sending it over to the victim. It's like rubbing it in perpetually.

Summing it up
It's clear that the real value of the Halo 3 purchase is in online play, and Bungie.net is the glue that holds all of this together. You can queue up downloads online, look at your stats, check out your screenshots, and obsess about your scores and ability. The official site gives you a ton of information about each match you play and allows you to check out screenshots and stats on all your friends.

The co-op mode adds life to the campaign, the Forge gives more life to the maps, and the ability to tweak the settings of each game type makes sure you rarely have to play the same game twice if you don't want to. Finding new modes and tweaks is easy: just see what other players have shared, or go to the Bungie favorites area and see what they have come up with.

It's easy to look down on the single player campaign. It's by-the-numbers Halo, with a pretty mediocre story. How do you make it better? Dump in a few more players, take the time to design your own game types, and you have the next few months of your life planned out.

Why finish the fight when you can continue picking new ones?

The final score
Now that we've looked at the good and bad of both the single-player campaign and the multiplayer aspects of the game, it's easy to give the whole game a final score. While the single-player game just doesn't deliver the thrills and story that other recently released single-player games have, the sheer number of multiplayer features and the freedom to change the game takes the entire experience to a new level. If you don't have Xbox Live, Halo 3 may be an easy game to skip. If you spend a lot of time online, welcome to the one of the best online experiences on any system in recent memory.

Yes, that includes the PC.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by DrSpike
I think these threads have to set a record for longest sustained argument about a game none of the most outspoken participants have actually played.

I've been playing it in spurts. I guess I am up to the bit where you have to attack the towers for some reason that isn't quite made clear.

It's an OK game, but the graphics are substandard. Jaggies everywhere. I don't think it is the flagship game that Microsoft wanted, but they have Gears of War, so they can't complain.

[Asher]

Which display and connection type do you use? Do you have your sharpness settings too high?

The meat of the game is in MP. Doesn't sound like you've played it online at all.

[Verto]

People who whine about Halo 3 suck at it. Enough with the *****fest.

[Wiglaf]

What a retarded post.

[Verto]

Of course, but it's still accurate.

[Wiglaf]

Well yes I am crap at Halo and Agathon claims he is bad as well. But it is sort of irrelevant to the discussion. Which is over regardless, I think we agreed on everything pretty much.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Asher
While ArsTechnica gave the SP Halo 3 a 7/10, they just reviewed the MP portion and gave that a 10/10 -- 9/10 overall.

Here we dismantle the opinions of Wiglaf (people buy for the SP, Halo 3 is a rehash, Halo 3 is not innovative) and Agathon (Warhawk is better multiplayer):

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/halo-3-multiplayer.ars

We've already reviewed the single-player campaign of Halo 3, and our thoughts on that experience speak for themselves. But the single-player game is only a very small part of why people buy Halo 3, and the online features of the title are almost insanely ambitious. In this review we're going to look at what Bungie wanted to accomplish with the online portion of Halo 3 and how well they achieved those goals. People are still playing Halo 2 online in large numbers after almost three years, so Halo 3 has some big shoes to fill.

This review isn't an easy thing to write: Halo 3 features many, many multiplayer options spread across 11 maps, a co-op game with its own built-in scoring system, a new level editor called The Forge, and, of course, you have to take into account the numberless game types and downloadable tweaks that the game supports (not to mention the social aspect of playing with the unwashed masses of Xbox Live). For the past week I've been playing at home, at friends' houses, online, offline... I've been living Halo 3 with other players. It's not a bad assignment to be given.

So let's see what is added when you throw more than one player into the mix. I'll drive, you grab the gun, and we'll see who we can shoot.

Load up on guns, bring your friends....

When you play through the campaign of Halo 3 in single-player mode, you start the scene, move forward, kill everything, move forward, see a cut-scene, move forward, repeat. The gameplay can feel a little monotonous, and the AI-controlled soldiers who are supposed to be fighting with you don't do much. God help you if you grab the Warthog’s turret and let the AI drive.

The enemy AI gets better on Heroic and Legendary, but it mainly makes you a more conservative player. I played through the entire game in two sittings, thinking I would never again play the campaign mode. For me, it was competition play and the Forge from now on.

How wrong I was.

During my first co-op game I was riding on the back seat of the Mongoose, Halo 3's ATV-like transport, zipping between the Covenant Wraiths (large tanks) as they battered our forces. We were outgunned, surrounded by enemy turrets and vehicles, and didn't know what to do. So we kept moving, dodging fire where we could. "Get me close to that Wraith; I have an idea," I said, and my partner did so. I leapt off the Mongoose behind the Wraith, jumped on, and slammed a sticky-grenade onto the side of the vehicle. Of course, then everyone knew where I was, and opened fire. My shield was almost gone when I heard...

"I have ya!" my cohort said and pulled a quick U-turn, allowing me to again jump onto the back of the Mongoose and zip away, still alive. It was, if I say so myself, a daring maneuver on the difficulty we were playing at, and I was impressed that we both survived. This never could have happened in single-player; the coordinated attacks you can pull off with another good player are amazing to behold. The co-op in Halo 3 allows up to four players at once, and in the games I've played so far, I haven’t seen a hint of lag. You haven't lived until you've attacked an enemy's fortified position with a Scorpion tank providing covering fire while three of your teammates assault the base on foot. The co-op play makes the campaign feel alive, and you can do things working together that you wouldn't dream of alone. While playing the campaign by yourself can feel clunky and artificial, playing with other skilled players is like living the best buddy-action movie you've ever seen.

Playing through the first two Halos on co-op was fun, but nothing matches playing four-player co-op on Xbox Live, with each player having a full screen, voice chat, and no lag. This is the best possible way to play the game, and it is incredibly addicting.

The other aspect that makes co-op so enjoyable is the co-op scoring feature of the game. If you turn this on, the game begins to track who kills what and awards points for your performance. What you kill, how you kill it, how quickly you finish the mission, and how many times you die can boost or diminish your score, and at the end of each mission you get a nice little tally that lets you know how well you did in comparison with the other players.

This adds a whole new level to co-op play, with players either competing for the high score or choosing to work as a team, and you'll learn more about your style of play from your totals. For instance, I tend to get many more kills than the people I play with, but I also die a whole helluva lot. Learning this, I held back instead of charging in for melee kills, which helped the entire team as I stayed alive much longer. Replayability also goes through the roof with this feature enabled. Can you beat each mission while beating your old scores? Can you beat your times? Can you try to get double the kills of someone else?

You can also help your scoring by scouring the game for a series of skulls hidden in each mission. These skulls give you point multipliers and other effects as you carry them around. While there are guides to finding these, you'll have much more fun finding them for yourself.

Keep in mind that the best way to play co-op is online. The game offers splitscreen, and it's fun, but for some reason the game becomes letterboxed, eating up some of your screen real estate. No fun at all.

Co-op, along with the optional scoring system, adds literally hundreds of hours of play time to the campaign. There is always something new to try, new tactics to perfect with new players, and higher scores to go after. It's a thrill that playing alone just can't match. Time to make some friends.

The co-op is fun and all, but sometimes you just want to blow stuff up, and that's where competitive play comes in. There is still no in-game server browser, so you have to either start your own custom game and invite friends or wait for strangers to join, or subject yourself to the matchmaking service that pairs you with people who are hopefully near the same skill level and then hope it gives you a game type and map you like. I'm not thrilled at this lack of control, but it didn't seem like I would ever have to wait long for a game to come up. However, I was often playing maps and game types I didn't care for, and I soon built up an extensive friend list so we could control what we played.

The game ships with eleven maps, which is a smallish number, but of course the for-pay map packs are more likely than not right around the corner. Also keep in mind that some of these maps are based on older ones; Valhalla is basically Blood Gulch, and Last Resort is a Zanzibar remake. Even with the retreads, the 11 maps do a good job of keeping you interested, and each one is ideal for a different sort of play.

Also helpful is the limitation of being able to carry two weapons at once. This makes things much more tactical than other first-person shooters where you can carry a seemingly endless amount of guns. The combination of guns you can dual-wield also adds a layer of complexity. Your choices for attack while carrying a rocket launcher are much different than when carrying dual spikers. The new deployable items such as the bubble shield also give you some options in play. Halo has a much different feel than almost any other first-person shooter, and that very distinct feel is one of the reasons the series has such a dedicated following.

The game types and variants are too numerous to list. There is Slayer, which is every man for himself. There are also one or two Capture the Flags, as well as Oddball, a game where you have to hold onto a skull to gain points while everyone else tries to kill you. Then there is Infection, where you infect others to turn them into "zombies" while the living try to hunt you down. This is just scratching the surface, and it’s hard to play everything, especially given how easy it is to tweak maps. You want to play Capture the Flag with low gravity, using only swords and no grenades? You can do it. Slayer with nothing but pistols? Simple. In many gaming sessions, players spent much of the time experimenting with the maps, variables, and weapon loadouts to create our own play ideas. The sky is the limit, and this is before we even get to the Forge, which we’ll touch on later.

In matchmaking, the game also awards experience points based on how many games you play and how well you do, allowing you to level up and find games that match your skill level. You can choose playlists that stick to team-based games, or games for beginners, or games that are made for single players, the "Lone Wolves." The matchmaking does a good job of keeping things hopping and allowing you to find games that match your taste, but more fun can be had in custom games.

Matchmaking too often throws you into lame game types with racist and snotty players; the stereotype of the annoying and immature Xbox Live player wasn't made up. The key to enjoying Halo 3 online is find a good friends list of players you enjoy spending time with. Custom games felt like hanging out and having a great time, and matchmaking felt more like I was forced to attend parties in places I didn't want to go where I hated everyone. No, thanks; I did enough of that in college.

With the power of my mind, I can create grenades
Have you ever wanted to change the basic mechanics of a map? The Forge is where things get really interesting. This is a game mode that operates much like Team Slayer, but the catch is that any player can change into a floating Guilty Spark-like monitor and edit the level. While the map itself can't be changed in terms of terrain and textures, you can spawn any weapon, change spawn points, move or add vehicles, or simply remove everything and start with a blank slate. You may wonder what would happen if you had ten fusion coils under a Warthog and then blew it up; the Forge allows you to try this in a matter of seconds. The ability to change the dynamics of levels and how they play is a welcome tool, and very soon you’ll begin to see the possibilities.

Take for instance, my favorite new game type: Mounts. We downloaded the Sandtrap "Race" map variant, a version of the huge sandy level that Bungie changed to include nothing but the ATV-like Mongoose. Then in the Forge we dropped in a ton of rocket launchers and made them spawn in almost instantly. We changed the player spawns to put each person right beside a Mongoose. We then split everyone up in teams of two players each, with one player driving, and the other firing the rocket launcher. It turns into a fast-paced game of chicken as teams zip around each other, trying to ram the other players or blow them up with a rocket launcher. I can play Mounts for hours, and it's a new game type that only took about fifteen minutes to put together. The Internet community is going to be inventing new ideas like this constantly; we've only seen the beginning of what the Forge will let us do.

Keep in mind that on every map you have a budget: a total amount of "money" you can spend on items, and each item has a different dollar amount attached to it. A Scorpion will be much more expensive than a plasma grenade. To give you as much freedom as possible, a very nice member of the Bungie.net community has released "canvas" versions of each map, with all the items removed. These give you a very nice template to start with.

The Forge is fun to play games in, with players spawning vehicles and weapons left and right and causing mass chaos, but careful and slow map creation in order to save your creation and play in custom games is where this mode really shines. It's a powerful tool to allow you to play to your own tastes, and I can't wait to see what players come up with.

The kid stays in the picture
Movie-making was one of the most hyped features of Halo 3, and while I’ve enjoyed playing with it, I have a few problems with execution. The game automatically saves the games you play as videos, which you can then view from the Theater. During the playback you can pause and take screenshots, either in first or third-person view, and you can also view the action through the eyes of any player involved. If you want to get more cinematic, you can remove the camera from the players and move it wherever you'd like on the map. This makes a kind of forensic analysis of your play possible: if you want to know how the opposing team got to an area so quickly, jump to those players and watch them in the playback. There is no more lying; everything you do is on the record. Video or it didn't happen.

But the videos taken automatically are only part of the fun. Hit "record" and you can then direct a video clip of particularly cool scenes with your own camera moves. Pretty neat, huh? This feature allows you to create little movies and take cinematic screenshots, but there are a few problems.

For instance, while you can take clips of matches, there is no way to edit them together into a sort of "best kills" compilation. There is also no way to export videos from your system without a capture card and a computer. Games like skate allow you to move your videos to places online where you don't need a 360 to view them; I wish Halo 3 included the same feature. I also wish I could edit movies together in-game. You can also freeze the action, watch in slow motion, or make it play forward more rapidly. The problem is that there aren't as many features for rewind, which simply jumps you back in chunks. If you've missed your shot, it's not possible to go backwards with any precision to find the perfect starting point. It's not very intuitive, and it can be very annoying.

Still, the movie mode is a fun feature, even if it isn't as powerful as we might have hoped. The machinima crowd is going to go crazy with this; expect to see a flood of movies starring Halo characters any minute now. There is nothing better than getting a masterful kill, saving the clip, and then sending it over to the victim. It's like rubbing it in perpetually.

Summing it up
It's clear that the real value of the Halo 3 purchase is in online play, and Bungie.net is the glue that holds all of this together. You can queue up downloads online, look at your stats, check out your screenshots, and obsess about your scores and ability. The official site gives you a ton of information about each match you play and allows you to check out screenshots and stats on all your friends.

The co-op mode adds life to the campaign, the Forge gives more life to the maps, and the ability to tweak the settings of each game type makes sure you rarely have to play the same game twice if you don't want to. Finding new modes and tweaks is easy: just see what other players have shared, or go to the Bungie favorites area and see what they have come up with.

It's easy to look down on the single player campaign. It's by-the-numbers Halo, with a pretty mediocre story. How do you make it better? Dump in a few more players, take the time to design your own game types, and you have the next few months of your life planned out.

Why finish the fight when you can continue picking new ones?

The final score
Now that we've looked at the good and bad of both the single-player campaign and the multiplayer aspects of the game, it's easy to give the whole game a final score. While the single-player game just doesn't deliver the thrills and story that other recently released single-player games have, the sheer number of multiplayer features and the freedom to change the game takes the entire experience to a new level. If you don't have Xbox Live, Halo 3 may be an easy game to skip. If you spend a lot of time online, welcome to the one of the best online experiences on any system in recent memory.

Yes, that includes the PC.

That's actually the best review I've read and pretty much echoes my views so far.

It would also seem to back up one argument Wiglaf made on Halo 3 not being that good if you don't have XBL, which IIRC you disputed.

[Asher]

That's not what Wiglaf said and I'm sure you know it.

[Wiglaf]

Er...I spent about 30 posts talking about the single player being a let down, and how that's not a good reason to be excited for Halo 3. You responded by saying how awesome bubble shields and the AI are, which are both pretty silly since neither is a huge innovation.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5057163#post5057163

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5057283#post5057283

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5057278#post5057278

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5057289#post5057289

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5055774#post5055774

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5054932#post5054932