Zero Punctuation Fanboy
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Archive for tag Halo3
Smackdown
Yeah! We had a good crowd on Halo 3 last night. I’m starting to get the hang of the multiplayer.
Donald and I dominated King of the Hill in multi-teams (four teams of two). We had quickly fallen to fourth place before we realized that we didn’t have to stand on the glowing point to maintain ownership of the “hill”, just to claim it. (In KoTH you get 1 point per second you own the hill.) We came back from a pretty heavy deficit (and fourth place) to claim our victory. It’s all about the teamwork.
Then Bud and Joe (Terri’s dad and brother-in-law, respectively) logged on and we switched to big team battles (two teams of 4-5) where we continued to lay smackdowns.
One of the really nifty things about Halo 3 is that you form “parties” of your friends. So Donald, Bud, Joe, and I were able to stay together as a group even as we switched game modes, servers, etc. The way it works is that one person is the party leader and the others all join. Then the party goes where the leader selects. So we could all go into theater mode and comment on fun replays, or all go into multiplayer, or all go play the single player campaign, etc. Very nice.
Hit and Fly
Halo has always had great vehicle fun. In Halo 2 Lewis, Lance, and Josh invented ‘Warthog Basketball’ wherein one would drive toward a particular spot near a particular base on a multiplayer map and the other would fire a carefully timed rocket at a precise location. If all done correctly the warthog would fly arcing into the air to fall into the slightly-larger-than-warthog sized hole in the center of the top of the base.
Fun stuff right?
But something happens when a player gets behind the wheel. Something…takes over. The urge to drive over things: grunts, elites, brutes, rocks, ramps, and, most of all, other players. It can be more fun if the other player is on foot, but isn’t strictly necessary (there is another game called Warthog Tag which quickly devolves into Warthog Smash).
Here is Donald, perched on a ride new to Halo 3, the brute chopper.
Here he is, being hit by temptation. I’m that alien in the foreground.
Incoming!
After a sucessful hit, Donald tries to strike again…but a little too close to the edge of a cliff. Oops. :-)
Ride that ride!
I tried to get a video of this hilarious back and forth, but Halo 3’s theater mode let me down by not allowing recording from a campaign.
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Halo 3 - Theater Mode
I love Halo 3’s theater mode. I can’t think of any other videogame that so gleefully invites you to meticulously examine the game from every possible angle and location. I was overjoyed to discover that theater mode is not just reserved for multiplayer, but every single game experience that you have is available for potentially painstaking examination. You can pause the action, slow motion cool scenes, have your camera follow the game character or the character of any other person you are playing with, you can even setup fixed camera locations and watch the action unfold.
That last bit is particularly fun. Rather than constraining the graphics and focus to the player-character, the creators of Halo 3 allow you to move the camera with an amazing amount of freedom. I spent ten minutes following one of my AI marines around until his bitter death at the hands of a grunt. The sheer amount of detail that my camera exposed was astonishing. Completely separated from the player/character the marine chattered with his, also AI, squad. When the marine’s leg was speared by four 2” spikes he grimaced in pain, fell back, and then struggled to fight on before finally falling to a brute’s attack.
Halo 3 is simply brimming over with this massive level of detail. Donald and I played two co-op game sessions last night that lasted about an hour each. I could easily spend three or four hours on each in theater mode and still not see everything. At one point in the game the player/character is riding up an elevator hearing about a Covenant attack over the radio. In theater mode you can actually see the attack taking place by flying the camera up ahead of the character. Where most (all?) gaming companies would justifiably only worry about detail immediately surrounding the character, Bungie has created a wealth of detail then gleefully given us gamers the tools to peruse it.
This isn’t to say that theater mode doesn’t expose the ‘game’ itself. There are the sudden pop-in and pop-outs of sets and props if you move the camera extremely distant from the player. Rather than hide this, Bungie simply accepts it as a consequence of giving the player complete freedom with the lens.
As I watched Donald and I kick Covenant ass I found myself moving the camera in and around the battles like a photographer, which is handy because it’s actually possible to take screenshots and share them with the world.
Awesome? I sure think so.
Halo 3
Amazing. The single player campaign is, so far, everything I had hoped it would be. The multiplayer is so flawlessly awesome that it practically bring tears to my eyes.
Let me just take you through a single aspect of the multiplayer: theater mode.
- The game keeps fully viewable records your last 25 online matches, meaning that for each of those matches you can watch the entire thing in slow-motion, from the perspective of any of the players, move a free roaming camera anywhere on the map
- Using these ‘video’ records you can also record screenshots and film clips
- Those film clips and screenshots can be uploaded to space provided for your user by Bungie
- Other users can browse those clips and Bungie makes finding them extremely easy. If I save a cool screenshot from a match, if I, or anyone else, looks up the detailed match information on Bungie.net my screenshot will be listed as ‘Game Assets’
After I have been beaten down (check out my Halo 3 multiplayer match record) I can view the game from the perspective of the player(s) I found most impressive and steal their tactics (which are hopefully not beyond the reach of my skill).
That previous link to my game stats bring me to another fantastic aspect of the multiplayer: stats. Some of you may remember the prodigious amount of statistics that Unreal Tournament meticulously tracked for each multiplayer match (wow, my character took 3768 steps during that match). I am pleased to report that, although Halo 3 does not surpass them, it does a fair job of rivaling them.
That’s my online character over there to the right. I’ve only unlocked the merest fraction of the upper level customization so far, but I’m pretty happy with my current look.
I’m “TheRealXyzzyB” on XBox Live because, believe it or not, someone else has the gamertag of “XyzzyB”. Obviously since I own the domain, it makes me the true personification of the handle. :-)
Halo 3 Cometh
Want to see how crazy Halo fans can get? Well then feast your eyes on this:
What is that you ask? Oh, just the spectrographic analysis of a wav file downloaded from a secret server (206.16.223.61) the existence of which was found in four numbers hidden in an online Halo 3 comic the existence of which was found in a Circuit City flyer.
What? Oh yes. Did I mention the crazy? That is merely the slightest scratch of the depth of the awesome insanity of the serious Halo 3 fan. Check this out.
Is that an Amazon graphic you see on that book? Why, yes! It is! Yes, the Halo 3 alternate reality game “Iris” has even managed to hide clues inside a book listed on Amazon.com.
Not quite crazy enough? No problem:
That is a picture posted alongside advertisements for a company called Flood Containment Control. The company has a bunch of online postings (Google search for flood containment control) ranging from advertising services, to job postings, to equipment surplus sales. But doesn’t that symbol in their example of flood damage look odd?
That’s because it is odd. It’s the ‘glyph’ symbol that represents the alternate reality game.
If you are at all curious at the huge backstory behind Halo 3, check out Halo 3: Iris Wiki, particularly the quick summary. If you just want to see all the pieces of data (e.g. a textfile of array recorder data apparently from when the halo structures were last activated) that have been found, head to the page for the secret server 206.16.223.61.