halo armor

So, here I am again: Standing on a sandy beach, near the edge of a pine-tree forest, hunched behind a stone outcropping -- while an army of bellowing aliens singe my armor with 3,000-degree bolts of plasma.

Does this feel familiar? Of course it does. I'm playing Halo 3, the final part of the 15-million-copy-selling trilogy. And the designers at Bungie Studios are trying to satisfy the same sort of paradoxical longing from their audience that pop bands wrestle with: We want them to do exactly the same thing they did on their first album -- but, y'know, even better.

So when I got to that sandy-beach level, I had a jolt of déjà vu, because it looked eerily similar to the sandy-beach-and-pine-trees level in ... the first Halo. Then I realized this was probably intentional: The designers are giving me the architectural equivalent of a wink and a nod.

Halo hype has been with us for so long that the backlash is already upon us, even before the new game's launch. If you're a gamer, you've heard the carping: What's the big deal about Halo? The graphics are middling, it's just another first-person shooter, the story arc is huge and trilogy-tastic, but hey -- lots of games have all that these days.

Those critiques are all partly true. But having spent a weekend finishing the single-player campaign of Halo 3, I've found that it still has the elusive quality that the original Halo possessed, the one many games since have strived mightily to achieve: an effortless, acrobatic sense of balance.

In Halo 3, as in the first Halo, each fight is a lightning-fast game of chess. You've got three main ways to attack -- firing a gun, throwing a grenade or running up and "melee" punching someone -- and each battle inevitably requires you use all three. Like rock, paper and scissors, each attack solves a problem the others can't, but none are dominant; you cannot simply rely on one technique. You have to master them all, and then make constant, split-second decisions about which one fits what sort of fight. Will a grenade break up that clot of nasty Brutes? Or should you fall back and snipe them? Or confuse them with the machine gun, then give each one strong whack?

Like I said, ever since Halo perfected it, most games have copied this style of play. But you rarely see it executed so sweetly. I love BioShock, in part because it has the same mental gymnastics: You have to constantly figure out which power-ups to use to fight different battles. But the mechanism for switching between power-ups in BioShock is just a wee bit more cumbersome than in Halo, forcing you to either cycle through different skills or actually pause the action while you select one -- and either option breaks your flow. With Halo 3, in contrast, you're carrying fewer weapons, so switching from one to another is instantaneous.

This distinction seems ridiculously tiny, but it makes an enormous difference when you're fighting 12 shrieking enemies. The essence of good design is knowing when not to add complexity, and Bungie nails that with this game.

I picked up Halo 3 this morning at Fry's Electronics (Greenway / Phx location), who interestingly enough had a few stacks of Legendary Editions on sale in case you're in the market for one. They also had a shelf of tin CE boxes, but after reading about the scratched-up disc problem, I opted for a normal version. I was worried they might be sold out, but the Halo 3 display (they had a little tent) was barely touched. It was early though (9:45 AM), so I wouldn't declare the game to be a sales dud just yet.
This was my first real encounter with Halo 3, as I didn't go to that review event thing, so here goes:

Gameplay - Ugh at gamepads and first person shooters. I'm pretty awful with them, but after an hour or two, you get used to it. Once you slip into that comfort zone, the controls aren't so terrible. The new weapons are really neat (gravity hammer especially) and it's a lot of fun to be able to take chainguns off of turrets and walk around with 'em. When that happens, you zoom out into a over-the-shoulder view, which I have found is a little easier to play with. Plus, Master Chief armor looks pimp.

Graphics - While Halo 3 doesn't look bad by any stretch of the imagination, games like BioShock and Gears of War blow it away. If I was to compare it to any other 360 FPS, it would be Perfect Dark Zero. Especially the outdoor areas. The character models haven't changed all that much since Halo 2, but I think that's more of an art direction choice than anything else. The new UI is pretty slick though. developers at Bungie, the masterminds behind the Halo trilogy, say they've delivered an impressive gaming benchmark today because of the scads of technological innovations they've packed into the billion-dollar franchise's final match.

During the three-year project, 200 members of Halo 3's production staff employed an array of software, including highly specialized programs such as 3ds Max, Maya and Havok, to re-create Master Chief and the world in which he battles the evil Covenant.

"[The advances] are rendered using a new graphics engine, making the most of next-generation features like high dynamic range and pre-computed radiance transfer," said Frank O'Connor, Bungie's lead writer.




Everything from the creation of the sky to detailed lighting concepts went into the high-definition graphics. High dynamic range or HDR helped enhance the simulation of how light realistically affected the eye. "Think of it at its simplest as simulating real sunlight, complete with the overexposure that human eyes suffer when moving quickly from darkness into light," O'Conner said.

Pre-computed radiance, or PRT, made it possible to create more realistic shadows and reflections to foster an immersion experience, such as the self-shadowing textures in Master Chief's armor, or the real time reflections on his visor, O'Connor said.

"We tend to innovate in fairly innocuous and invisible ways," he said. "We can effectively simulate the effects of pollution and dust particles in the air to create a completely realistic blue sky. Sounds simple enough, but the effect is much more convincing than simply putting a big blue graphic on your horizon."

Bungie created a new variation on the game's musical themes this time around. Martin O'Donnell, Bungie's composer, incorporated a full live orchestra and chorus, which goes "above and beyond" what they've done in the past, he said on Bungie's Web site.

More then 800,000 gamers previewed a limited public beta version of the game on Xbox Live in May. The feedback was groundbreaking and paved the way for many last-minute touch-ups, O'Connor said.

Other new tech advances include a "saved films" feature that allows players to save matches and replay them from any angle. A new program called Forge lets players create environments for up to 16 players to compete over Xbox Live, the online networking component incorporated into Microsoft's Xbox 360 console.