WOW! Halo 3 is a BLAST!

So I picked up Halo 3 at the midnight opening on Monday the 24th. I've never really been that big of a Halo fan. I've played very little of both one and two. I'm not sure what happen, but I got hit HARD with the Halo bug for part three. Let me explain, I went out and bought the Legendary set which cost me $130 bucks. 7-11 had 3 Halo hologram Slurpee cups so I went out and got those as well, Picked up a bottle of the Halo inspired drink called "Game Fuel" from Mountain Dew (which is really disgusting BTW). Medicom Toys released a Kubrik Master Chief collectors set with 4 different variations of the main character (Master Chief). My favorite of the toys released so far. Plus a slew of other toys that were released already and others will be in the near future. So anyway, I get home with this monster box which holds my Spartan Helmet and 2 DVDs (one for the game and another with extras). I crack open the game and throw it in my 360. That's when I knew I was in trouble. I was immediately hooked! I started with some Multi-player action and knew I was in for a rude awakening. This game is tough online, I had people on my team yelling at me that I sucked. Now you have to remember I never really played much of Halo. A really good part of 8 months was me playing Gears Of War. Halo has a completely different style of gameplay, which took me about 2 days to get used to the new controls but once I got the hang of it, It was ON! Like most online games there are rankings (level ups). Which doesn't really do anything for your character per say it's more of a bragging right. Seeing someone who is a captain vs. a recruit you know the captain knows his shit. All in all I love the multi-player aspect of Halo.

On to the story mode.. Thank god I have good friends who also picked up the game as well. A new feature in the series is a 4 player live co-op mode for the campaign. What that entails is being able to play the story mode with 3 other players anywhere in the world. Since my friends live all over the country this feature is priceless IMHO. 9 levels on Legendary mode (The Hardest mode in the game) with 3 of my friends was a complete blast to play. Being able to jump on a Warthog (a truck with a chaingun on the back of it) with one of your friends driving it and you operating the chaingun through a level, trying to avoid being hit or driving off a cliff is very intense, but yet very satisfying at the same time. The laughs we would have trying to discover where all the Skulls in the game were. Skulls are in secret locations throughout the game which open up options for you to tweek the game with. For example the Grunt Birthday Party Skull Effect is: When you get a headshot on an enemy Grunt, they will explode into confetti, and you'll hear children cheer. How awesome is that? Searching for the skulls took indurance and patience but the outcome is quite rewarding. The story of the game is your basic Sci-Fi: Man vs Alien, protect what's left of the world sort of thing. Not knowing the story for the two previous games didn't take away from the enjoyment I had from it.

A new feature in Halo 3 is Theater Mode. This allows you to go back and watch a stage you played on in either Multi-player or Campaign mode. For example say you threw a grenade and you killed 2 other players, what you can do is replay a video to that exact moment freeze frame it and take a snapshot of it. A great little thing they added is to be able to get a free roaming camera so you can take a snapshot from any angle. I find myself going back to theater mode to take some great snapshots all the time now. The photos are uploaded to Bungies website (The makers of Halo) which you can save or even share them with your friends.

Hands down I would recommend this game to anyone in to First Person Shooters or FPS for short. I'm off to play some more now!

Here is a victory pic of my friends and I after we spent a good 30+ minutes searching for a skull!