I’m sure some of you are surprised with it being over a week now since Halo 3 was released and I’m yet to write about it. In fact, I have no intentions on really getting into it just yet as I still have so much to take in. It really is a complete package. Of course, you have the killer single player campaign with about 18 reasons to replay it. The ridiculously fun and addictive multiplayer that will no doubt be the top Xbox Live game for years to come. Plus, there’s the addition of fun toys like Saved Films and Forge. I’m still wrapped up in the campaign and have barely scraped the surface of the other aspects of the game, so I’ll hold my critique for now.
As we approached the September 25 release date, I was excited, sure. But I wasn’t ecstatic about Halo 3. I assume this had to do with Skate only being out for a week and the Half-Life 2 bundle (The Orange Box) just a couple weeks away. It wasn’t until about 4pm on September 24 that I became increasingly antsy. By 6pm I had decided that I would take a nap after dinner, then hit a mid-night launch event. Not only that, but I had told myself that I would pick up the Legendary Edition if there were any left. All of the sudden, I was a total Halo fanatic and I didn’t even see it coming. Sure enough, I was in line at 11:30pm and out the door at 12:03am with a Legendary Edition under my arm and a ridiculous smile on my face.
Once I got into the game, I paced myself by only doing a single mission in each sitting. As excited as I was to have it, I didn’t want to just blow through it and be done with it. By doing this, I managed to drag my excitement out over the course of about 4 days. But here I am today – 8 days after its release and I’ve put about 3 hours into the campaign since I got up this morning. After my first run through, I started replaying some of the missions I really enjoyed – which turned out to be nearly all of them. My daughter Hannah, has been spending more time watching me play games recently and one evening when she seemed particularly interested I passed her a controller and began to teach her the ropes. In no time, she was taking dudes down with the butt end of her rifle. “Did you see that Daddy? I just nailed that Brute!” – that’s my girl! We’ve been playing a mission a night and are approaching the end now. We had to stop early last night, before getting to the end of The Ark. Hannah was bummed because she didn’t get the Achievement before bed. 🙂
I had to apologize to Hannah tonight, as we didn’t get to finish up The Ark. I’ve been pretty much obsessed with collecting the skulls since I started a couple nights ago. I figured I could blow through the campaign again – jumping in where I needed to in order to snag the skulls. I guess I didn’t read the walkthrough clearly enough, as some of them took a good hour to get due to being near the end of the mission. Others, were just a pain in the ass! Catch and Cowbell in particular, had me so damn frustrated. Well, let’s just say I had to ask Hannah to leave the room a couple times. 😉 Regardless, I have them all now and am rocking the Hayabusa armor in full effect!
To sum it up – there’s so much game here, I’ll be playing it for months on end without a doubt. It really has been worth the wait and deserves every bit of hype it’s received. It seems like I’m almost done playing the campaign solo (with the exception of co-op with Hannah) and will be venturing into the online games more so. I really want to rock some 4 player co-op, but I think I’ll hold that off until I’m itching to get back to the campaign again.
For those playing the game and having fun with Saved Films, be sure to grab some screenshots and add them to the Halo 3 Screenshots pool I started on Flickr. It’s already nearly 60 members strong and houses over 200 screenshots.
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