First off, I feel the need to start this off by saying that I’ve never played Halo before playing the Halo 3 Beta. Of course I’ve heard of the series, but beyond seeing a few videos or watching a buddy play for a few minutes, it would be fair to say that yours truely is a “Halo Newbie”. So if you are looking for a different perspective on the series, you have come to the right place.

Game Interface Design/Menu System
You load up the game, and if you enjoy a clean easy to use game menu system, your first impression will be “wow”. Bungie (the developer of the game) obviously spent a good deal of time designing a game navigation that is smooth, seamless, and very easy to use. This can easily be overlooked by a development team (see: Madden 07 Next Gen) but they didn’t and they deserve a great deal of credit.

Communication/Chat
Open dialogue exists while waiting for a game to load, or looking for a game with your party members, however once you enter a game there are a few things you may want to familiarize yourself with.To communicate with team members from a distance you need to press down (or any direction) on your directional pad. You will hear a buzzing sound letting you know the airwaves are all yours. You don’t need to press anything again to disconnect, the system will automatically buzz out when you are finished speaking.

The game also allows for proximity based sound as well, meaning when you are near your team member you can hear them speaking and communicate with them freely without pressing anything. By default the sound of their voice (and yours on their end) will be broadcasted from your TV speakers, so you may want to adjust that in preferences if you don’t want it to do that.

Party Feature
Another feature is the ability to invite your friends into a “party” which is nice. As the party leader you can take your friends with you to new matches and not have to worry about re-inviting everyone or having them search for your username. Never again will you have to worry about hearing “The room is full, it says I can’t join!” Bungie has made those problems a thing of the past.

Online Game Performance Issues/Lag
Being that Bungie uses their own servers (not all games do this by default) lag was not an issue. As someone that was new to the series, it was impressive. This may have always been the case with Bungie, but as an outsider playing the game for the first time it definitely makes for a less frustrating experience.

Skill Level Matching
Bungie has created a system that matches you and your party to with other players to form a team and then does this again to form your opponents team. It does it based on skill levels and more often than not does a pretty good job of creating a great game play experience.In terms of the time you have to wait while the system does this, Our party experienced a wait of about 5 minutes on average between games to get matched up with another team of equal experience on more than one occasion.

However, it must be said that while this can and does slow the speed by which you can join into new matches the party didn’t seem turned off by it at all. It will give you time to reflect on the game that you just played and most importantly it allows you to familiarize yourself with the game without having to worry about being annihilated by a Halo pro every two seconds…which is great unless you ARE that Halo pro.

Graphics
The environment that Bungie has created based on the 3 maps that we played in the demo were very bright, well lit, and fun to play. There is a little bit of everything for everyone. If you like to snipe, no problem. If you like to run and gun, again not a problem. The maps are well thought out with nice open areas, places to hide out, a nice mix of high ground and low ground.

That doesn’t mean we are saying these are the best graphics we have ever seen but taking into consideration that some tradeoffs have to be made to stream information over the internet and keep frame rates at a decent speed we were willing to overlook the fact that you can’t see the master chief’s nose hairs through his shiny visor. In all seriousness though, the game looks great. You can argue that this view is coming from someone who grew up playing games like Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers, and you would have be correct. However, hopefully you would agree that what sets a great game apart from a good game is having the right balance between game play and visual detail. That is something this game definitely has.

Sound
A good game soundtrack transports you to a different place and helps you buy into the universe of the game. The music in this game has a very larger than life feel to it. From the first note, you get the buy into the notion that you are involved in something very crucial, an epic in the making. As you wait for the next match to begin it empowers you, and gives you a sense of anticipation and excitement.

Fun Factor
The Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta is very enjoyable and addictive. The ability to play with other players of the same skill level made it easy to break into the game as a first time player without being discouraged.

Lasting Appeal
If you like online shooters, fast and furious game play, and want to have lots of fun this game will not grow old. Unfortunately there is only one way to play the Beta at the moment and that is buy purchasing Crackdown and downloading the Beta through the Crackdown game interface. The Beta expires in less than 3 weeks, after that you won’t be able to play the game again until its official release in September 07.

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Tags: Bungie, Halo-3, online-multiplayer

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