it’s September the 25th and that means that last night I picked up Halo 3 at midnight! I played a few multiplayer matches and a couple of missions of the campaign and felt like sharing some of my thoughts about my first moments with the game.

For starters, I’ve been extremely excited about this game and so far it hasn’t disappointed me too much at all. The multiplayer games are still some of the most fun you can have playing strange 14 year olds over the internet and the campaign is also as fun (if not more so) than the first 2 were. The mechanics to the game are very similar to Halo and Halo 2 with a couple of exceptions. A couple of the buttons have been moved to places where they make more sense so if you played Halo 2 24/7 for the last couple of years, your muscle memory might take a few sessions to get used to the new placement. It didn’t take me too long to get used to though.

There are a couple of new features that sounded very promising before the game released, too. There’s the Forge and Saved Films. The Forge is a level editor of sorts. Instead of working with the geometry of the level, though, you work with the entities in the level. You can change the placement of most things or add new things to the level which could completely change how the level is played. I haven’t tested this out yet so I can’t really tell you how it is but I’ll post about it later when I get a chance to use it. The Saved Films is great for the photographer and cinematographer in all of us. Because Halo 3 is such a gorgeous game, it’s extremely fun to fly around the replay of your last game and find that perfect head shot or just a cool picture. I’ve played around with this and for the most part it works really great. There are a couple of quirks that I would love to see fixed up with a patch in the near future, though.

One of the most annoying parts of the saved films is the rewind. Or lack there of in some instances. For whatever reason, any campaign saved film you are watching can not be rewound. I don’t understand why this limitation exists but it makes finding that perfect frame to capture a lot more difficult because your pretty much screwed when you pass it up and are already 30 minutes into the film. In multiplayer saved films, you can rewind though (which is why I think it’s really weird that you can’t in campaign) but the rewind just jumps back a few seconds. Currently, if you press A, the film will just play. If you press the Right Trigger, the film will play at a variable speed depending on how hard you press the Right Trigger. This makes you naturally feel like pressing the Left Trigger will rewind at a variable speed. Not the case. Instead, the left trigger is for moving your camera faster than normal. I would really like to see this fixed up in a patch or at least an explanation as to why rewinding can’t happen in a natural, fluid way like going forward. At the VERY least, I would love to be able to rewind in campaign films.

A couple other things I would love to see fixed soon with saved films are saving clips in campaign films and the quality of the screenshots. Again, I’m not sure why this is, but you can not save clips of your campaign. Just seems weird that there’s that much of a difference between multiplayer and campaign films that these limitations are in place. Also, I’ve noticed that the so-called “Hi-Res” screenshots appear to look worse than in the game. Kind of blurry almost. Like some post processing tries to make the image look more cinematic or something, but, to me, it just decreases the detail and quality of the image I’m trying to capture..

For the most part though, Saved Films work great. I love them and I can see myself spending countless hours searching through games I play to find those great shots I made, or to learn from my mistakes and see how I died, or to learn by watching the group of people who just kicked my ass 25-1. The greatness of this new feature, by far, outweighs it’s short comings. It’s still early and I’m sure they’re still working on things. I just really hope they release a patch in the future that cleans it up a little more so that it’s perfect.