Halo 3 IMAX Premier Reactions

Mid-day Monday, an announcement appeared on Bungie.net. A free, first-come, first-served demo of Halo 3 at the six story IMAX screen in Seattle's Pacific Science Center. Turn-out was so high that they ended up doing two shows, one at 10 and one at 11. Good for me, since I didn't get there until 9:30 and was 300th in line for the second show. Boy, does this game bring all kinds of people out of the woodwork (though Autumn's "Just Out Of Curiousity" thread is proof enough of that).

When we finally filed into the theater, 60 feet of Master Chief was staring down at you, with the Arbiter in the background. The lobby screen. Pretty pretty. Frankie does his intro spiel -- turns out many of the Bungie folks are there, including Luke, Marty, Tyson "Ferrex" and Shi Kai. Frankie apologizes for teh sound quality, since the IMAX has some ridiculous proprietary sound system that doesn't like 5.1 much. Luke joins Frankie in the lobby and they pick Heroic difficulty to play through. Apparently in the first show they showed (by accident, maybe) how you can activate any in-game skulls that you've collected from the campaign lobby, to up the difficulty as you play.

Tsavo Highway, the third level, opens with a big rumble in a dark tunnel. Frankie flips on his flashlight and opens the big garage doors, while half a dozen marines call out all around. He and Luke jump into two warthogs, loaded with marines, and proceed to fly off through the tunnels. Cables dangle everywhere and swing back and forth as the hogs pass.

They leave the tunnel in a bright flash of HDR lighting and proceed to mow down jackals and brutes. Frankie soon ditches his warthog and gets into Luke's. Between gunning down bad guys he pans around the environment -- it's really gorgeous. Much more polished than the beta, as you'd expect. F&L jump in and out of the hogs from time to time, dispensing carnage on foot and battling Brutes, Grunts and Jackals. A Brute deploys a flare, which washes the screen completely white if you're on top of it, but has a cool "overexposed" effect as you get farther away.

They continue on, eventually encountering a squad of choppers which they manage to take over after a couple of deaths. The demo moves through a short tunnel, then pops back into the open, at which point Frankie looks to the sky for no apparent reason... until a monstrous Covenant cruiser flys by, not more than a few hundred feet up. It shakes the ground and the rumble of the air is palpable even with the bad sound system.

This is where they stopped, in the first show of the night. They played through another major encounter for the second show, since we had waited so long to get in. We ended up seeing about twice as much campaign, apparently.

Luke and Frankie pull up to a broad spot in the valley floor. All kinds of wreckage and detritus are littered around and there are marines holed up in a bunker on the left (the garage, presumably). Carnage ensues as F&L fight off the brutes and grunts that are giving hell to the marines.

As a phantom moves in, Luke breaks off to the right and Frankie mounts up behind a turret in the garage and starts trying to take out the phantom's gun. He takes heavy fire and picks up the turret to move to cover, still trying for the phantom -- it seemed clear that he was trying to do enough damage to take the phantom down, but before he could Brutes started peppering him with fire and he had to change his targets.

He and Luke seemed to work together, often setting their sights on the same jet-pack brute to take it down, but the brutes would deploy half-moon shields or bubble shields if they were taking heavy fire. At one point Luke drops a bubble so they can catch a break, while Frankie peeks out and tosses two grenades through a broken culvert at a pair of brutes. The second blast takes them out, with an audible scream from one of them.

As the brutes get picked off, a voice comes over the radio warning of an inbound wraith. Frankie pops over the hill and lays into it, ultimately clearing the way for two pelicans to come in and drop hogs, which Frankie and Luke proceed to destroy in foolish glee, meleeing and tea-bagging to end the demo. Awesome.

Other highlights from campaign -- the flare is very cool; the big-ass plasma turret support weapon is awesome; the chopper looks just badass. In all, I can feel the expansive level design already, and this wasn't even one of the biggest.

Forge -- sweet jeebus. This is going to be really fun. The budget system seems good, though I think people will max out quickly if they put a lot of big-ticket items in -- you won't be putting 6 scorpions on High Ground, for example, I think. Not sure if the budget increases for larger maps. There will be oodles of 2old2pwn custom maps created here.

The flamethrower was gorgeous in first person -- flame stuck to everything, including Luke's Monitor, delivering persistent damage which killed him after a few seconds (the Monitors seem quite a bit weaker than 343 ).

Gravity hammer looks great as well. Frankie pounded a pile of fusion cores with a big downward swing, blowing them all over the map. He didn't take much/any damage from that, either. Didn't see the alternate swing.

Saved films are going to be a machinima junkie's wet dream. So versatile, so amazing. This just sounds like fanboy drivel, but it's hard to describe. Suffice to say that everything Frankie and Luke have said about it in podcasts with their guests seems to be totally true. Proof of every teabag/muff drop received will be available for all the clan to see.