BACK FROM ODST 'Firefight' preview

Just got back from Halo 3 ODST firefight truck

So lets talk about the truck. It's a customized military vehicle that some guy in ohio had stored and a 3rd party company pitched using it to bungie and microsoft and doing an ODST road tour with it. They were stoked at the idea and the rest is history.

So the truck has two tip-outs one on each side, these tip-outs are the queue benches inside, four people on each side of the truck. Then in the middle part of the truck is a long skinny island with 8 screens and 8 xboxes four on each side with tiny high chairs to sit at.

There are doors on either side, one way in, one way out. They're a bit 'rough' sounding. The guy I was talking too said the truck isn't really finished, but they had to get the tour under way. The sides of the truck are begging for ODST graphics and stuff but when I saw it, it was just black. When they get to LA later this week, it'll be getting the graphics treatment.

They also didn't really have much in the way of swag to give out. There's a little card you can pickup that reminds you of the controls and they're giving out license plate covers that say "my other car is a warthog' to the top scorer in firefight in each group of four. I was expecting at least some T-Shirts or something, maybe a hat... And people get out of the truck and line up again to play so if you're a virgin in the truck, forget about winning anything. So the swag was totally lame.

Some dude showed up in full on ODST garb, it was pretty cool. The guys running the truck were pretty excited, i guess this guy works for microsoft or something but isn't part of the promo team, he just showed up. It was a pretty sick outfit, some people have a shit ton of talent for that kind of stuff. So he posed for pictures and what not, then disappeared for a while.

The wait to get in to play ODST is totally dependant on how many people are in front of you and how many people you're with. You get to play for 10 minutes and it takes about 5 minutes to move the people from the queue and bring 8 new people in to sit in the queue, so every 15 minutes or so they're cycling 8 people in and out of the truck. So it's real easy, start counting how many groups of 8 are in front of you and multiple that by 15 minutes for each group of 8 and that'sll be your approximate wait time. For me, with a relatively light showing of gamers, the wait was an hour. Now if you go just by yourself, they ask for singles all the time to fill out the stations when groups of 3 go in. So if you want your wait to potentially be not as long, go by yourself and tell them you're a single and can fill a spot if there's a group of 3 or 2 in front of you.

Now the game itself, 'Firefight' mode is a four player co-op mode with waves upon waves of bad guys coming at you. So think horde except when you go down, there is no revivies, you go down and you're dead and have to wait to respawn. It seemed like you have a limited number of lives because the game kept announcing two lives remaining, one life remaining, no lives remaining but we could endlessly spawn for the 10 minutes even if you had no lives left. So they must have kept the announcement in but disabled not letting you spawn for the sake of the demo.

Graphics are the same as halo 3 as far as i'm concerned. People who had played and were back in line were saying how sick the graphics were but the first thing i saw when i sat down to play were jaggies. So i didn't think they were any better or worse than halo 3, it looked the same to me. I couldn't really judge sound becasue it's coming out of the screens not headphones or a sound system so the sound is crappy due to the setup not the game.

The action was pretty fast paced. Covenant drop ships would come in and drop off a shit ton of bad guys and then fly off shooting at you while they pass. In later missions they started dropping wraiths and brute cheiftans. Unlike horde, there didn't really seem to be a reason to stick together as a team since there is no reviving. So i kept close to one of the other guys playing but wasn't really working with him, more ran away with bad guys following so they'd attack him instead :lol:

I'm not really sure where or how the weapons spawn, i noticed other people who had already played running to spots and picking up the spartan laser and rocket launcher and what not but the only thing i ever found while running around with an empty gun were covenant weapons where they had died. Which was ok, i love the needler, no aiming required.

There weren't any usable vehicles in this game on this map. I'm not sure if that's the plan for the release or just a limitation of what we were playing. But having a ghost or warthog to drive around in and fight would have been nice.

In case you were wondering about the controls, right trigger is to fire your gun, right bumper was to reload and Y was to switch weapons.  Left trigger tosses grenades, left bumper chooses which grenade to toss.  B is melee, A is jump, X was a visor mode and one of the bumpers, right bumper i think picked up a gun from the ground.  The stickes worked as you would expect for moving and camera control as well as zooming.

Overall, it's a halo game. If you're not a halo fan and didn't like halo 3, then I don't expect you're going to like ODST. On the other hand if you are a halo 3 fan, then ODST should be on your september buy list. The special edition one comes with an ODST etched wireless controller for 100 bucks or you can get the regular edition for 60.

I forgot my camera here so i couldn't take pictures but i did find a UTube video of someone who went to the seattle launch of the tour, so here's a link to his video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zywn1YRvt48

If you want to find out if the ODST tour is coming to your tour, here' s the link to the tour info

http://www.gamestop.com/gs/landing/h3otour/default.aspx