As expected by many, Halo 3 was officially announced about an hour ago at the end of Microsoft’s E3 press conference. The trailer shown is available to download from the Xbox Live marketplace, and Bungie.net.
As expected by many, Halo 3 was officially announced about an hour ago at the end of Microsoft’s E3 press conference. The trailer shown is available to download from the Xbox Live marketplace, and Bungie.net.
I suppose we won’t be seeing the complete game for several years? LMAO.
Yeah, Halo 2 isn’t out yet. If I were Bungie, I would have got the proper Halo 2 out before Halo 3. Nevermind though, mass of Covenant ships = good.
Wasn’t thatimpressed at the start . That was untill the covenant flew past my head and the speaker ,and it then all start to zoom out and the music kicks in so you get to see the real scale of HALO III.
Its like somthing out of Star Wars
???
Halo 2 isn’t headed to 360 any more. It’s comming out on Windows Vista.
When I say “Halo 2 isn’t out yet”, I mean the Xbox game is so bad it doesn’t count as Halo 2. I usually call it “Halo 1.7”.
Y’know, you really should play the game first before you criticise it =P
And here I was hoping they would make some changes to the main theme in Halo3…
WHAT!? Why would you want them to change the music!?
I have to echo Shadow here: You can argue over whether Halo is a proficient or a dire franchise all day if it pleases you, but anyone who disputes that Martin O’Donnell composed some truly superlative and marvellously apposite themes and accompaniments to the game needs chastisement with a model Warthog around the head seven times. Through the employment of boh orchestral and electronic instrumentation, he created tracks which resonated harmoniously with the differing unearthly, martial and technological natures of the environments and scenarios, contributed to the atmosphere immensely, and simply sounded spectacular on their own as well. When the coda from the Truth and Reconciliation Suite’s battle movement struck up its stirring, rousing tones once the Covenant ships hoved into view during the trailer, I was promptly grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
The single player in Halo 2 is weak as hell. the only fun to be had is with a few mates on Live - then it’s absolutely awesome and a fantasticaly designed and tuned FPS.
Trumpets, hell yeah!
[quote=“Shadow”]
Y’know, you really should play the game first before you criticise it =P[/quote]
I haven’t played an FF game before but I still say they suck.
But they don’t… Not all of them. There’s a huge difference between being overrated and sucking.
Actually, I was impressed with the Halo 3 trailor. The fact that it was all done using the actual in-game engine, as well as having an awesome score, makes it deserve a few browny points. And this is coming from someone who absolutely despised Halo and Halo 2 - it looks like Halo 3 will correct what the first two games did wrong: it’s going to have a conclusive story.
Can’t wait to pirate it.
But you actually played and liked the first Halo, so you owe it to yourself at least to try it before slating it =P
u r teh r0x0rz
Now: As for the trailer, I thought that where it succeeded most was conceiving an awesomely impressive sense of scale. The first section with Cortana’s commentary was delightfully understated - it possessed a distant, mournful, sombrely subdued quality which succeeded excellently in conveying the rout of mankind.
It did not display acres of land fused into horrifically twisted forests of glass by the incalculable force of orbital bombardment or the flayed shells of plasma-scoured cities, but it didn’t need to - the desolation is conveyed in a different manner which, while not sensationalist, is no less effective. The only fire man is now able to produce not to found in the boiling infernos of a reactor’s heart or the stinging flames gouting from a weapon’s muzzle, but the pathetic, limp smoulder of a shard of wreckage. Seeing wrecked cities, the atmosphere tinged scarlet with the steel rain of battleship wreckage, and columns of refugees trudging from death on the battlefield to death in the wilderness would at least have a sense of dignity and enduring pride about them. They’d enjoy the implication that men created something great and mighty in their time, something of importance by the very fact that a rival deemed that it warranted destruction, and create the aura of the Worthy Challenger that the victor had to struggle against, and whose memory he honoured, rather than the Insignificant Ant he just crushed underfoot and immediately forgot about, if he even knew that he was there at all. Yet here, Man doesn’t even have monuments to the race’s own defeat - just a few shattered and battered splinters of anonymous metal, dotted across the empty landscape like dirt scattered on a coffin before it is lowered into the grave. A glimmering sun perversely shining on them with summer brightness to convey how the cosmos rolls on, uncaring about how the environment rides roughshod over annihilation of the lives and ambitions of millions.
And throughout all of this crushing disaster, the Master Chief strides; he even emerges through the smoke to indicate that he’s struggled through it. He’s walking through the ashes of an empire - his own empire! - how must a ghost feel when he floats over his own corpse? The Master Chief carries a weapon, but the war is over - the single, solitary clack as he slaps the foregrip into his palm only emphasises the harrowing isolation the Master Chief is enduring. There’s none of the usual accompaniment to the gesture of arms - there’s no gravelly-toned cigar-chomping Johnson to bark out defiant quips, nor is there the typical entourage of determined Marines who, while they lack the superhuman strength of Man’s great champion, nonetheless have the undaunted spirit to follow him into the very maw of Satan in the name of victory.
Now, they’re gone. All of them. Each one as insubstantial as the grains of dirt the breeze is pattering against the Master Chief’s armour. Even Cortana has deserted him, with her warm, familiar, supporting prescence now withdrawn to some unreachable, far-off, cryptic omniscience. The Master Chief is now the Last Human… and he was never even human to begin with.
Yet despite this drawn-out doleful diatribe of death and devastation, the music maintains a noble, upright quality. The Master Chief glances upwards, considering the heavens and the mysteries above the clouds - not something we’d expect a man raised from birth to be naught but a soldier to do - and we sense that there’s something tangible stirring through the air and behind that inscurtable visor…
…then the Banshee sweeps through the air, and the coda from the Truth and Reconciliation Suite’s iconic battle movement strikes up its stirring, rousing tones. Once the Covenant ships hoved into view during the trailer, and leaving aside this post’s rambling pseudo-intellectual conceited tripe for the moment, I was promptly grinning like the Cheshire Cat - this moment encapsulates that there’s little doubt that while you can argue over whether Halo is a proficient or a dire franchise unti lthe cows come home, it has undeniably stamped its distinctive mark upon gaming.
The contrast between the quiet, personal and moving former section to the loud, bombastic and tremendous scene that begins now couldn’t be starker and more extreme, and that only emphasises its stunning impact… and that impact is to reinforce the monolithic extent of the Covenant’s unassailable domincance. The Master Chief would normally have an entire horde of relentless crusaders crashing down upon him like a tsunami - yet from this perspective, he is little more than a speck, almost completely obscured by light and lensflare. The hero of humanity is of no more concern - he is neutered, insignificant, impotent to do more than watch the pivotal events unfolding around him. Seeing the great, mysterious array hauling itself from the oceans also deals a shocking blow to the solar plexus of Man’s pride. We have laboured millenia to dominate Earth - republics and kingdoms, races and ideologies, have all risen, endured and fallen in the continual effort to establish themselves on this planet’s soil - yet in one single frame, the Covenant have smashed apart any sense of achievement we might have believed we earned from all of this labour and struggle - in one instant, dredging forth a gargantuan relic from beneath the waves, they’ve revealed that they know more about this world than those who claim it as their own home! One might find a parallel with the infamously enigmatic Monoliths of Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey books - is humankind no more than transient tenants, squatters to be evicted when it pleases the landlond?
For all of its luscious graphical ostentation, then, the trailer to Halo 3 is actually one spirit-hammering visual allegory that explores the nature of crushing defeat, and how it is represented with the immolation of civilisation, the doom of men, and the disintegration of his works. “The Way the World Ends”, indeed.
We should be lapsing into some bleak, miserable reverie - so why does the music, then, insist on beating a pacy martial theme that causes your blood to stir with a thrill of passion and expectation? The cliff that the Master Chief is standing on may be crumbling away, but he hasn’t been sent cascading down with it yet. The triumph and dominance of the Covenant may be of monolithic proportions, true, but is it unassailable? The eldritch brilliance of the array’s summoned energies - the cusp of alien success - is reflected in the Master Chief’s visor, bestowing on him a bright, shining quality too… and then the notions hinted at in the end of the first half of the trailer suddenly erupt out in an explosively compelling epiphany. While there’s still a pair of hands left, you can build anything from a mud hut to a great cathedral given the effort and dedication - something the Master Chief certainly doesn’t lack. He is a man. He has a weapon. And that’s all he needs.
“There is one certain means by which I can be sure never to see my country’s ruin: I will die in the last ditch.”
-Prince William of Orange.
There’s a fight to finish.
He owes himself disappointment?
After watching the trailer, I was glad that I purchased a 360. Halo 3 looks to set to be an epic conclusion to the best story driven/music driven FPS series that I’ve had the opportunity to play. I can’t wait to see how the conclusion to the story turns out.