Halo 3: The Review

After playing it for the first time the other night, I just have to say something about it. Halo 3 is simply awesome. If it weren't for the XBox 360 crashing all the time I could waste even more countless hours playing the stupid thing.

OK, here's the Skinny. The game play is fantastic. New weapons, new vehicles, and even better maps for the player vs. payer mode. The story line is well thought out and the cinematic interludes are a welcome break. Your character has some new abilities. You are now able to carry special extras like bubble shields, flare, deflectors, power-drains and all kinds of other things.

There are all kinds of new vehicles. A 4-wheeler "ATV" type thing, a new "chopper", a new flyer for the good guys and a new tank. This is what Broadsideonline had to say. "Halo 3 is unique in that almost anyone can easily pick up and play. The control scheme is straightforward and solid, making even the most First Person Shooter-inept players feel right at home, while instantly enjoying taking out the monstrous hordes of alien Covenant forces and the disgustingly zombie-like Flood. Players run through the campaign or story mode as Master Chief, the last surviving member of the elite Spartan military group. Able to run faster and jump higher with abnormal human strength, players can be all they can be while running the gauntlet of enemy forces as Master Chief. The campaign mode offers a wide variety of locations to go through, each extremely detailed and beautiful to look at."

If you have a 360, I would highly recommend checking picking up a copy. You won't be disappointed.

I know, I know - this doesn't have anything to do with marketing, but then a gain maybe it does. There was so much hype about Halo 3, game store literally had tens of millions of dollars in pre-launch deposits. There were excellent pre-release trailers on TV, and the gaming magazines were giving Halo 3 their full attention. The Canadian press reports, "...over $170 million in sales on day one and calling it the biggest entertainment launch in history... $170 million works out to, at most, 2.83 million copies of "Halo 3" - a fraction of the 8.3 million "Harry Potter" books that sold in the United States on their respective premiere days."

The Halo 3 buying frenzy had an unpredicted side effect. The week that the game launched, Microsoft enjoyed a doubling of the previous week's sales to the highest level yet for 2007.
And in addition, the return of Master Chief meant the system outsold the Nintendo Wii for the first time in 26 weeks.