I’ve stepped through the video frame-by-frame and came up with the following observations:

• 00:13 – 00:15 From the Loadouts bit, I think it’s clear that jetpacks, active camo, and sprint are all armour abilities.
• Also looks like the radar shows you the name of the area you’re in e.g. “Slipway” (00:15) , “Yard” (00:21) – should help with team communication
• 00:22 The bit where the Spartan survives the Ghost ram, looks to me like the Spartan does some kind of power punch to the ground or something that kills the Ghost? As kidtsunami points out on the HBO Forum the movement of the Spartan is very reminiscent of the action in the Halo 3 CGI trailer where Master Chief triggers the bubble shield
• The Covenant weapon at 00:48 looks like a plasma grenade launcher or rocket launcher with tracking projectiles
• Human grenade launcher at 1:03.
• You can see the armour ability icon “recharging” the jetpack ability at 1:05 – a small circle around the icon.
• 1:09/1:10 some kind of new gametype where you have to blow up the generators? It’s marked with a “C”, and it’s definitely called a “Generator” in the text that comes up when you blow it up. A Territories variant?
• 1:12/1:13 – Phantom airstrike taking out the tank?
• 1:16 is definitely some kind of Covenant equivalent of the Spartan Laser.
• 1:17 you can see “Revenge” come up as he headshots the guy – is this a new medal?
• 1:20 – DMR looks like one head shot kills.
• Looks like the Covenant Laser is back at 1:23 (top-left, targeting the tank).
• 1:24 Guy that lands beside the “May 3, 2010″ shoots the human grenade launcher towards the camera

Conversation about the video is progressing in this thread on the HBO Forums

I’m not going to go into the progress so far in detail here, but it started with the appearance of AdjutantReflex on the Bungie.net Halo 3 forum, and links to www.halo3.com/comic, which in turn led to http://www.societyoftheancients.com and a countdown site at 206.16.223.65. The countdown finished abruptly as AdjutantReflex was destroyed/asimilated by something older, more powerful, and now you are redirected to 206.16.223.61 where there’s one of the “servers” that are referred to on the www.halo3.com site.

Clicking on certain glyphs on the rotating machine provides several files to download, and also plays a movie. I’ve managed to re-encode the movie as a Quicktime Movie. You can download it by right-clicking here and chosing Save Target As… or whatever is equivalent in your browser. It looks like this ARG will give us more info on the Forerunner and the background to why they did what they did 100,000 years ago. I’m eager to find out more, but hopefully it will involve more puzzles and less just waiting around for the next thing to be revealed

Thankfully for me the biggest problem was to decide what to delete to make room for the download. I’m considering getting the 120GB drive when it comes out later this year. The game appeared in the “Demos and More” section, and started up no problem – with a simple loading screen that said “Loading”, “Halo 3 Beta”, and “Love, Bungie”

Once the Beta loads, there’s the familiar Bungie logo screen, then a very simple main menu that allows you to jump into Matchmaking, View Saved Films, and Quit to the Dashboard. The background is a fly-through of Valhalla, one of the three maps included in the Beta. The music is typical Marty fare, with the same music as Halo 2 , but with bits from the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer too.

Personalisation and Settings

The first thing I did was hit the Start button to go into my profile and change my appearance and controls. The options for your appearance now include a greater range of colours, as well as a tertiary colour on your armour for further personalisation. The emblems seem to be the same set as Halo 2, but I didn’t really go through them all to be sure. For the Beta you can only be a Spartan, but the implication is that other character models will be available, such as the Elite from Halo 2. I hope that the full set of characters will be available in the final game.

The other way you personalise your character is with a three character callsign, which is made up of a letter and two digits. This shorthand notation is used in team games particularly, with each team-mates callsign shown hovering over their character in the game. As you get closer to players, including opponents, their Gamertag is shown. The idea of the callsign is to make it easier for team mates to identify each other and issue commands/request help/etc. It’s not clear how the game will handle duplicate callsigns – perhaps this will feed into matchmaking and automatically exclude players with identical callsigns?

The options for the controls are pretty much as found in Halo 2, with presets such as Southpaw, Boxer, and Green Thumb available. I’m currently using Green Thumb, since I have the tendency when going head to head with someone in close combat to press in the right thumbstick by accident, so I’d rather accidentally melee them than accidentally zoom in Plus it means I can keep pointing at my opponent as I attempt to melee them, which gives me a better chance of hitting them than taking my thumb off the thumbstick to hit B – during which time they’ve moved away from directly in front of me. This also fits my preference for close combat over ranged, though I think that’s because it’s easier to actually hit the person when closer I think I need to improve my accuracy at distance, since I don’t believe I actually am significantly better at close range!

Controls

The control system itself is mostly the same as Halo 2, but the XBox 360 controller’s bumper buttons introduce some changes. They are used to reload your left and right weapons independantly when dual-wielding. When holding one weapon, the left bumper cycles through your grenades. You now can carry only two of each type of grenade, though there are now three types with the addition of the Brute Spike grenade. The right bumper is held down to perform actions such as picking up weapons, getting into vehicles, and opening doors, while a quick press performs a reload. This frees up the X button, which is now used to deploy pieces of equipment such as the Bubble Shield. Apart from that it’s pretty much the same, though there is now an option to toggle crouching on and off with the left thumbstick instead of having to keep it pressed in to crouch. That should make it easier to crouch-walk.

Now that the dates are official, I’ve updated my countdown timers on My Halo News and Halo Screen Saver.com. I’ve also put the countdown timer into the sidebar here.

For some reason a lot of French gaming sites picked up on the original date I used (07/07/07) and thought it was official because there was a news post up on Bungie.net about my updated screen saver. Well, now they would be right

Roll on September!

I can’t wait to get home and start enjoying the Halo 3 goodness! I’m going to make the most of the next three weeks. See you all online!

Friends of my family had a son that got a Sinclair ZX-81 – the precursor to the Spectrum. This had a whole 1KB of memory, a flat membrane keyboard, and the built-in BASIC interpreter so you could type in programs line by line. I got my own ZX-81 soon thereafter, and cut my programming teeth on it with the help of the simple programs provided in the manual. When the Spectrum came out a short while later, I just had to get it. I can still remember the smell of it when I took it out of it’s box

It’s hard to over-estimate the impact of the Spectrum – not just on me, but on the UK computer game industry. The Spectrum was as much about creating the games as playing them with it’s focus on programming. The manual was a good primer on BASIC, and once that was mastered you could delve into the depths of Z80 machine code programming. Magazines would publish games that readers had sent in – often requiring you to type in lines & lines of machine code instructions in hex, and if you got one wrong it would crash when you went to run it, and you would have to start typing it in all over again (unless you were smart and had saved the code to tape first!). It’s funny to think that I owe my livelihood in a large part to the same programming language I began with over 25 years ago

As for the gaming side of things, my adolescence was filled with time spent battering that rubber keyboard attempting to make Daley Thompson run a bit quicker to win the decathalon, cheering on tiny stick men that played out the highlights of matches in Football Manager as I made my way up the divisions, and fought and traded my way across the galaxy in Elite – still one of my favourite games ever! There were many, many more games, some of them not so good. But the good ones were typically really good. I think this was because the limits of the machine meant that there wasn’t flashy graphics and 5.1 surround sound, so gameplay was really important. None of the games could look so good that it didn’t matter so much if it was crap to play.

And now, the legacy of the Spectrum lives on. Rare, the studio that has created games such as Goldeneye 007 for the N64, and Viva Pinata for the XBox 360 (and many more) began life creating some of the best Spectrum games. Founded in 1982 by the Stamper brothers, it went on to create chart toppers for the Spectrum throughout the 80s, and followed those up with games for various Nintendo platforms, before being acquired by Microsoft in 2002 for US$377 million. Earlier this year, the Stampers announced they were leaving Rare to pursue other interests.

And now, the circle is complete. You can now download an updated version of Rare’s first Spectrum game Jetpac as a XBox Live Arcade game Jetpac Refuelled. It includes the original game, as well as a new HDified version with 128 levels. I had to buy it, and it brought back memories of trying to get a big enough score to send in to CRASH magazine by sellotaping down the fire key and positioning my spaceman in just the right place on one of the levels where he was safe, but would continue to kill the aliens – while I went downstairs for dinner

All this, from a small black box with rubber keys.

Later last year at the X06 event, there were several other Halo-related announcements. Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios was announced. This will be a real-time strategy (RTS) game based in the Halo universe at a time prior to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Ensemble Studios are responsible for the successful Age of Empires franchise, so there’s a good chance that this will turn out to be a good game. There are concerns over how an RTS will play on a console with a controller, rather than on a PC with a keyboard and mouse. However, the recent Lord of the Rings RTS on the XBox 360 showed how it could be done, so I have high hopes. No release date has been announced for Halo Wars yet, but there is a CGI trailer available over at the official Halo Wars site.

The second announcement was that Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings and King Kong fame, would be teaming up with Microsoft to create a new games studio called Wingnut Interactive, and that they would be working on a series of games based in the Halo universe. Jackson was vague about the details, but talked about a new type of gaming experience that could be more like a movie. Perhaps this means episodic content delivered via XBox Live, or something akin to the old laserdisc arcade games like Dragon’s Lair. I think Jackson doesn’t necessarily know exactly how to do what he wants, but feels that there is an opportunity to do something different. Only time will tell if anything comes of this, and if the end product will be any good.

Late last year Bungie also annouced that there would be new a set of maps for Halo 2 available in Spring 2007, and that they would be available over XBox Live Marketplace for XBox 360 owners only. They also announced that they would be holding a multiplayer beta for Halo 3, also in Spring 2007, with various ways of getting into the beta. It looks like I may have got into this – confirmations will be going out this week. There will be more chances to get into the beta later this year. North American players can play 3 hours of Halo 2 online in February and then rush to register on halo3.com – the first 13,333 will get into the beta. Also, there will be special copies of Crackdown, a new XBox 360 game out shortly, which will include invites to the Halo 3 beta. Also, community sites outside North America have places on the beta available, and some are still giving them away. I got mine from an Irish gaming site World Gamer Live, and I’m very grateful to them. These announcements were accompanied by a CGI ad for Halo 3 that appeared on US TV. While it’s not generated using the game engine, it was based on actual models and game assets provided by Bungie, and it looks beautiful.

Since then, Bungie have been releasing bits of information over at Bungie.net via the Weekly Updates. Some information on new multiplayer maps, new weapons such as a revamped Assault Rifle, and new vehicles such as the Mongoose ATV has been released, and this was fleshed out with a “viddoc” called “Et Tu, Brute”. This 7 minute video showed footage from alpha builds of the Halo 3 engine, and showcased the Brutes. Bungie staff admitted that the Brutes were not very interesting in Halo 2, and in Halo 3 they will play a large part. There will be new squad behaviour that will make all enemies more believable, new weapons such as the Brute Spiker and the Spike Grenade, as well as all the eye candy you would expect from a next-gen game. Even in the alpha build things look impressive. The video also gives glimpses of an elite with armour similar to the Arbiter’s, so it looks like he’s returning, and may well be fighting alongside the Master Chief. We also glimpse other weapons, and see rough animations of dual-wieldable swords and a Brute tearing the arms off a marine. I can’t wait for the beta!

In other Halo news, the Halo movie has hit some snags. Mainly it seems to do with money, and disagreements between the studios and Microsoft. The relationship has broken down, so Microsoft are looking for someone else to help fund and distribute the movie. They have stated that they will not do it themselves, since they are not in the movie business. It does look like they are serious about doing it properly and not compromising the creative vision of the Halo story. Peter Jackson is also in dispute with New Line over money related to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, to the extent that they are saying he will never be involved with The Hobbit. I hope they sort that out, since it would be a real shame if he wasn’t involved. As for the Halo movie, I would rather it’s done right or not at all, which seems to be the way it’s going.

The Halo Graphic Novel came out last year, as did the latest novel Ghosts of Onyx. The HGN had several stories, with one main one, “The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor,” showing how Half-Jaw (the spec-ops Elite commander) got his name, and giving insight into the Covenant and their relationship with the Flood. Other, shorter, stories show the latest Mjolnir armour being tested by an apparently retired female Spartan; a story set in New Mombassa as the Covenant start their invasion; and “Breaking Quarantine,” which shows Sgt. Johnson escaping the Flood on Installation 04.

The HGN also contains a gallery of Halo art by several artists, and this includes a single page by Robt. McClees from Bungie. This page shows what looks like a chat transcript and details of a file download, surrounded by photos and other details, that in sum seem to suggest that Sgt. Johnson may in fact be a Spartan-I, and that Dr. Halsey was fed false information about Johnson having Boren’s Syndrome – which was supposed to be why he was not infected by the Flood. There’s also passing reference to characters from I Love Bees, so it looks like Bungie is trying to bring some of the story elements from that into the Halo “canon”.

Ghosts of Onyx, the latest Halo novel, also gives us more information on the Halo universe, talking about the Spartan-III program, and tying up several loose ends in relation to Dr. Halsey and the other Spartan-IIs. It also introduces us to a Forerunner “shield world”, and further illustrates the advanced technology of the Forerunners. The way the story ends probably means that there’s no real scope for Spartans other than the Master Chief appearing in Halo 3, though you never know.

So, 2007 is shaping up to be a busy Halo year, with the multiplayer beta and Halo 3 itself due to be released. Beyond that there’s Halo Wars on the horizon, Wingnut Interactive’s project (whatever that will be), the Halo movie, a couple more novels in the pipeline, and talk of a Halo comic also. Not all of these will arrive this year, but there’s sure to be enough information about all these to keep our appetite whetted.

“Thing is, watching the video at the keynote of the first 360 sliding off the production line, I thought, ‘Why can’t we have ours now?’ I mean, come on. Where’s the harm? I would just keep it in my house and load it up with my CD collection. And maybe play the built-in game. Or some Halo 2. Which works on the system thanks to the magic of backward compatibility. Anyway, apparently the answer to my early 360 question is a resounding ‘no.’ Jerks.”

“We have some cool stuff coming up for you in the next couple of weeks, including a tour of our new offices, a look (well, maybe more of a discussion) at Halo 2 running on 360, so look out for that. And you never know, there may be some surprises between now and then.”

Candidates for the surprises are:

• Halo movie news – director, actors?
• Details of the next project that Bungie are already working on – Halo 3, Pimps at Sea, GNOP360?
• Confirmation that Halo 3 will be a launch title for the XBox 360 (I wish!)

Maybe there’ll be more details in this week’s update.

While this is pretty impressive, these are static images, taken from a game engine still in development. While Bizzare have put a lot of time, resources, and effort into creating these fabulous looking art assets, it remains to be seen how well these can be rendered as you’re driving down those streets at 200 kmh!

The differing GPU architectures will also require developers to change how they work to take full advantage of new features. The XBox 360 Xenos GPU can dynamically adjust between processing geometry to processing pixels, which does offer the potential to have higher polygon counts and thus more detailed geometry. The PS3′s GPU can provide output at up to 1080p, which offers some advantage over the XBox 360. While presently few people will be able to take advantage of this high resolution, over the next few years displays that can handle this will become more common.

Overall, both machines are powerful, but will take some adjusting for developers to take full advantage of the new features of each machine. The XBox 360 has gone for a more cost-conscious design, with money saved by not including the extras that the PS3 will include (more USB ports, media card readers, HDMI video connectors, Gigbit ethernet ports). The choice of Blu-ray discs for the PS3 will give developers over 23GB of storage at a minimum, but the extra cost and ongoing debate over standards mean that the XBox 360′s choice of standard 12x DVD drive offers a lower risk option.

In the end of the day, I think that it will boil down to the games, since both machines will be very powerful, though different. XBox 360 developers will potentially have a couple of months lead on PS3 developers in getting the most out of their games. However, the games still need to be good games first and foremost, and not just technical demos of GPU power. Roll on Halo 3