Like a few on this site, I’m sure some of you were outside a GameStop or some other video game retailer last night waiting for Halo 3 ODST. I have to say that this time there were more people in line compared to the release of Halo Wars. Last night there were about 40 of us waiting for our copy.

Some interesting observations about the people standing in line:

One guy had a Hummer with a flat-screen hooked up and there was a group of people playing Halo 3 (much in the same fashion as when it was released, ‘cept that night, they were playing Halo 2).

Imagine this – there were actually women standing in line, and no, they weren’t the mothers. In total there might have been about 5 of them, and only one was a GF of a customer.

But enough about the crowd, lets get to the game.

Since I got the collector’s edition, the first thing I did was enter in the code for Sargent Johnson. Cool. Now he’s available in “firefight” mode which is ok I guess.

So, I crack open the cd and there are two discs inside. One labled “Campaign” and the other was “Multi-Player” (OR was it “Online”? I can’t remember).

First one I checked out was the campaign since it was probably the best chance of getting played. (The primary reason I got the game was for the new maps – more on that later). I always let the cd fire up and let it run through the intro clip just to see what they do. Nothing impressive here, just a bunch of clouds and text.

Once I get to the start screen, instead of playing, I chose to download the video, hoping it would provide some edge to the gameplay. After watching it, all it does is provide a ‘lil bit of backstory to build up the drama.

Next, I chose the Firefight option and picked an open map to play. I tried to find the “Play as Sargent Johnson” Option but was nowhere to be found. To be fair, I didn’t try too hard looking for it.

The game starts and I’m running around the map trying to find some weapons. Eventually I make it to the center of the map and the Covenant arrive. The gameplay was ok, the Pistol is just blazingly AWESOME, Bungie should upgrade that immediately into Halo 3…

As I’m running around killing grunts, one cool feature I liked is how your medals appear to the right side of your visor with a slightly slanted display. By trying to keep the player immersed in the environment by including the “In-Game” stats is a great idea.

After making it through 2 waves, on the third a Wraith gets dropped and all my weapons are out of ammo. I finally die and they tell me I have 5 lives left. At that point I just quit – it’s just like a campaign gauntlet without other people playing…

Now to the campaign. I think I now know why Bungie has never shown Master Chief’s face – they absolutely SUCK BALLS at making a human face look anything like a real person. I just don’t get it – everything else – the textures, mapping, lighting, gameplay, balance is great – but all the faces just look like total ASS. So my friends, that’s the real reason why Bunige won’t reveal his face – at least until they can hire someone who’s good at it. (I can’t imagine it would be that hard to find a few 3D artists that could do the job).

As the “Roookie” you crash land in New Mombasa and begin your journey. When you activate the special display in the visor, I can’t imagine any other way of playing the game – why would you? It’s much cooler to see the enemies outlined in red and everything else in gold. I only played it through a few checkpoints before saving to go online…

Now to what I really wanted to see – the new maps for Halo 3. In the past just about everytime they released their packs, there was always a map I didn’t like. this time was different. Heretic is an updated version of “Midship” from Halo 2. While it’s never been a favorite of mine, it does offer balanced gameplay and I was glad to find that some of my old spots are still accessible with some timely jumping.

“Citadel” looks like it will be a fun map to play. Great sniper spots, tons of jumping areas and hiding spots as well as obvious hot spots on the map that will have many players watching the re-spawn timer.

Then we get to “Longshore”. This is easily my favorite map of the new ones released and for a player of my style, this map suits me great. What seals the deal is the whole “Fish Tacos” love Bungie shows for the map. The map feels huge with plenty of ways to get to the flag or arm the bomb for objective games, and will offer plenty of places for snipers to get their targets.

Finally, I went online to see if I could get some of the new maps to appear. While that never happened for the 7 games I played, I did enjoy the “Throwback” game settings. This set of games seems to have all the old gametypes available on a more frequent basis. While I enjoyed an easy victory in the first match, the second one absolutely sucked as my entire team quit on me and I was left to try to defend the flag against 4 others. So, my question to Bungie is, I get penalized if I quit, why should I lose a rank when it’s obvious that 1 player vs 4 others has no chance of winning – shouldn’t that player at least keep their previous rank? If i’m going to go down anyways, I’ll just quit everytime it looks like I’ll lose anyways.

Rant over.

So, how would I rate Halo 3 ODST? For the game itself which I haven’t played very much, I would say a 7/10. For the firefight mode, I’ll give that a 7/10 too.