...where smooth, rolling green hills dominate the landscape, interspersed with cliff-walled canyons in the nadirs of watersheds. Trees sway in the breeze. A waterfall plunges into a sparkling river. You can't make out a straight line anywhere, and the lush scenery seems to go on for miles.

HALO challenges the current conception of how beautiful a computer game can be. It could, in fact, redefine your conception of computer games. Why? Because this third-person-perspective action game features the finest 3D-game engine, character animation, and physics modeling we've ever seen. Such technology in the hands of a company long known for making fewer games at higher-than-normal quality levels is practically unfair.

Not satisfied with simply stunning terrain, Jason Jones - creator of MARATHON and MYTH and the visionary and lead programmer for HALO - also aims to revolutionize the art of character animation and physics modeling. Even at this early state in the game's development, his effort shines. Not only do vehicles and characters reflect light and cast dynamic shadows, they actually appear iridescent. Even more impressive is the life-like way in which the models move.

In almost every game you've played before, the character animations are pre-canned - they're animated before you ever play the game. What you see when you walk forward or jump is actually a series of slightly different models, rapidly painted after one another, much like a three-dimensional flip book. Not so in HALO; Jones found a way to implement inverse kinematics, a technique for modeling human motion in real time. Game models actually have a skeleton inside them with properties governing the movement of each joint. If your character is riding in a jeep and the driver hits the brakes, the inertia jolts his skeleton forward in the seat, moving the character right along with it. At the same time, his arm could be reacting naturally to the recoil of his pistol, and his head could be turning to track an enemy. This kind of dynamic, fluid movement and attention to detail is unheralded on many levels. The effects are mind-blowing. And then there are the vehicles themselves. Driving around in the game's jeep could practically qualify as a game in itself, due to the extremely-detailed physics model (think GRAND PRIX LEGENDS off-road). The vehicles' tires kick up pebbles and dust that change color depending on the terrain you're driving over. Bungie also displayed an iridescent flying vehicle and hover tank that were equally impressive.

As one final demonstration of the engine's power, Jones zoomed the map way out so that the marine appeared as just a speck in the distance. Then he smoothly zoomed in, enough that I could read an indicator on the side of the soldier's rifle that showed how much ammo remained.

The standard soldier's weapons are a pistol with a built-in laser for painting targets, an assault rifle with an attached grenade launcher, and a machete for desperate situations. We also saw a cool zooming sniper rifle, a rocket launcher that leaves realistic smoke trails behind it that dissipate into the wind, a surface-to-air missile, a spear gun, and a funky-looking detonator weapon. The aliens pretty much have an equivalent weapon for each purpose, but they shoot blue energy beams instead of familiar, earthly ordinance.

Bungie's game design process is three-fold. First they finish their engine, then they play the hell out of the multi game, and finally they move on to the single-player experience. Since the game recently began moving into phase two, much of the game's story has yet to be realized. But to be perfectly honest, the HALO engine is so amazing that Bungie could let us just run around the map banging two rocks together, and that would still entertain us fora while. The setup for the game goes something like this. A space-faring transport vessel carrying about 1,800 humans, 800 of them marines, crash lands on a huge ring-world that orbits a distant star. A theoretically feasible science-fiction construct, a ring-world is a thin ring of planetary mass thousands of miles across, with an inner surface coated with desirable life-supporting essences like an atmosphere, dirt, trees, and water. Because of the ring-0world's unique halo orbit at the lagrange Point between a gas giant and one of its moons, this freakish world actually spins in place, with the resultant inertia creating an effect similar to gravity (remember the space station in 2001?).

An impressive artifact of tremendous significance, the ring appears to have been mysteriously abandoned by the time your ship crash lands on the surface. But much like a leftover slice of pizza at the CGW offices, this kind of phenomenon fails to go unnoticed for long. An alien race called the covenant soon pops up. Technologically superior to humans, these humanoids show up in great numbers to pilfer what they can from the ring. As you might guess, a full-scale war erupts between the humans and the Covenant. Since the humans are ill-equipped to face the Covenant head on, their only hope is to use guerrilla tactics. Given this fact, at times you'll be able to use all of the aliens' weapons and vehicles against them. The other big problem you'll face in the early parts of the game is that all your mates and gear got spread out all over the ring world in the chaos preceding the crash.

HALO makes quite an impression the first time around, but it isn't exactly a surprise that something so revolutionary would come from Bungie. After all, these guys are known for being different. They do their own publishing; they have always supported the Mac platform (HALO is no exception - Steve Jobs unveiled the game in his keynote speech at the recent MacWorld Expo); and they tend to make fewer and more innovative games than the rest of the pack.

Although only in the nascent stages of development, it is readily apparent that HALO is a very big deal. With a solid record of setting high standards for their games, it is unlikely that BUngie will screw this one up. Which is why, of the five games we've selected, we feel HALO has the surest shot at changing gaming. It just looks too damn good.