I am really glad I got there early. When I arrived (at 6:30), there was already a long line forming. I feel really bad for those at the end of the line; inside, Matt said that the place was filled to capacity, and there were still people waiting outside. However, Marty O'Donnell was prowling the crowd with a video camera, which was cool. I asked him about a release date for the Halo Soundtrack, and he said that the Powers that Be would judge that. He also interviewed me, which was cool.

Anyway, I managed to score a position on a 16-player CTF game first time. Oh wow. Halo rocks. The controller, like many have said, is actually very good; it was immediately comfortable, and after a bit of practice I was doing pretty well (considering that I not a console person). The one thing that annoyed me was the zoom mode; it was too easy to press down on the right stick and go into zoom mode when you don want to. But I was impressed.

My views on Multiplayer: 16 player Halo ownz. Each player has their own setup character, which is saved separately, and there are several controller defaults (as well as custom ones, I believe). The two main maps being played were Sidewinder and Blood Gulch; of the two, I like Blood Gulch the best. My favorite weapon? The Warthog. Running people over is just so satisfying; at one point, I was spending time running people down near the red base, then retreated to recharge shields. On my way back, I 360-ed and smacked another red player with the back of my jeep. After mowing a couple more down, I retreated again, and crested a hill into the face of one of my teammates. JEEP COMING THROUGH! It was hilarious. On the subject of the jeep, it certainly does go all over the place; you can spend quite some time spinning in place (it especially annoying when the camera goes in front of the jeep). But the satisfaction that comes with driving it waaay outweighs the bad things. The gunner and passenger positions are often hard to play because of the squirrelly nature of the jeep, though are rewarding when you score kills in it. Enough concentrated firepower can take down a jeep pretty easily, and while it hard to get a grenade under it, it is great when one goes flying because of a grenade. Though it is very intimidating to be dueling with a jeep when you on foot :D. I wasn seeing much strategy going on in the games, but that could have been because of the large amount of people around. However, near the end (when things were quieting down), shouts of "I got the flag and am being chased, someone help!" really got the blood flowing. I wasn as impressed with Slayer, however, possibly because of the split-screen venue. The levels were huge, and it was hard to find people the lack of jeeps definetly hurt it ;). Those who like deathmatch would love Slayer though. The larger maps seemed to suffer more; splitscreen isn very good for spotting distant figures, and so there a lot of wandering around (even with 16 players). I didn get to play any single player, but from the screens I watched, it looked quite impressive.

Some things Matt mentioned during his speech were the impending relaunch of Bungie.net, as well as a new site Truth and Consequence (I believe that was the name sure about the Consequence bit), a site with lots of Halo goodies, including concept sketches, cut material (including, supposedly, the stuff that got Halo down to a Mature level :0), and all around good stuff. He also mentioned Seventh Column, but only said that they weren talking about it ;). I also heard second-hand from a person on my team that Matt had talked about the PC/Mac Halo: supposedly, he said that work would start on it when they get back from vacation, but that porting the code might be difficult; I wish I had asked Matt myself, because I have no idea how reliable this info is. Still the starting work soon bit is very heartening to a Mac-er.

I saw Mark Levin, Mnemisis and Dan Rudolph there a good game near the end with Mark and Mnemisis (probly ran over you guys once or twice ;D). Also spent most of the night hanging out with Christian from They Might Be Mapmakers don know if this is news or not, but he mentioned a super-secret project that he helping programming. Hmmm. To those I didn't see (vector40 comes to mind), hope you guys had a great time too :).

Overall, Halo rocks. The weapons rock, the vehicles rock, the graphics rock, the gameplay rocks, the controls rock. However, I wont be buying an Xbox for several reasons: I don have enough money, I like the online community that comes with the PC/Mac version, and I actually need to go to class sometimes would eat up all my time if I got it in my dorm room.

Theocracity signing off.