Halo 3 thoughts (this does belong in gaming)

[kn]

Ok, so I just finally bought Halo 3 recently and sat down and played an hour or so on my 32" Sony Wega. (standard def)  I put it away because I'm still waiting on my 42" LG LCD to play on and I don't want to ruin it, lol.

Halo has taken a lot of heat since it was launched for a number of things but I can tell you this:  after having played just an hour, it is leaps and bounds above Halo 1 and 2 graphically.  Now, why is this thread in gaming instead of microsoft?  Well, there is a little feature called theater mode that I think is quite cool.  I've not seen it in any other games and it's quite revolutionary.  If any other game has done this, let me know what it is... I know replay and screen capture have been done before, but I don't think anything even remotely close to this level of control has been included.

So, basically, after having played part of a level, I went to theater mode and discovered you can watch the replay.  Replay... No big deal, right?  WRONG!.  You can play back the replay from the perspective of others in your party, close behind the Master Chief, far back, or even in "free camera mode".  The free camera mode is freaking awesome as you can pan around, zoom in and out and just take in all of what transpired during a battle.  It really is quite cool to go back and watch a battle while zooming around and checking it out from the bird's eye view or from the enemy's side.  Everything remains rich in detail and you can basically "camera wander" anywhere in the level that your people have been or the aliens have been.  I can't say enough about how cool this little feature really is.  All of this can be done while motion is happening so you watch live or you can pause it and examine everything in place.

I haven't even begun to explore other areas of the game yet but this feature alone is worth the price of admission...