Midnight Release in Harrisonburg / Micro Review: Halo 3

I decided that with nothing better to do, I would go to the midnight release of Halo 3 last night at Gamestop in Harrisonburg Crossing.

I got there a half-hour before the store closed at 9pm when they were going to give out tickets. I was the 3rd person in line. I pulled up a chair from Cold Stone Creamery and pulled out the cellphone. Across the street, they were setting up a lasertag course in the parking lot. It was free for anyone who wanted to play while they waited. I was wearing motorcycle boots and declined. My tennis ankles are precious.

I just sat and listened to the different people talking about games, playing online, reading books. Which is strange when you consider "gamers" encapsulates hard core geeks to frat jocks. Everyone was very admirable and friendly. I think the only person that got made fun of was trying to ask about reserving a Legendary edition of the game 20 minutes before it went on sale. He was wearing a Halo 3 shirt, which normally would indicate that he pre-ordered it months ago. Dumbass!

When they opened the doors for to hand out receipts and numbers for midnight, there were probably 100 people in line, stretched down the sidewalk. Cold Stone had come out and offered a few small, small cups of ice cream and some woman was selling the disgusting Halo 3 Mountain Dew in cans for $2, saying that it wasn't available around here (accept for every 7-11 and/or Sheetz). I saw a bunch of empty cans on the sidewalk later that night. She probably made a killing.

Once we got our tickets people started playing lasertag and I left to get some food. When I came back the parking lot was littered with drooling gamers for Halo 3. Around 11:30 people started congregating back at the store, waiting for the line to be formed. A police car made a round or two. Luckily, as far I as knew being one of the first people in line and out the door, there weren't any problems.

I also didn't sign up for the local tournaments that were going to be held via email. It was an interesting proposition that I was glad to see get a push around here. As far as I know, there aren't any local gaming clubs or teams in Harrisonburg. JMU maybe, but those are just glorified dorm suites.

I played Halo 3 with a friend until about 2:30am. The graphics aren't top notch, but there's too much going on in the game to be pretty and powerful. The voice acting is fantastic and all the non-player computer characters are back chiming in with "You kicked his ass!" type quotes and other such funny nonsense.

The online coop works great and sets up just like an online deathmatch in a hosted room. And it's so much nicer not having to restart if one of your teammates dies. Switching to a scored coop instead of the old checkpoint system was a great move on Bungie's part.

The difficulty of the game is about right too. We're playing on Heroic, the second hardest mode. Even the pawn-like Grunts have tactics in their A.I., though now it just seems to be "IF Brute leader dies, run like hell. Flail arms wildly."

So with just a couple of hours in on the campaign story alone, so far so good. This game is going to make Fall go by so fast...