Feature By

Chi Kong Lui

When you're faced with literally hundreds of different videogames at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), it's funny how everything starts to blend together, and the majority of the games seem glaringly unoriginal. In my mind, there was one quality that separated the factory clones from the genuine showstoppers. That one quality was scope (I'm not talking about Konami's Silent Scope, either). The most notable games of the show didn't just look amazing graphics-wise, but also seemed to kick things up a notch when it came to the depth of what they were trying to accomplish in terms of game mechanics as well. They seemed to want to do more and put in more compared to the competition. Bungie's premiere title in-development, Halo, was one prime example.

Marching to the beat of its own drum and standing out from the crowd has never been a problem for Bungie, who made a name from themselves producing killer games on a MAC platform more known for being a graphic designer's workhorse than a gamer's dream machine. But with Halo, Bungie garnered major mainstream media attention for the first time in their less than a decade of history. Even before this year's E3, there was already a tremendous buzz surrounding the game. Adding to the intrigue was Bungie themselves—because in order to even get a sneak peek at the game, attendees needed to wait on line before being ushered into a small theater room for a brief presentation. The presentation consisted of two parts, the first was an on-the-spot demonstration of the actual game in real time by one of the game's producers, and the second was the showing of a movie trailer.

What we know of the game thus far is that Halo is a "third-person perspective, sci-fi action epic that takes place indoors, outdoors, in the sky and beneath the surface of a world of astonishing realism and visual impact"—according to Bungie's official press release. The game will boast a robust single-player mode as well as advanced online multiplayer features with versus and collaborative options. The lead game designer is Jason Jones (co-founder of Bungie), and the game has been in-development for over two years with currently about 60 percent done. When the game is completed, it will be simultaneously released on both the PC and Mac platforms.

More in-depth details to the game itself will be presented in screenshots accompanied by captions in the following pages.