Oh my gosh, it’s finally HERE and I HAVE IT!!!  I gotta tell ya, at $59.99, I was a bit hesitant to purchase the Halo 3 Beta.  I mean, an incomplete, trial-version of a game for 60 bones?  But, after playing it for a week and a half I came to the conclusion that it was well worth the money.  Bungie must have wanted to totally redesign the game – much like starting from scratch.  Offering the gamer a whole new exploratory world, the Halo 3 Beta allows your character to quickly achieve super-human abilities while taking down the town’s bad guys.  Instead of fighting the religiously zealous Covenant, or the parasitic spawn of Flood, you fight Mexican, Russian, and Asian gang-bangers!  How exotic!

The Bungie crew must have been reading my blogs because this installment of Halo specifically caters to my collecting obsession.  I love to collect things, and I love games that give me things to collect.  Even if games don’t give me something to collect, I make up something to collect (I have 14 paint brushes in Oblivion)!  With 500 green orbs and 300 white orbs dotting the game, I have a grand task ahead of me - the more green orbs I collect, the faster my character can run and the higher he can jump.  In no time, I found myself flying from rooftop to rooftop, collecting green orbs as I went; when I jump from the top of a 15-story building down to the street, I crack the concrete like Morpheus, or a crazy anime super hero.

Similarly to Grand Theft Auto, you can shoot gangsters and steal cars, but what sets Halo 3 Beta apart from GTA is the overall atmosphere and heroism.  This game gives you more than the real-life experience - you are a super-human, driving over and shooting gangsters without the dirty feel of GTA.

The only thing I really have a problem with is the lock-on targeting.  There’s an angry gangster directly in front of me and I’m itching to shoot him.  I pull the left trigger to lock-on, but instead it locks onto the guy 100 yards away on top of a building, or the car he’s standing next to, or the dead body on the ground.  That gets kind of annoying sometimes, but besides that, the game is top-notch.

I haven’t seen much of Master Chief yet, but I’ll worry about him when the actual game is released.