[Click images for sexy large scale.]
“Master Chief, you mind telling me what you’re doing on that ship?”
(Fleet Admiral Sir Terrence Hood)
“Sir, finishing this fight.”
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NOTRLY!
But, I have! Finally, after finishing the second installment (yeah, I played out of order), my Halo series is over with! 1, 2, & 3 have now all been totally completed. Of course I didn’t do it on the hard difficulties…but whatever, I still won.
So what’s a girl to do now? Well, I have Gears of War and GoW 2 (completed 7/5) on hand to take care of. Also, Killzone 2 has been calling to me.
Mostly, I’m craving the next Halo installment — Halo 3: ODST
Though there will be no beloved Master Chief, I see good times ahead.
{EDITED to combine two posts}
{6/28/09}
With 99% of my blog views being for Halo 3: ODST (a change from my usual WoW traffic), I decided to basically repost info you can find easily elsewhere.
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Halo 3: ODST
(Orbital Drop Shock Troopers)
The game is set approximately two weeks prior to the events of Halo 3 in the fictional city of New Mombasa.
The main objective of ODST is for the player, a lone UNSC soldier known as “the Rookie,” to search through the ruins of New Mombasa and discover what happened to his missing teammates. As the Rookie drops in the ODST pod, the Prophet of Regret’s ship is seen jumping into slipspace. After finding a piece of evidence left behind — a sniper rifle hanging on a lamppost, for example — a flashback is triggered and the player assumes the role of the missing soldier. After players find the first beacon, the choice of where to go next is up to the player. It will also include an option which, unlike other Halo games, will allow the player to play the campaign levels in any order they want to.
ODST’s multiplayer offering is identical to Halo 3’s, and will ship with a total of 24 maps. Maps consist of the original eleven Halo 3 maps (Construct, Epitaph, Guardian, High Ground, Isolation, Last Resort, Narrows, Sandtrap, Snowbound, The Pit, Valhalla), the Heroic map pack (Foundry, Rat’s Nest, Standoff), the Legendary map pack (Avalanche, Blackout, Ghost Town), the “Cold Storage” map, and both parts of the Mythic map pack (Assembly, Orbital, and Sandbox; Citadel, Heretic, and Longshore).
In a recent gameplay trailer, a game mode called Firefight is shown, wherein players take on increasingly difficult waves of varied enemies, similar to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode. Firefight will include new medals as well as the ability to co-op with up to 4 teammates over Xbox LIVE or system link. Each player has a set number of lives which, upon their depletion the game ends. There is no time limit, no limited number of rounds and no maximum number of kills. Skulls will be incorporated into firefight as a means to increase the difficulty and provide variation. The maps used in firefight will be unlocked as the player progresses through the ODST campaign. It is also noted that the enemy characters appearing in each wave are generated at random, thus the player will be unable to anticipate the strength of the next wave prior to its arrival.
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The game’s protagonist, referred to as “the rookie”, is an unnamed member of the UNSC Marines’ Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) or “Helljumpers”. ODSTs often deploy in small, one-man Human Entry Vehicles (HEVs), launched from spaceships in the upper atmosphere. During the game, the Rookie is separated from his four teammates and must find out what happened to them with the guidance of a city maintenance AI known as the Superintendent. The Rookie’s teammates are Buck, Dutch, Romeo, Mickey, and Dare (voiced by Tricia Helfer). Nathan Fillion also voices one of the ODST in the game.
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Halo 3: ODST will ship as a two-disc set. The first disc containing the campaign mode as well as the firefight co-op mode, while the second disc will contain the multiplayer mode with the complete set of Halo 3 maps. Owners of the game will receive an invitation to participate in the upcoming Halo: Reach multiplayer beta in 2010, while pre-orders will include a token to unlock Sgt. Johnson as a playable character in the Firefight multiplayer mode.
A special edition “Collector’s Pack” has been confirmed, containing the game and a special ODST wireless Xbox 360 Controller.











