G-pinions

As I'm sure everyone has noticed, the first Halo 3 info and screenshots leaked yesterday, scans from a Swedish gaming rag called Level. Beating out the EGM cover story by a few days, no less. I wouldn't feel comfortable posting anything from it here, but if you can navigate our site you're probably resourceful enough to find them for yourselves. Here's the kicker: they just didn't excite me. Not because it looks anything short of great, not because the new weapon, vehicle and gameplay info didn't sound like great additions; the genius and longevity of Halo 2 didn't come from any of those things specifically, it came from the online party and matchmaking systems, and the gameplay balance. My excitement was already maxed out, and that was only from the music in the trailer.

I played Halo 2 for almost a year straight, four to five nights a week. Same group of guys, night after night. Tom and I have written a few columns about the game, but the place in my life that it occupied was something of a significance I can't easily explain.

So what of Halo 3? Well, it is the sole reason thousands of Americans lined up overnight last November. You don't buy a 360 for the promise it holds. You don't buy it because you just can't bear to live without the next PGR. You buy it because, deep down, you know that one day you will be able to walk into a store, spend $60, go home and fire up Halo 3 with few other complications. They could have called the console "Halo(3)60" and it would have been arguably more sensible.

I'm excited about Halo 3 because I will once again have the opportunity to play regularly again with a very particular group of friends (with whom I still play various 360 games and stay in contact with on message boards and Instant Messenger), and socialize and compete together in a perfectly tuned game. There is a place in my life reserved for such an experience - lo-res screenshots aren't going to make me anticipate it any more than I do.