The setup inside the Bowery nightclub Blvd. (site of last year's Gears of War/video marketplace launch event) was droolworthy to say the least: 15 Sharp LCDs (46"ers) had 360s running the beta (in 720p), and when I arrived the room was still empty enough that I was able to sit down, pick up a controller and start playing within five minutes of coming through the door. Waiters wandered the room with trays of mini-hamburgers, spring rolls and chicken skewers, and even at the early hour of 3:30pm there were as many people taking advantage of the open bar as there were playing the game. The crowd wasn't sparse for lack of interest: The party was scheduled to run from 3-11pm, and the room started to fill around 5:30 as people got off work for the day. I had the day off, so I opted to come as early as possible in order to maximize my hands-on time with the game.

There's not much I can add to the mountains of gameplay impressions that have accumulated online in the hours since beta access codes were emailed to select participants: Halo 3 just plain rocks. I played for 90 minutes, did terribly and had an absolute blast. Instead of competing against the rest of the room on a LAN, everybody was dumped into an Xbox Live waiting room with a pool of about 135 players from around the country. For some reason the "Valhalla" map never came up in the rotation for me at the event: All my matches were in "Higher Ground" and "Snowbound".

It's a lame excuse, but I'm inclined to think that one of the reasons I did so badly was because of how distracted I was by the game's rich colors and detailed textures. The controls and gameplay are classic Halo, but the visuals are several orders of magnitude beyond anything we've seen before from Bungee. I must have spent about 30 seconds just looking around with my jaw on the floor before a rival gave me a brutal wake-up call by clipping me with the wing of his banshee, sending me to my death. Over the next 90 minutes, I died in just about every way possible, a smile on my face the whole time.

The only drawback to the event was the low volume level on the LCDs, which, combined with the venue's acoustics, made Blvd. a terrible showcase for the game's much-vaunted sound design. But on my way out, this was revealed as a nonissue when a member of the publicity team handed me a beta code along with a commemorative t-shirt. Within an hour, I was at home playing the game on my 46" Sony Bravia via the HDMI connection on my 360 Elite (with a pool of players that had surged to 900 and change within less than two hours) and reeling with disbelief at the quality of the audio. Eager as I am to play Calling All Cars and the new Crackdown add-ons, it's pretty much a no-brainer as to what I'll be doing all weekend...