Halo 3 drops its secrecy shield

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Weapons, vehicles, controls and more revealed

Followingrumors that a Halo 3 demo would be announced in November, publisher Microsoft has indeed chosen the PS3 and Wii launch month to launch a Halo 3 blitz, with cover stories in Electronic Gaming Monthly and Swedish magazine Level.

If there's no sign of the demo, the magazines show that the Xbox 360 game itself is very much playable in multiplayer and features a new control scheme - the left and right bumpers are used to individually reload your dual-wielded weapons, while the X button has been reserved for a mystery action. Developer Bungie is such a tease.

New weapons include the Spartan Laser, which EGM editor Dan Hsu notes with awe, "I'm the first person in the world, outside of the developers at Bungie, to get disintegrated by" - expect a serious one-hit-kill weapon that can cripple vehicles with a single blast.

You'll also get your mitts on some new Covenant technology - the Brutes' Spiker melee weapon and nail-bomb-like grenades, which clip to walls before spraying steel spikes into everything around them (coincidentally, much like the Hedgehog grenades inPS3 FPS Resistance: Fall of Man).

The two-man Mongoose joins the vehicle zoo of Warthogs, Pelicans and Scorpions - a fast buggy obviously intended for scouting or cheesy flag swipe-and-runs, as it doesn't pack any on-board weapons and looks to be frail enough for a good rocket hit to split it in half.

Expect a lot more on Halo 3 over the next month. And maybe, just maybe, that Xbox Live demo rumor turning out to be the best kind of rumor - an accurate one.

October 30, 2006