Halo 2 theatrical trailer download

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Publication date Videogame-related footage taken from Kikizo's archives. A brief period has passed since Halo i's finale, in which we saw Master Chief obliterate the enigmatic Halo ring-world. He had just crushed a Covenant force and an army of mushball space mutants known as The Flood.

Now he's returned to Earth with Cortana--the chatty female A. The Covenant have wiped out every last human-colony world. Earth is all that's left. Master Chief and Cortana's mission is clear: Hightail it planetside to back up Earth's forces and repel the alien blitz.

Sounds like more than enough mission for one game, right? Well, that ain't the half of it. So far, we've seen concepts for a level set in a hydroponic plant; on an orbiting space outpost; and on a mining station floating in the upper wisps of a gas giant, where hurricane-force gales make it tough just to walk, let alone massacre Covenant bad guys. One mission's set on a moon we're not sure if it's Earth's or another world's , complete with weak gravity that drops the game's hyper-realistic physics into slow-mo.

We watched Master Chief leap three times his height to reach a secret door to the Covenant's moon base. The kick from his rifle even slowed his descent when he fired downward while falling. Bungie is working on moon-buggy-style vehicles, which'll take stratospheric jumps in the low lunar gravity. And just think of all the low-G tricks you'll be able to try in multiplayer But we'll get to network play later.

At some point in Halo 2, the Covenant's assault on our home planet comes to a close. Just don't expect the end-game credits to roll when it happens. Instead, Master Chief and Cortana will zip deep into the heart of Covenant territory, attacking the source of the enemy's power. The climactic battle that follows will bring a measure of closure to the Halo saga, something that was missing from the first game. Ultimately, humanity was in the same place as when the game started.

We do know Halo 2 will reveal a lot more about the aliens and the motives behind their intergalactic assault and battery on humanity. Jones says, "or they just came across as the stupid cliche of an alien race that ruthlessly attacks mankind. Nobody knew about their social structure or anything, but I had hoped people would give us credit and realize there's more to the Covenant than what we showed. We're really expanding on them in Halo 2. There's a whole bunch of the story we still have left to tell, and that's going to be a lot of fun.

Some revelations will even come from the original Halo--at least once the sequel shows you what to look for. He's referring to the first game's mysterious little details, such as the scattered symbols on Halo and the funky history lessons from Guilty Spark. Chat with Jason Jones about sequels--any kind of sequels, even the movie variety--and he'll tell you exactly how not to do them.

And that's what you don't want to do. Likewise, we don't want to make a different game. Why eliminate the reasons people played our first game?

That's why Bungie isn't fiddling with Halo's fundamentals. Master Chief can still carry only two weapons at a time. He still possesses superhuman strength. He still has a rechargeable force-field shield and flashlight. His armor has been upgraded this time around, but he's still pretty much the same green guy from the first game.

But we'll definitely give him augmentations. He'll have some tools. Bungie didn't clue us in on what those "tools" might be yet, but we did glimpse a few of Chief's enhanced skills see page for a complete rundown.

He's can now peer around corners and lean forward over ledges to check out a scene before he dives into it.

He won't be able to shoot or lob grenades, but the enemy A. The Chief's melee attack is beefed-up, too. Time your button presses right and he'll string together a combo of up to three skull-crunching smacks with his gun.

But the Bungie guys are saving most of their tweaks for the Master Chief's alien enemies and marine allies. We're not just talking about their look, although Covenant and marine character models come in a much greater variety this time.

Different types of marines, for example, will haul around their own special backpacks and wear unique body armor. The bigger deal here is the A. We need a bunch of new secrets! What they've settled on is a scheme that makes all computer-controlled characters more flexible in any situation. They'll have a larger variety of behaviors and interact more realistically with each other. They'll really watch each other's back and coordinate their actions for maximum effect.

Such defensive moves won't be part of a pre-planned script--the troopers will actually think to do this. Marines pinned down by enemy fire might call for a Warthog to save their bacon. Marines will point out a sniper for an ally to grenade. Any of these scenarios can and will happen in Halo 2. Your A. Bungie is building on the first game's marine-conversation system, making it so your fellow soldiers will have more to say to you and each other.

Let's rewind to the big shield ship battle at this article's outset for an example. Say that, instead of following the main attack force away from the ship, you mosey up on a hill and stumble upon one of the snipers. We really want to have that level of detail that you may or may never see.

Of course, lifelike brainy marines deserve lifelike brainy opponents, so Bungie has souped up the Covenant's I. You've got guys climbing. You've got guys ducking under objects or jumping over them. The Elite soldiers will be more lithe and leopard-like, jackals will behave more like birds.

Life will be anything but a day at the zoo for Master Chief and his marine allies. Enemies know to switch on their flashlights and hunt for you in darkness. They'll understand how to fight in low-gravity environments. They'll talk to each other more and most of them will speak English this time and coordinate attacks.

As tenacious as the first game's bad guys were, Halo 2's enemies will make you fight even harder for every inch of ground. Bump mapping--the rendering hocus pocus powering much of Halo 2's advanced new visual vibe--is a magic word with Bungie, because it's letting the team achieve an astonishing level of detail in the sequel's environments and on its characters and objects. Bump mapping's tech-nerd definition is that it's an Xbox-friendly rendering process that overlays a map of three-dimensional details--treads on a tire, buckles on gear, gouges on body armor--onto a polygonal model's flat skin.

If you think of a 3D model such as a vehicle or character as a simple shape hacked out of wood, then bump mapping is the process of sculpting out all the fine details. Bungie's artists are sculpting everything with bump maps in Halo 2, and it works beautifully. Just look at the screens and watch the trailer. Everything in the game, including marines, weapons and retouched Halo 1 models, will be sculpted for maximum visual impact.

It's much more believable. And the whole point here is that such believability doesn't come at the expense of the game's performance. The bump mapping helps us make the game look so much better while not demanding anything more of the Xbox.

Many Bungie guys we talked to guesstimate that Halo 2's visuals are an order of magnitude better than the first game. That boost isn't just from the bump mapping's pumped-up detail: Half the pizazz comes from the sequel's advanced new real-time engine for creating light and shadow, which reacts more realistically to bump maps than to ordinary textures.

Watch Master Chief descend in a wire-mesh elevator and you'll see shadows dance around everything in the scene as he passes each floor. When the hangar airlock doors rumble open in the trailer, you see harsh sunlight, reflected from the Earth outside, bathe the scene and wash out weaker light sources. Bungie calls such splashes of overpowering light the "bloom effect.

Bungie's artists are creating textures with this new lighting model in mind, whereas in Halo 1 the lighting engine came in fits and starts, and the artists never really got the hang of it. Now it's letting them achieve the subtlest of details, such as the way every model in the game casts shadows on itself as well as its surroundings.

It's so subtle, but it's so cool. You don't really appreciate the sequel's lighting effects until the lights go out completely. It's a situation you could find yourself in frequently, since that Master Chief has the ability to shoot out lights and skulk in the shadows this time.

Imagine hearing a bump in the dark, cutting loose with your battle rifle and seeing a dozen Covenant enemies strobe-lit by your muzzle flash, their shadows writhing on the walls as they scurry for cover. By no means will most of Master Chief's new haunts be dim and creepy. Halo 2 is still alt about fighting and shooting and killing. But, yeah, players have this great resource of being able to hide in the shadows now, and we're going to use it in some interesting ways.

Halo 1 was the first Bungie game in five years that didn't have Internet play. You can tell the team hates that--they hate it with all their might--especially because the game was originally designed for online. Microsoft's gaming network just wasn't ready when Halo launched in late , so players had to settle for split-screen or linked-system multiplayer play.

It was still ludicrously fun, just not the kind of experience Bungie wanted. Fast forward to Halo 2's launch a year from now. Xbox Live, Microsoft's broadband-gaming network, will be a year old with its kinks ironed out. Bungie will be able to stop drooling and we can start: Halo 2 will feature online battles between Master Chief characters on one side and Covenant Elite soldiers on the other. The plan is for online to support at least 12 to 16 players. It'll be nothing less than the total online war Bungie originally envisioned.

Bungie has other big plans for Halo 2 multiplayer that they're just not ready to chat about. They know they want to enhance the cooperative mode of the main campaign game, but they probably won't make it playable over the 'Net "That's really hard to do," Jones says. And they've heard all your gripes about the first game's lack of computer-controlled 'bot opponents for multiplayer.

We want to do something for them, but I don't know what it's going to be. We can't wait to try online dogfighting in soaring new vehicles. We can't wait to try multiplayer battles in low gravity. We can't wait to play as a Covenant Elite wielding a human shotgun. We just can't wait for Halo 2.

And the funny thing is, neither can Bungie.