Halo 3 nuggets

The E3 Halo 3 teaser trailer obviously generated a lot of buzz, and there are some cool analyses and tidbits out on the Web (some factual; some a wee bit speculative).

A couple of the better ones:

• Narcogen (more of a frame-by-frame assessment)
• Stonesand (more of an engine/development assessment)
• Bungie.net (Frank O'Conner -- right from the horse's mouth, so to speak; sorry, Frank)
• Halo 3 FAQs at Bungie.net

On Frank O'Connor piece, while being typically coy (that guy has a tough job), Frank drops some nuggets o' goodness, and rewards some of the questions of the faithful.

Some of the more interesting (to me):

• The trailer was a real-time (non pre-rendered) trailer.
• Master Chief's gun isn't the current assault rifle -- or is it? ("Who says it's the standard Assault Rifle? Doesn't look identical to me").
• Frank is "party to some graphical features that you haven't seen yet, that sort of blow [the E3 trailer] stuff away".
• The trailer takes place in the ruins of New Mombasa (on earth), the mountain in the background is Kilimanjaro, and the wreckage is of a fallen "tether" (space elevator).
• The landscape looks pretty bleak. Remember that space jump the Covenant Capital Ship made in Halo 2? "A Slipspace jump in-atmosphere would have a devastating effect on an environment, don't you think?"
• The Covenant vehicle group "is an excavation force. Its makeup is purely practical."
• The uprooted roadsign shows a Covenant Grunt, evidently due to New Mombasa's dedicated public works department.
• There was a closed-door showing to select industry folks after the trailer showing. Bungie flew around the trailer environment, showing the "a close-up of the Chief to show the realtime reflection of the visor (you could see the ammo counter running down in his faceplate) and showed off the unified lighting model we're using - particularly how other surfaces, such as sand, reflect light back up onto his armor. Frame rate was silky smooth, but to be fair, that was basically an empty environment with the Chief in it." I hate them. All of them.
• "The sand, dust, smoke and other effects are all from the game engine. They will be used in the game. The landscape you saw is real geometry - the mountains and city in the distance are not a skybox - they are actual geometry that you can go to. Our cut scenes and our gameplay will be very comparable."
• "A lot of detail is achieved using a combination of lighting, textures, normals and bump-maps. We're saving our polygon budget for other things…"
• "[The game and the movie] will not affect each other in terms of release dates" (I don't believe this at all; Marketing 101 says different channel releases for the same IP need to be evaluated for positive/negative timing impacts).
• The game and soundtrack will have a decidedly darker feel than the first two showings.
• Marty O'Donnell has "Ninja Music Skillz". We knew this, Frank.