In the new EGM magazine, a whole bunch of new Halo info showed up, according to this post on the Bungie.org forums. This includes more details on the new weapons, custom matchmaking, game settings and even mentioning a 20 second ingame single player movie in the hands of EGM. We’ve also got some new stuff on gaming modes, and promise that a lot more is coming up these days as 1UP is giving us tons of news upcoming weeks.

First of all there is the EGM magazine, they’ve visited Bungie over a month ago, and are finally talking about what they found out:

New “New” Info:

The New Needler:
IT IS NO LONGER DUAL-WIELDABLE!!! Not much is explained but they do say that it is going to be made more powerful, balanced, and “usable”.

The Brute Ghost:
The only details on the Brute Ghost were seen in the 20-second Single-Player Video (more on that later). It is summarized in the magazine as a “bulkier version of the classic hover bike” shown in the vid with a Brute climbing into it.

Single Player:
The guys at EGM got a 20-second video of the MC “tearing” around a huge industrial compound with gunfire coming from all types of Covenant crafts including a hulking wraith and “what looks to be a new Brute Ghost”. There were “ships flying overhead, lasers everywhere, multiple enemies all around etc”. Again, EGM rejects us much info on the stuff that no one else has…(More details to be revealed on Nov. 20 on the Mini-Site)

SAVED FILMS:
One of the things I am most excited about is being able to record gameplay onto your harddrive or memory card. The best way to describe this is as an example: Late one night you go into matchmaking and have the best game of your life. You rack up 95% of your teams kills and attain little deaths. You were playing like a GOD. The problem is, none of yours friends were with you. Don’t fear, as long as you chose to save the temporarily stored video of the match, you can share your glory! Start up a party and get all of your friends in it, then bring up your saved video and launch it! The video will automatically come up on everyone’s screen and the host will be able to control play, pause, slow, rewind, etc. While everyone else can choose how they want to see it, be it First Person, Third Person, or from a “fly-it-yourself bird’s eye view”. All I can say about this is, WOW.

Game Settings:
No longer are certain things such as speed reserved for either one person. That’s right you can give all special traits to everyone!!! And for even more fun, you can even give them to the leading/losing teams in a match! But along with the old traits come a line of new ones. My favorite is being able to make characters more visible, BY SETTING THEM ON FIRE!!! You can even turn down gravity to allow people to jump twice as high, and prevent certain people from picking up weapons. That was all that was specified in the mag but they say there is more…

Voting:
Have you ever been in a party and the host is putting a gametype that no-one wants to play? Well vote against it! This can allow people to override the host’s power. Whatever happened to the good ol’ x button?

Advertising Customs:
Now you can put your custom gametype or even your custom game lobby out there for everyone to see! This was Bungie’s answer to custom matchmaking…

Ranks:
Now you will have an actual “military” rank in Halo 3. This will be separate from your matchmaking ranks and will include your overall stats, ranked, unranked, and even customs.

The X Button:
Still a mystery…

So, this all sounds very interesting. Off course we’re all hungry to see that 20 second Single Player footage they have, and I surely hope they release it any time soon. And about the recording feature, I noticed that IGN said earlier that you could record 10 to possibly 30 seconds of gameplay. Since the average matchmaking game takes a lot longer, I’m not sure if you can use it the same way as described here.

Now let’s talk about the new game games modes, Ninjaball, Elimination and Tankflag. What do we know about them?

Ninjaball will be a lot like the oddball we know from halo 2. My first guess was that it’s like the custom game Swordball (Oddball with swords), but it seems to be just holding the ball as long as possible (Hmm, Oddball after all?).

Elimination is about “killing the other team”. Yeah great info, but that’s what we call Team Slayer over here. No, they gave a nice twist to this one, you have to kill 5 opponent team members in this game mode. Still not exactly sure what they mean, but I’m sure it’ll be great.

And last but not least, the most self explaining of them all, Tankflag. This is going to be like normal Capture the Flag, with a special tank, which can carry the flag and is extremely powerful. I’m not sure if the other players also have special tanks, but it probably requires a lot of team play and organisation (just like normal Capture the Flag games do, if played seriously that is).

Expect more Halo 3 news in the upcoming weeks, as 1UP is giving away a lot of new info the upcoming 3 weeks. Stay tuned here on Xboxic, we’ll hook you up with the latest info!

Thnx to Deadly Warrior, Shadow000 and AN ALIEN.