Download it here.
For those of you on 56k... I feel for you guys...
Sooo...
2002-08-21 - Kristopher Abel - Consoles Preview
While you'll have to wait a mere fourteen days until its online release, (and yes, we dutifully tried to get a clip for you sooner), I had a chance to see the Halo 2 Trailer today on a big, thank-you-RCA television display with full, surround sound audio. Oh the glory, oh the detail.
Security on the video clip was high and instead of showing it to a large audience, Microsoft instead choose to go with a series of private screenings in a closed-off room. Viewings were by invitation only. There is only one copy of the trailer in existence and it never leaves the possession of one special Microsoft employee who was kind enough to carry it through Canadian customs by hand. If you think you can scam a copy, good bloody luck!
The Halo 2 trailer is actually just a teaser clip, an ominous sequence designed to instill a promise that the designers at Bungie are indeed working on something huge, and no they won't be pulling their punches. Before lighting up the display screen with Halo 2 wonder, Pete Parsons, marketing director for Microsoft Game Studios mentioned that after the team at Bungie had delivered the final copy of Halo, they took a well-deserved vacation, but not able to walk away that easily, they ended up coming back from their vacation with their heads full of new Halo ideas and production on the sequel began ahead of schedule. That's why we're getting a trailer so soon and that's why we could be seeing the final game as early as next fall. Officially they're saying by the end of 2003, but it could be sooner.
If you'd rather not know anything about the contents of the trailer and would like to save the surprise until you can actually see it, stop reading now.
It's not an action clip; instead what Bungie is giving us is a premonition, a feeling, a kind of mood of what's to come. We see the Master Chief walking past the familiar bulkheads of a military drop ship. No one else is around, but then its close quarters after all. As he navigates through the tight hallways and through air locks, we can hear a set of transmissions cutting through the background. Tangled by military jargon, it's difficult to understand the details, but the tone is certainly one of urgency. These are reports; of damage, of casualties, of dwindling resources. Something is horribly wrong, but the Master Chief seems to take these reports in stride. He enters an area of the ship that's more brightly lit and takes in his surroundings. The transmissions in the background now contain a dialogue between Cortana and the other military forces. The message is more frantic now. Apparently disaster is at hand. The complete eradication of the human race is eminent. Again, none of this has an effect on the Master Chief, as if they're discussing something he knew already. He activates a weapons rack, which springs out from a wall and neatly unfolds and grabs the first Assault Rifle from the rack.
As he passes under the ships lights, we get a close look at the new Master Chief. The detail is amazing. It's not just that the plates of his armor are now better defined, but the joints have become more sophisticated. But what is most ominous, and I hope this can be seen with the online version, is the detail in the visor. No longer just a reflective surface, the visor is transparent enough that you can see past it, and you know what? There's no face behind it. Just an endless aperture of circuitry that seems to go back into infinity. It's as if there's a mini black hole in there.
The detail on the new assault rifle (yes, new) is far more intricate than anything in the first Halo. It looks less like a prop in a sci-fi movie and more like the real thing.
As the Master Chief walks by a set of large windows, we get our first glance outside of the ship. The ship is in orbit over some kind of planet. Below the atmosphere, underneath the cloud cover, the surface is covered in a vast metropolis of blues and silver. Suddenly, an area of the landscape ignites into a large golden ring, which closes inwards on itself and turns into a mushroom cloud. It's really quite beautiful in it's own way. Then another section of the landscape ignites into a mushroom cloud.
Cortana's voice rises in panic over the transmission reports and she emphasizes that the human race is about to be eradicated. Frantic, her calculations offer no possible solutions and she does her best to try to get the Master Chief's attention. He simply ignores her.
For most people watching the trailer, this is when it hits. Outside that window, that planet below, that's Earth. Those mushroom clouds? That's the earth being destroyed, by the Covenant. The Covenant has reached Earth. If you've followed the story of Halo closely, the impact of this should be huge. The forces of Earth have never won a battle against the Covenant. All fleet captains who come in contact with them are directed to commit suicide by warping away from the Earth, away from help. What happened in Halo was a freak of fate. Without the involvement of the Flood, without Halo itself, there would have been no small victory. Now that the Covenant have found the Earth, well, fighting against insurmountable odds is a statement of most underestimated meaning.
Here's the catch. The Master Chief doesn't care. He either has a plan or his sense of will is so strong, he can't give up. He grabs a clamp along one wall and pulls it. A landing bay door pulls open. The compartment quickly decompresses and the rush of air is deafening. Still holding onto the clamp handle, he moves closer to the edge of the bay, and then
He dives
Leaning downwards, visor defiantly facing towards the ground like the tip of a speeding bullet, he folds his arms by his sides and pulls his legs together the way skydivers do to fall faster. The sky around him is glorious; the landscape below seems to stretch forever. We can seem him falling, and no matter how much time passes, he doesn't seem to get any closer to the planet below.
There's a burning rush as his visor begins to brake through the atmosphere. This is the hint we get of the kind of invincibility he's capable of. Here is a soldier who quite literally is his own drop ship.
This dive is a gutsy move. It's not just that he's falling from an orbital height with no apparent parachute, with no apparent plan, but the planet below is pure death. Armed with only an assault rifle, his response to a planet under instant demolition is to simply dive into it, as if single-handedly, from right in the middle of it, he'll be able to stop the orbital assault.
From the left side of the screen, we can make out a large, silver ship. Elegant and smooth, the ship is completely devoid of detail. Take a mercury thermometer and break it open. Let the mercury fall into several blobs defined by French curves and then connect them together and you have the ship. Its hull literally looks like its made out of a silver liquid.
As the Master Chief falls closer to the planet, we can make out a second silver ship. This one is moving quickly towards the Master Chief's drop path. As the one falls and the other glides, we can quickly make out from the trajectory that the two are going to come close to each other. In fact, it now begins to look like the Master Chief knew what he was doing when he made the leap and the plan was not to actually dive into the planet, but onto one of the ships flying above it.
Here's the last impact the trailer gives us. Who exactly are in those silver ships? We can only assume they are the Covenant. Earth's forces are obviously not doing very well, it's doubtful there's much that still in the air. They must be part of the invasion force, but who can picture those little hooded dwarves or those strange jaguar-creatures building and flying around in silver blob ships? Bungie has stated that the Covenant seen in Halo represent only a fraction of the whole force. Whatever's in those ships is unlike anything we've seen before, and apparently they are devastating.
Just before the Master Chief lands onto the roof of the ship, the trailer goes to black.
It's a 2:36 teaser. (36.4 MB [87 secs on cable])
640x384 pixels, WMV9, WMA9Pro Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround 48khz 24bit.
For those of you on 56k... I feel for you guys...
Sooo...
2002-08-21 - Kristopher Abel - Consoles Preview
While you'll have to wait a mere fourteen days until its online release, (and yes, we dutifully tried to get a clip for you sooner), I had a chance to see the Halo 2 Trailer today on a big, thank-you-RCA television display with full, surround sound audio. Oh the glory, oh the detail.
Security on the video clip was high and instead of showing it to a large audience, Microsoft instead choose to go with a series of private screenings in a closed-off room. Viewings were by invitation only. There is only one copy of the trailer in existence and it never leaves the possession of one special Microsoft employee who was kind enough to carry it through Canadian customs by hand. If you think you can scam a copy, good bloody luck!
The Halo 2 trailer is actually just a teaser clip, an ominous sequence designed to instill a promise that the designers at Bungie are indeed working on something huge, and no they won't be pulling their punches. Before lighting up the display screen with Halo 2 wonder, Pete Parsons, marketing director for Microsoft Game Studios mentioned that after the team at Bungie had delivered the final copy of Halo, they took a well-deserved vacation, but not able to walk away that easily, they ended up coming back from their vacation with their heads full of new Halo ideas and production on the sequel began ahead of schedule. That's why we're getting a trailer so soon and that's why we could be seeing the final game as early as next fall. Officially they're saying by the end of 2003, but it could be sooner.
If you'd rather not know anything about the contents of the trailer and would like to save the surprise until you can actually see it, stop reading now.
It's not an action clip; instead what Bungie is giving us is a premonition, a feeling, a kind of mood of what's to come. We see the Master Chief walking past the familiar bulkheads of a military drop ship. No one else is around, but then its close quarters after all. As he navigates through the tight hallways and through air locks, we can hear a set of transmissions cutting through the background. Tangled by military jargon, it's difficult to understand the details, but the tone is certainly one of urgency. These are reports; of damage, of casualties, of dwindling resources. Something is horribly wrong, but the Master Chief seems to take these reports in stride. He enters an area of the ship that's more brightly lit and takes in his surroundings. The transmissions in the background now contain a dialogue between Cortana and the other military forces. The message is more frantic now. Apparently disaster is at hand. The complete eradication of the human race is eminent. Again, none of this has an effect on the Master Chief, as if they're discussing something he knew already. He activates a weapons rack, which springs out from a wall and neatly unfolds and grabs the first Assault Rifle from the rack.
As he passes under the ships lights, we get a close look at the new Master Chief. The detail is amazing. It's not just that the plates of his armor are now better defined, but the joints have become more sophisticated. But what is most ominous, and I hope this can be seen with the online version, is the detail in the visor. No longer just a reflective surface, the visor is transparent enough that you can see past it, and you know what? There's no face behind it. Just an endless aperture of circuitry that seems to go back into infinity. It's as if there's a mini black hole in there.
The detail on the new assault rifle (yes, new) is far more intricate than anything in the first Halo. It looks less like a prop in a sci-fi movie and more like the real thing.
As the Master Chief walks by a set of large windows, we get our first glance outside of the ship. The ship is in orbit over some kind of planet. Below the atmosphere, underneath the cloud cover, the surface is covered in a vast metropolis of blues and silver. Suddenly, an area of the landscape ignites into a large golden ring, which closes inwards on itself and turns into a mushroom cloud. It's really quite beautiful in it's own way. Then another section of the landscape ignites into a mushroom cloud.
Cortana's voice rises in panic over the transmission reports and she emphasizes that the human race is about to be eradicated. Frantic, her calculations offer no possible solutions and she does her best to try to get the Master Chief's attention. He simply ignores her.
For most people watching the trailer, this is when it hits. Outside that window, that planet below, that's Earth. Those mushroom clouds? That's the earth being destroyed, by the Covenant. The Covenant has reached Earth. If you've followed the story of Halo closely, the impact of this should be huge. The forces of Earth have never won a battle against the Covenant. All fleet captains who come in contact with them are directed to commit suicide by warping away from the Earth, away from help. What happened in Halo was a freak of fate. Without the involvement of the Flood, without Halo itself, there would have been no small victory. Now that the Covenant have found the Earth, well, fighting against insurmountable odds is a statement of most underestimated meaning.
Here's the catch. The Master Chief doesn't care. He either has a plan or his sense of will is so strong, he can't give up. He grabs a clamp along one wall and pulls it. A landing bay door pulls open. The compartment quickly decompresses and the rush of air is deafening. Still holding onto the clamp handle, he moves closer to the edge of the bay, and then
He dives
Leaning downwards, visor defiantly facing towards the ground like the tip of a speeding bullet, he folds his arms by his sides and pulls his legs together the way skydivers do to fall faster. The sky around him is glorious; the landscape below seems to stretch forever. We can seem him falling, and no matter how much time passes, he doesn't seem to get any closer to the planet below.
There's a burning rush as his visor begins to brake through the atmosphere. This is the hint we get of the kind of invincibility he's capable of. Here is a soldier who quite literally is his own drop ship.
This dive is a gutsy move. It's not just that he's falling from an orbital height with no apparent parachute, with no apparent plan, but the planet below is pure death. Armed with only an assault rifle, his response to a planet under instant demolition is to simply dive into it, as if single-handedly, from right in the middle of it, he'll be able to stop the orbital assault.
From the left side of the screen, we can make out a large, silver ship. Elegant and smooth, the ship is completely devoid of detail. Take a mercury thermometer and break it open. Let the mercury fall into several blobs defined by French curves and then connect them together and you have the ship. Its hull literally looks like its made out of a silver liquid.
As the Master Chief falls closer to the planet, we can make out a second silver ship. This one is moving quickly towards the Master Chief's drop path. As the one falls and the other glides, we can quickly make out from the trajectory that the two are going to come close to each other. In fact, it now begins to look like the Master Chief knew what he was doing when he made the leap and the plan was not to actually dive into the planet, but onto one of the ships flying above it.
Here's the last impact the trailer gives us. Who exactly are in those silver ships? We can only assume they are the Covenant. Earth's forces are obviously not doing very well, it's doubtful there's much that still in the air. They must be part of the invasion force, but who can picture those little hooded dwarves or those strange jaguar-creatures building and flying around in silver blob ships? Bungie has stated that the Covenant seen in Halo represent only a fraction of the whole force. Whatever's in those ships is unlike anything we've seen before, and apparently they are devastating.
Just before the Master Chief lands onto the roof of the ship, the trailer goes to black.
It's a 2:36 teaser. (36.4 MB [87 secs on cable])
640x384 pixels, WMV9, WMA9Pro Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround 48khz 24bit.
