Well, whats new, there is nothing to do after work on Sunday, so today I decided to watch Star Wars: A New Hope because lets face it, I am a nerd.  As you all well know every nerd has to renew his/her Star Wars, or Star Trek knowledge every so often, so I dusted off the DVD and popped it into the HD DVD drive for my 360 and what do you know, not HD, but Damn Close.  Close enough in fact that my 360 can now vouch that it has seen the entire original Star Wars Trilogy, all in one night.  I just finished Return of the Jedi and I think I am going to head off to bed.  Oh yea, and I hadn't noticed that Hayden Christensen is in Return of the Jedi when Luke is looking back upon Obi-Wan, Yoda, and his father.  Honestly, I thought it was kind of gay, should have kept it original, everyone looks like they did when they died or at least close, and then Aniken is in his fricken twenties.  I suppose you could debate as to whether Aniken Skywalker truly died in his twenties though.  Anyways, I am about to do a project concerning my xbox that I am super excited about, so more on that soon, for any of you unfortunate enough to actually stumble across this blog, let alone read it.

Wow, as if I couldn't get anymore excited about the Halo 3 Beta.  I mean right as I am simmering down from the explosion of rumors that followed the Maintenance that Xbox Live recently went through Bungie has to go and ruin my perfectly in place study habits by forcing nearly half of brain to wonder how certain new elements in the Halo 3 universe will effect other new or old elements, not to mention overall gameplay.

Alright the first and biggest improvement, or modification shall we say to prevent this blog from becoming an argument is the feature fans are already calling "Deployments".  Now I have not done enough research to confirm that "Deployments" is the actual technical term designated by bungie for these new features, but for the purpose of this blog, thats what we will call them.  Anyways, Bungie has confirmed two "Deployment" types and all but promis more are in the works.  The current two are the Bubble Shield, which seemed to have an early birth when Master Chief deployed one in what was said to be strictly a cinematic trailer and nothing else.  And the second is the Trip Mine, which can used to blow up oncoming vehicles.  Both of these new "Deployments" sound amazing, and I personally can't wait to see what other "Deployments" Bungie has come up with to put in the final release of the game.  Who knows we may even see some new ones in the Beta.  Only time will tell.  I am personally very impressed with bubble shield idea and can't wait to explore the possibilities of having a virtual bubble of protection around you and possibly other teammates.

One of the other things that really struck me is the look of the levels and players.  While they were definately of next gen quality, I have to be a little critical and say that Bungie still has a lot of work to do, but for the most part I am sure its being taken care of.  I realized that all of the footage that was shown was from the Alpha build and I also realized that since the Alpha build, bungie has come out and said that an entire coat more of polish has been applied since, and it seems like every week in the weekly update they have more to say about what they added the previous week, so we will definately see about that.

Other than that the only other thing that really struck me as a good thing is that they are regressing the starting weapon lineup back to the rifle and maybe some grenades.  But either way, I was kind of getting sick of the SMG anyways.