By: Brian Crecente

Video Game Nirvana, make that 360 Nirvana.

My Spartan baby-steps across the high-def television, a dismounted turret hanging from his hands. Bullets spray around the screen. Music pumps in the rectangle of cement where I sit. Servers scurry, handing me food meant not to be eaten without interrupting play and delivering a seemingly endless supply of Corona and Gin and Tonics.

Kill, kill, die, die, die, die, die, die. People begin to sit down around me, anxiously waiting for me to stop playing. Someone asks where they should put the quarter. OK, time to take a break.

I walk from the gaming room, packed with gamers, big screens, pumped with music and food and alcohol and testosterone. Sidle up to a nearby table quickly filling with Halo 3 Beta T-shirts and snag a few. One for me, two for you.

A Halo-themed Zune sits next to the growing stack of shirts. I snag it and look it over. It's loaded up with Halo 3 videos and trailers, all stuff I've seen before.

"That's not final content," someone says from over my shoulder. I take a few pics and hand over the black device. Ask about talking to someone from Bungie or Microsoft. Earlier Brian Jarrard, the other Frankie, had walked a group of us through the game's levels giving us tips for survival in the swirling pool of beta testers we were about to be dipped into... apparently as chum.

Microsoft Game Studio's Shane Kim is making the rounds, doing interviews, trying to eat, hiding away occasional for a break.

I wander outside where people, over Haloed stand and eat and drink and talk. It's getting chilly, the already cool San Francisco day is quickly becoming a much colder San Francisco night.

Jarrard wraps up, grabs a beer and sits next to me at a table to talk about the game and those jaggies. I've got a white wine and keep swiping sticks of curried chicken, so many that the chicken guy starts to deliver straight to me.

So those jaggies, I ask Jarrard, is that really how the final game's going to look?

"It is an open item," he said. "It's just about priorities and in multiplayer we had to focus on a fast game. We are going to prioritize what's best for the game. Right now Halo 3 has no anti-aliasing at all."

Does that mean the game might not have anti-aliasing, or that you include it in the single-player campaign but not online multiplayer?

"We haven't decided on it yet."

I've really enjoyed the game so far, I tell Jarrard, but it seems to lean heavily on Halo 2.

"Halo 1 and Halo 2," he corrects me. Halo 3 multiplayer "takes equal parts from Halo 1 and Halo 2, so it's one third Halo 1, one-third Halo 2 and one-third Halo 3. "This is the final chapter in the trilogy so it gets back to the game's roots."

I tell Jarrard my theory about the night's beta premiere and the beta in general. People were bound to like the multiplayer aspects of the game, but the single player, that's where the game's really going to live. Something unusual for a first-person shooter.

"There are a lot of people who bought Halo 1 and Halo 2 just for the story line," he says. "There are definitely people who only care about the campaign. That's the thing they want."

Fortunately, Bungie won't be using Halo 3's story as a platform to another game or, worse still, the movie.

"This is the final chapter in the story, the story is going to end with Halo 3," he said. "I'm definitely not going to say this is the last Halo game for Bungie. We are working with Peter Jackson on new stories and there's also the books and graphics novels."

Halo 3's very numerous beta testers won't get a taste of that single-experience because that's not the thing that Bungie needed to stress-test.

"It has a lot to do with scale and testing, we had 1,000 people play testing it at Microsoft," he said. "But with file sharing, we can only get so much research from a thousand people."

What about that file-sharing, how much does it save from a gameplay session and does it suck up a ton of harddrive space?

Jarrard says an entire gameplay session is saved when you decide to keep a video, but it doesn't actually save it in a video format, instead the game saves the code of what happened in the session and then replays it by actually recreating the session.

"We are looking at ways to edit that video once you've saved the file," he adds.

I ask about matchmaking, my personal pet peeve with Halo 2. It seemed to always take much longer than it should to find a good match and let me play. I noticed that during my time, albeit very brief time, with the Halo 3 beta.

Jarrard says that the lack of control in selecting matches was a complaint with the last Halo, but that the new game isn't that much different, though they have added some new features.

"There have been some subtle changes made, people want more control," he said. "We've added the veto function and the party-up function so you can hop into a group you've played with and then drop out whenever you want."

But nothing for the game is set in stone, he said.

"We're definitely nervous about whatever put out in the wild," Jarrard said. "We call it beta until we are blue in the face, but it's out there now and putting are going to start forming their opinions."

"But nothing is 100 percent finished," he added. "These guys will be working on this up until the last minute."

"We play the shit out of it every day and it's fun as hell," he said.

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