T-shirts, hoodies, patches, buttons, keychains, refrigerator magnets, a special ugly edition Xbox 360 console with a wireless headset to match, incredibly tacky controller designs from Todd McFarlane, tiny replica guns that don’t seem to serve any real purpose whatsoever,, and a special edition Mountain Dew flavor. Halo 3 is easily the most hyped game, since, well, Halo 2, and it pretty much lives up to the hype, as well as including a whole load of features no one asked for or even thought of putting on consoles and in FPS games before now.

The long-awaited campaign is definitely the most polished in the series to date, though it isn’t without flaws. Bungie’s level designers are firing on all cylinders here, with only one real dud in the entire lineup. (The eighth level. You know the one.)

The Halo series has always shined in large-scale open-area combat, and Halo 3 is no exception – it ups the ante significantly in both enemy numbers and arena size. Graphically, the game might not be quite as stunning as games like Gears of War or Bioshock, but you see where all that power went when you arrive at some of the title’s larger setpieces. There can be dozens of units and vehicles in a single battle, and it’s glorious. The battles can happen dozens of different ways, and they really showcase the unscripted nature of Bungie’s AI programming and level design, especially when you get stuck at a particularly hard checkpoint. After one death, you might see a few marines decide to take off after a wraith in a warthog, and in another they will decide to go after a fortified turret defended by infantry. It does wonders to keep the game fresh as you play through it, though some ability to control the computer-controlled marines would be welcome.

The game’s smaller infantry-based encounters are a little more complicated. On lower difficulties they are a cakewalk; the computer-controlled marines can take care of things alone in many encounters. Walk through; shoot Brutes; carry on. To a player on normal or easy, they are either filler just some fun mindless shooting. On heroic or legendary, they become almost a tactical grind, requiring careful management of ammunition, equipment, marines and enemy attention to survive.

Equipment is one of Bungie’s new additions to its formula, and it’s a great way to throw a little more flavor into battles. The items integrate smoothly into battles, which is no small feat considering how fine-tuned Halo’s combat is. Bubble shields, which form a protective sphere around the player, can be exactly what you need to move back on the offensive, and power drains, which can both remove enemy shields and disable vehicles from movement, and be incredibly damaging at the right moment. The AI uses these items incessantly, but the player generally has to cast a more careful eye on his supplies.

Halo 3 also introduces an impressive array of new weapons and vehicles. Many of these have an art style reminiscent of the brutes, the game’s replacement for the elites of the first two games. One is a gun that shoots razor sharp spikes, and a new kind of sticky grenade that functions similarly. Unfortunately, these don’t work like Half-Life 2′s crossbow: You can’t pin an enemy corpse to the wall with a well-placed kill shot burst. A welcome addition is the ability to rip a turret off its stand and fire it while walking around. The game’s new vehicles are generally rather unremarkable. A new human air vehicle, the Hornet, functions as sort of an airborne Ghost, as players can strafe side-to-side, and the new Brute Chopper is a motorcycle-esque ground vehicle that can ram stuff to great effect and explosion. All the new weapons and vehicles fit so well into the previous arsenal that you can scarcely imagine the game without them.

The campaign’s narrative is unfortunately quite scatterbrained. It seems at times it is trying to evoke this feeling of danger and the idea that the story may end with Master Chief’s death, but for most of the game it forgets this and is completely focused on the larger happenings with the Prophets and the Flood.

A gripe of mine is that the character of the Arbiter seemingly has no overt motivation other than “don’t die and Brutes suck.” Despite the fact that Master Chief meets the Arbiter in the opening cut scene, the two don’t really exchange dialogue until the beginning of the next level, and they never exchange anything of substance. Some additional lines might have alleviated this particular narrative problem, but Cortana’s story arc in the game builds up to, well, nothing, and it’s highly disappointing.

It also fails to cash in any of the emotional potential that setting the game on Earth could bring. One might have walked through a hospital with civilians in it and overheard them talking, or simply flown over a devastated city, but most of the game’s Earth time is spent on the African savannah. Only once are civilians involved in fighting: A group of construction workers armed with pistols rush a Covenant battle line. They die. It’s underwhelming, to say the least.

I would contend that even Halo 3′s prerelease ad campaign, “Believe,” offered better look at the sort of human cost of war, and it was far surpassed by Halo 2′s landmark “I Love Bees” campaign, which really made you feel like Earth was worth defending. However, humanity has never been the focus of Halo’s actual storyline, though, just its ancillary properties, and this is either an odd choice of Bungie’s or a failure of their storytelling ability. The story of the Forerunners, the Flood and the Covenant comes to a relatively satisfying conclusion, but what has happened to humanity over the course of the war?

Of note is Bungie’s throwback to its old Marathon style of storytelling by including a series of terminals once the player reaches a new location midway through the game. They are reminiscent of Bioshock’s audio diaries and are a welcome addition to the game’s storytelling repertoire. A casual player can ignore them, unlike extended cut scenes, but they are there for anyone who seeks more.

Halo 3′s campaign is designed to have replay value beyond one playthrough. (Most of the game’s Achievements are focused around the single player.) It is the first in the series to offer four player cooperative play over Xbox Live, and, like its predecessors, it offers support up to two players on one console. This experience works very well, and can produce many great moments like one player dropping the other on the back of a scarab to blow it up, then scooping the player back off the top, where the two fly away from the explosion dramatically. Having any number of players also opens up great tactical abilities, but the game can be rather hard on the default settings. Players can turn on skulls, which can be found hidden throughout the campaign, to ratchet up the difficulty and make the experience a challenge for four players.

Bungie’s other addition to the campaign is scoring, like the arcade games of yesteryear. You get a set number of points for killing an each enemy, which can be multiplied by a headshot or a series of kills in short succession. Additionally, the aforementioned skulls can be activated to make the game harder, but lend additional multipliers to the final score. This is a fun feature to turn on for coop, where players can compete for the most kills, and it would be just as fun alone were it not for the lack of leaderboards, an incredibly huge oversight for a title that online play is woven so very deeply into.

Of course, the rest of the online functionality is really second to none. Halo 2′s excellent party system is back and improved, with the ability to switch between the game’s various modes as well as party up with strangers you meet online. It remains the single best way to play with friends online, and Halo 3 is a great game to tie it to.

Halo 3 sports a greater variety of matchmaking playlists than Halo 2, and its multiplayer in general is a refinement of its direct predecessor. It has better balance, generally more interesting maps, and another layer of added gameplay thanks to equipment. In short, matchmaking behaves exactly as you would expect it to.

The multiplayer in general is great fun, but not a huge change from Halo 2, despite what some might have you believe. It’s mainly balance changes and gametype

The real shining jewels of Halo 3′s featureset are the theater system and Forge. The game automatically saves complete replays of every game you play, campaign or multiplayer, and allows you to comb back through them from any angle or speed to capture screenshots or, in the case of multiplayer, short clips of choice moments where you died spectacularly, or made others die even more spectacularly. You can then send these to your Xbox Live friends, or save high-resolution anti-aliased 1080p (in layman’s terms, incredibly good-looking) screenshots on your PC from Bungie.net. Saved films can also be flagged using a Bungie.net account linked to your Xbox Live Gamertag, so that the next time you log in to Halo 3 on your Xbox they will automatically download in the background.

These features are incredible. Ease of use pervades the entire system, so that a friend can e-mail you a link to his triple kill from the previous evening and you can click “download” and then watch a full replay of the action from any angle or perspective. Reiterating, this feature is a sight to behold and unmatched in any other game on the market.

Theater mode isn’t quite perfect, however. The interface makes it difficult to rewind precisely, and rewinding is completely impossible in campaign mode replays. One also can’t fast forward large chunks of time at once, which is quite annoying if you want to capture a screenshot from the end of a two hour campaign session. Still, these features are an incredible technical achievement that is just as incredible for the player. The general polish

The other shining jewel is Forge. In short, Forge is Garry’s Mod lite. For those unfamiliar with Garry’s Mod, Forge allows players to rearrange nearly everything about a level and then save custom layouts and game modes to share with their friends or on Bungie.net alongside their films and screenshots. Though this may not be as complicated as modding tools for various PC games, this is a huge advance in features for consoles and will extend the the life of the title immeasurably. It, like theatre mode, is a revelation in the world of consoles, and compared to any PC solution it is still a revelation in ease of use.

Halo 3 is a great game. It might not be deserving of all the hype, the barrage of 10/10 perfect scores, and 3.3 million in sales in a mere seven days, but it’s an experience few Xbox 360 owners shouldn’t miss, and its featureset is a new high watermark in the industry and redefines the term “complete package.”

Crackdown is a game that screams with potential. Its content seems somehow unfinished. It is also sometimes quite buggy. It is obviously setting up for a sequel. It is a game that draws attention away from its obvious deficiencies through the sheer coolness of the idea behind it. Despite all this, it is extraordinarily fun to play.

For those who have not investigated that game on the disc with the Halo 3 beta invitation, Crackdown is an open-world sandbox game designed by the creator of the original 2D top-down Grand Theft Auto. In it, you play a genetically modified super cop setting out on a quest to kill a whole bunch of organized crime leader stereotypes. You start out weak, able to jump a few feet into the air, and pick up and throw small objects, like car doors or benches. As the game progresses, you become stronger and more agile, enabling you to jump ridiculous amounts and throw cars and buses and stuff. You can also level up your explosives, driving and firearms skills.

Crackdown is very light on storyline. You are dropped into the world and told to go after gang members and their leaders, as you work your way up to taking on the gang’s kingpin. Rounding out our three sets of enemies are the Latino stereotype called Los Muertos, the eastern European/Russian stereotypes called Volk, and the Asian stereotypes called Shai Gen. A disembodied narrator voice that sounds kinda like the host from Smash TV accompanies you throughout the game, but, disappointingly, is not the secret final boss.

Crackdown’s most interesting quality is that it is a sandbox game all the way through. How you complete the series of objectives you are given is up to you, there are no mission structures. You have to find them, and figure out the best way to kill them. I’d love to see this idea explored further. I’d love to see my guy locate an enemy, use a sniper rifle on a fire alarm or something so that the kingpin has to come outside, and then I fire a heat-seeking rocket at him. Or maybe, on this same boss, I could set off a timed explosive on one end of the compound, drawing attention away so I could sneak into the other side and then kill the guy that way.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t really like this. There’s a bit of strategy to be formulated in, essentially, getting to these gang bosses. You die a few times, and figure out, “Okay, so if I swim around back of the rock outcropping, jump across onto the second story, blow that door with a mine while I kill the dudes up there, and then run in as the alarm sounds, and jump up and unload my rocket launcher on the boss right away, then I can avoid getting my ass handed to me by angry Asian stereotypes with heavy machine guns and heat-seeking missiles.” This kind of strategy is pretty cool and evokes some of the memories I have of beating really hard missions in GTA3 with a bit of ingenuity and taking advantage of a bug or two.

The skill advancement system is pretty neat, as well, but also flawed. It works mostly by the mantra “skills for kills,” a phrase which the omniscient narrator dude will repeat over and over again. Shoot a dude, get experience for leveling firearms. Grenade kills for explosives. You get the idea. Unfortunately, by the time you get to the end of the game, your skills are not necessarily at their highest, and once you’re done, there’s little motivation to get them any higher, aside from messing around and, if you have Live Gold, cooperative play.

Cooperative play, though, might be reason enough to. The entire game can be played online with one other person. You can jump in and out of another person’s single player game if they so desire. Think of the amount of fun you can have just messing around the game world in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and then add a friend and superpowers. If this game has any longevity aside from downloadable content, it’ll be here. Unfortunately, there’s no split-screen co-op at all.

Let’s talk about bugs. There are lots, but none of them are really game-breaking. They’re mostly just funny. If you shoot at a dude while standing next to a railing, your character will pistol whip the railing. Take that, concrete. Occasionally, disembodied announcer guy will say something like, “What a breathtaking view, agent. Finest in the city.” Putting aside the fact that he declares this more than once and at different places, sometimes the places are an alley with a dead guy next to a dumpster.

The entire game really feels a bit like a tech demo for the engine technology, which is fantastic. It has amazing amounts of objects on the screen, as well as incredible draw distance and nice physics and it is co-op enabled. I just can’t help but think about the great games that could follow this one. For a sequel, they could take the superhero angle further and make it so you design a character and choose ability sets to develop. Think City of Heroes, but not an RPG or online. I could design my crazy psychic warrior guy and get online after leveling his powers to play with my friend’s flying ice spraying flying dude. Then we would fight crime! It would be awesome.

Sadly, though, Crackdown is not this game. It is a really fun game, though, just too short and too buggy for me to wholeheartedly recommend. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There’s a really cool game in this concept, and it’s almost shining through with Crackdown. Maybe we’ll see it for Crackdown 2, guys.