I thought it would impress me in the graphics department, and it hasn't and probably won't. With Gears of War, Bioshock and Lost Planet out there.......it's incredibly hard to be even remotely impressed with what I'm seeing.

doesn't support 4 player split screen or co-op,

The Forge isn't a map editor like you've seen in other games before. This editing tool doesn't allow you to warp the terrain or move major objects, those will stay just where Bungie put them. Rather, the Forge allows you to drop in any of the weapons, objects, vehicles, spawn points, or tools present in the Halo 3 world. If you think a map needs a flamethrower in a specific place and it's not there yet, the Forge will grant you your wish. If you want all of the spawn points for one team to be located within a small building, the Forge can make that happen. To keep things from overtaxing the memory, each map has a maximum amount of dollars that can be spent on it. Likewise, each object you can drop has a cost associated with it. A gun might cost $2 while a large vehicle up to $40.

The Forge is also a multiplayer game. Up to 8 players can hop into a Forge session at one time and fight on teams against each other. When you go into the editing mode, you become a monitor, just like Guilty Spark. You're still vulnerable in this state and can't attack, but you can drop or move any object you want. You can also delete objects the enemy has laid down. See that guy running towards a Warthog…whoops! No more Warthog. The currency limit on the map is shared between the two teams, according to Jarrard, making the rush to create objects for your team and delete them from others seriously intense.

We asked. You can't delete a vehicle while someone is in it. Nor can you delete a tail end of a series of warp nodes to trap opponents in limbo. But you can do some pretty cool things that might not initially be considered options. Dropping fusion coils from a large enough height will cause a nice explosion. Dragging a teleporter through the air as your teammates pop out of it (while the teleporter is carried over a wall!) can create a nice element of surprise. The options are essentially limitless. If things get too crazy, the party leader can limit the people who can edit the game to him or herself or leave it as global.

You can edit a lot more than just the weapon placement on maps. You can also edit the rules of the game to create custom game types. We know, you could do that in the original Halo: Combat Evolved. But not like this. You can edit just about every option imaginable. Gravity, scoring for each and every action, rules for status changes the leader gets, and a whole host of victory conditions are just a few of the options we saw as Brian Jarrard scrolled through the list. If you happen to create a particularly cool set of rules that everyone loves, Brian told us Bungie would likely add it to their global matchmaking lists.

You can even create your own custom power-ups. Want a power-up that gives you an overshield, turns your avatar blue, and makes you deal twice the normal amount of damage? You can make it and then drop it into one of your custom Forged levels. Damage and attack, gravity, speed, health regeneration, shield effects, duration and a whole lot more can be tweaked, stacked, and then packaged into one nice little power-up to use in the game.

Now, placing all of these weapons meticulously around a map and customizing the rules wouldn't be much fun if you couldn't share it. And since Halo 3 is aimed at those wanting fun, you can do just that. Just like sharing a movie, you can put one of your edited levels up for the world to see in your shared items slots. From there, the world has access to it in several different ways. Friends can just take a look at what you've got. They can also send your shared items to friends of theirs that you might not have in common, who can then pass it further along.

There are other ways to find content, too. On Bungie.net, you'll be able to find a list of "Bungie Recommends" content. The team will meticulously search for the best movies, edited levels, rule sets, and screenshots (when you save a screenshot from within a movie, it exports the image in a higher resolution than the game is displaying to both your hard drive and Bungie.net) to share with the world. They're also looking to include a voting system where shared materials can be made popular by the players themselves with the top vote getters getting the most exposure. Then, just like movies, you'll be able to flag rule sets and edited maps on Bungie.net to be automatically downloaded the next time you log on.

Samuel L. Jackson or bust.

I thought it would impress me in the graphics department, and it hasn't and probably won't. With Gears of War, Bioshock and Lost Planet out there.......it's incredibly hard to be even remotely impressed with what I'm seeing.

Also I haven't seen another title with AF this good on the console.

HUGE POST

Lebato, your comments never seize to amaze me

The feeling is mutual Jin, don't worry.

Oh, and thanks for bringing in COD4.......that game.......well, pretty much poops on everything else.

Gears of War... even worse.