Recently, I was fortunate enough to ride N'Gai's coattails and sneak into a preview night for Halo 3--a choice invite that would make my fellow twelve-year-olds-at-heart quietly curse my name. To be honest, it was a bittersweet experience.

When you last heard from me, I described how my love for my Xbox 360 was sliding down from unconditional by Microsoft essentially admitting that something wasn't right with the design. It is remarkable that a leading DIY solution to fixing a 360 stricken with the red ring of death is to swaddle it in towels: swaddling is how you make a baby fall asleep, not how you should have to revive home electronics. Now that I had shot my mouth off here on the permalinks of Level Up, I feared my prediction of my Xbox shuffling off its digital coil would come to pass. It flat-lined, of course. At first I was resigned, mildly annoyed that I would have to wait to play the new Ayn-Rand-with-guns-and-creepy-little-vampire-girls epic BioShock--but looking at a calendar and seeing September 25th only weeks away was no-scope shot to the head: I was going to miss Halo 3.

Calling Microsoft for a return under the newly extended warranty was an astonishingly bad experience. By the fourth time I had repeated my address, the customer service representative was still reading back a completely wrong number. A number that, on a Manhattan street map, would put my entire block in the middle of the Hudson river. I fared much better with Best Buy, and lucked out with a sympathetic operator who honored my product replacement plan. I was going to have to finish the fight later than everyone else, however: it was going to be 30 days until I saw my store credit in the mail.

Knowing all this fouled my mood as I sank into an overstuffed white lounge chair, in front of a nicer TV than I'm likely to own for years, to get my first hands-on experience with Halo 3's campaign. I'm new to these sort of review events, but it was a little peculiar  being in the darkened Times Square hotel suite where the preview was held. The place was almost a gaming monastery, with worshipers wearing 5.1 surround sound headphones staring into flickering flat-screen shrines. No one spoke above a whisper (you could only hear the click and clack of controllers) and the complimentary brownies and ten-ounce Coke bottles on the back table were ignored.

Once I had the controller in my hand, and the subtle, almost delicate opening seconds of Halo 3 started, my sour snarkiness drifted away. Bungie has a real knack for adding a sense of portent to imagery without succumbing to what I've heard called "Kubris"—an affliction where overly-proud creative types labor under the illusion that they are Stanley Kubrick. They also know how to pace a game. You're thrown into action after minimal exposition, and are immediately exposed to the richer interactivity and sophisticated art direction the 360 allows. Small things caught my attention--the way a small bush will snap back as a soldier runs past it, the sunlight rippling though jungle canopy--but I was never distracted by repetitive AI or feeling unduly railroaded into a particular path. The Covenant were the familiar mix of dumb cowardice and viciousness in a firefight, but they will react in a variety of ways to your own changing tactics. One tiny spoiler: the newly tuned Brute shot had scary accuracy--pick up one while you're at the Covenant-controlled base to spice up your time there.

Riding home on the subway, I realized I was going to miss the first-day excitement of meeting my friends online late at night to play--my hour and a half of game time before the rest of the world got their chance would not even things out. At 37 years of age, married and with a new child, this actually bothered me.