Still, it works well with the controller, the campaign seems interesting and I had a fun Skirmish against Normal (i.e. hopelessly easy) AI and it’s just plain fun.

A possible pay day purchase. More likely than Killzone 2 right now, anyway.

1) Being party leader is really quite stressful.

2) Lag’s no fun. Except in Rocket Race, which is insane enough to survive.

3) I am not good at all at Ninjaball.

I lost 10-5, but I’d feared a much harsher score line, so I was quite happy with the result.

We tried out some standard game types and then tried some new things – Storm The Beach and Zombies.

Storm The Beach is the Halo 3 version of D Day, with the attackers having to leave a landing craft and try to control six zones on the beach. Being the defending team is far more intense, I found, and neither team managed to grab the final zone, but it was good fun. If we play it again and find a good way to attack the sixth zone then things might become even better.

Zombies split the group, some of us loved it, some hated it. It’s very fast, very silly and not a little bit random. The humans have lots of weapons, the zombies only have melee weapons but can run very, very fast and jump very, very high. There’s only one or two zombies at the beginning, but every human who dies respawns on the zombie team. I loved it, but I’m not sure we’ll be playing it again, as it’s so divisive.

Everyone seemed to love Rocket Race, but I had to leave before that got played. Hopefully we’ll play it next Monday.

Before that I’d played a bit of single player. I’m really struggling to get through the first level on Heroic (I know, I’m rubbish) but it’s incredibly good fun. Best bit was the game checkpointing me while a huge alien git was charging towards me with a gravity hammer. Took me a few tries and some lucky grenade throws to survive that.

Then played through level one of the campaign on Heroic difficulty. Well, some of it. I still wasn’t done after an hour and so had to save and quit. Good fun and very satisfying, but it’s really a bit beyond my skill level.

Level nine, the final level, was just plain awesome. To both the extreme and the max.

And that was the end. I remembered to wait through the credits to see the final cutscene, and was very glad I did, as it explained something that confused me in the pre-credits cutscene.

Overall opinion of the single-player campaign? Well, I’m sure you can guess. It’s brilliant.

Then, of course, there’s multiplayer. I played three matches in Basic Training and actually won one of them. And not by a little. By a lot. The next match I came dead last in, but I had my moment of victory.

After that I decided to go back to the single player, with scoring turned on this time. I didn’t expect to see anyone, but someone on my friends list joined me. Not sure who they are, really, being a slightly random name, but we played through the first half of the first mission in complete silence and then they quit. Why I didn’t say anything, I don’t know. I’m regretting it now. But I was just confused at first at the fact that there was another player with me, which I hadn’t expected, and as the silence grew it became more difficult to break. I really want to try it with some talking friends sometime.

Now, level eight is already infamous online with The Internet deeming it to be a rubbish level in an otherwise stunning game. In this case, The Internet is right. It’s bloody atrocious. Incredibly repetitive in the most annoying fashion, badly checkpointed, far too easy to get lost in, despite basically being a single corridor, and with dull and annnoying combat.

Last night I was thinking that it wasn’t up to Halo standards, but was still the standard of a decent FPS, but in the cold light of day I feel it may not even be that good. It’s like a bad FPS and Halo is a bad game while you’re playing it.

Shame, as all the levels preceeding it were incredible. Absolutely marvellous. So many great moments and all I could think while playing was “I can’t wait to play this again.” I’m itching to finish the game so I can play through it all again, but I’m not going to be looking forward to level eight, unless it somehow clicks when I try it again next time I play.

However, after playing the single player for an hour or so I accepted a game invite for some multiplayer fun, assuming the game had been saving my progress as I’d been going along.

It seems not.

Looks like I’ll have to restart, but I really don’t mind, given the fun I had first time round.