So a few days ago, the Halo 3 Beta went live.

Now, truth be told, I never really got into Halo, and I don’t think I ever even played Halo 2. The small amount of multiplayer Halo I played seemed sluggish, unpolished, and somewhat boring. The high-speed action of Unreal Tournament just blew Halo multiplayer away, at least in my experience.

Halo 3, on the other hand… Wow. I wasn’t actually expecting a lot from it, but since I had bought Crackdown - a great game, and anyone who bought it just for the H3 Beta invite should be shot - anyway, I figured I’d grab the beta and see what all the fuss was about.

Visually, it’s stunning. These days, I don’t expect much less than awesome from 360 visuals - everyone seems to have gotten a good grasp on the hardware now, and so even crappy games look good - but Halo 3 is really beautiful. Amazing scenery, grass waving in the breeze, awesome explosions; it looks great.

More surprisingly though, is that it also plays brilliantly. The Matchmaking system seems fair, the gametypes are well balanced, and the netcode makes the entire experience feel like I am playing on a LAN.

I’m absolutely pants at it, of course - FPS has never been my strong suit, and console FPS even less so - but it’s a lot of fun, and I kinda feel if I stick at it, I may actually lern2play. I’ve had a few lucky victories in King of the Hill games, but usually I’m in the bottom half of the table. Still, I’m having fun with it.

So I’m impressed - Halo 3’s “maybe rent” has turned into a “almost definitely buy” for me.