Jeremy and Nate had the good sense to get to bed at 1 AM (their time). Why didn’t we?

Halo 3 isn’t spectacular, just rock-solid. On a system plagued by connection issues, it hooked us up to people 2,000 miles away without a hitch. In an era where split-screen gameplay is rapidly being abandoned, my wife and I were both playing co-op (not just deathmatch) over Live. We fired up the movie editor and reviewed a game that was (automatically!) saved, and marvelled at explosions frozen in time with a flick of the pause button.

I am not a game developer, but I know enough to know these features were not easy to implement. They required careful forethought, and in some cases, intentional sacrifices in game performance. And they are great. It’s nice to see a company care about the overall quality of the game experience, rather than fitting a few more polygons into the back-of-box screenshots. I hope they license the movie, party, and lobby features as a framework, because I know other developers won’t (can’t?) do this stuff if they have to code it from scratch.