ESPN

Everywhere you look or listen, the message is that Halo 3 is more than just a video game. It's billed as the biggest entertainment release of the year by Microsoft Game Studios, the publisher, and Bungie, the developer. Many observers note that it's the biggest gun in Microsoft's Xbox 360 arsenal as the epic "console war" with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii kicks into a higher gear. The Halo 3 logo has shown up in unlikely places like Mountain Dew bottles, Pontiac dealerships and even at 7-11.

7-11?

What does it mean when you can get heat-lamped nachos, Slurpees, beef jerky and pre-order a certain Xbox 360 blockbuster in one convenient location? Is it progress that 7-11 (the one-time hotspot for all the latest quarter-munchers in your neighborhood and mine) is getting in the game?

We're going to throw out a handful of awesome things we've seen in Halo 3 that should help explain why this thing needs your attention.

This Time It's War

Gallery: Images from the war zone

The robust science fiction story that drives the Halo franchise has talked about the war between humans and the alien Covenant for years now. In this installment of the game all of the cut scenes, dialogue, sound effects, animation and other visual elements used to show this extended war have been turned up, enhanced and otherwise improved to really make the player feel like he or she is in the middle of an epic struggle.

Not that the first two games were lacking with the drama, but the processing muscle of the Xbox 360 changes how you'll feel about the whole thing. You get to see the giant human capital ships landing on the surface and dropping off an assortment of tanks and other vehicles for you to use. By this point in the game the excitement of getting new gear like this has given way to being stressed out about what's coming next: if you're getting tanks and stuff, that means you're going to be up to your helmet in trouble.

Likewise, the chaos of battle with missiles and lasers crisscrossing, explosions all around, enemies and allies chattering, not to mention all the calamity you're causing as the player, all sound and look good enough to keep you gripping your controller in a I-don't-think-I'm-going-to-make-it-this-time kind of way.

Harder Than Hard

The hardest difficulty setting in the Halo franchise is called Legendary and in a word it is unforgiving. So we'll focus here on the second and third difficulty settings because the difference between Normal and Heroic is almost like playing two different games. Playing on the Normal setting (the default) is like being USC's football team; you're talented enough to just go out and do the obvious things to succeed. The bad guys know you're victory is inevitable. Heroic is like the NFL where everybody is good and you'll have to think quickly and stay on your toes the whole time to even have a chance of success. There are awful snipers everywhere that will disrupt your otherwise clever tactics and approaches to problems. And there are terrible Brute Chieftains wielding giant hammers and seem to eat rockets like snacks.

Snipers and Chieftains. They exist to make you angry and scared and perhaps you'll come to despise them as much as we despise them.

Gut Check

The Flood have been a part of the Halo experience since the first game. They're like the "Aliens" Sigourney Weaver battled in her movies (the Halo franchise bites a lot from the "Alien" movies) but with faster gestation periods and less acid. In Halo 3, thanks to those spiffy audio/visual elements, we experience the Flood on a whole new level of disgustingness. The little headcrabs that scamper around will infest bodies on the ground that haven't been completely, ah, disassembled. It's both nasty and a pain in the rear-end when you see enemies wake up from the shotgun or laser dinner you've so graciously given them.

You get to explore a Flood-infested capital ship at one point in the game. This is when Halo 3 might as well be called "Toy Soldier in Your Intestinal Tract" because that's what it feels like. You feel, see and hear the mucous-covered environment as you slog through waves of Flood enemies. All of the doors on the infested ship are sphincters that dilate open automatically with a squishy sound as you approach. Two words: "Smellivision" and "no." Those pink pulsating globes on the wall? Why, those are just headcrab "zits" that'll spit out dozens of those little critters if you or anybody else shoots them open. People who make video games look to simple sources of inspiration, it seems.

Voices In Your Head

Cortana is Master Chief's imaginary girlfriend/conscience/sidekick/artificial intelligence buddy and he lost her in the last game. Her verbal instructions and extraordinary deduction skills helped you throughout the first two Halo games, so she's sorely missed early on in Halo 3. It's okay though because she still haunts Master Chief by way of timely flashbacks where her image will fill up the screen and slow the game down to a crawl. She's become completely unhinged too, as she lobs plenty of emotional grenades like, "Would you kill me to complete the mission?" and "I'm a thief, but I keep what I steal" at our hero throughout the game. Not to spoil it but Chief doesn't even get that upset about her nagging. She's a hologram. What's she really gonna do?

It's Showtime

The Theatre feature of Halo 3 makes every other element of the game, both single and multiplayer, that much better. Your entire game, level by level, deathmatch by deathmatch, is recorded automatically as you play. You can then go in and watch the festivities, capture screen shots of you in action and fly your camera around the environment in real time as the clip plays. This is yet another element that's going to add months and months of value to Halo 3 as fans can upload their screens and movies for others to see. The community of fans that's been built up around this game may go a little nuts for this, not to mention that super hardcore players who plays Halo in cash tournaments. Crappy players can see how great players run through the game and hopefully become great players themselves. Great players can damn near make action movies and open up online video "academies." It could be bigger than Tae-Bo before all is said and done.

So that's just a handful of what makes Halo 3 worth a look. Some of the awesome things we left out include the entire Multiplayer component (we'll get to that when the world has had a chance to get their hands on it), Forge (imagine playing a multiplayer game while it's being built and edited right before your eyes) and the strange alliances formed and broken throughout the solo campaign (every side fights and helps every other side at one point).

Look for more on Halo 3 on espnvideogames.com because everybody is going to be playing this thing.