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Bungie has finally announced Halo 3… go check out that teaser trailer (running in-game) for the goods.

The bad news first… Sadly, we’re led to believe that this is the last Halo game, as the trailer features phrases like, “finish the fight,” “this is the way the world ends,” and Bungie has started referring to the series as a “trilogy.” (There’s still hope, though… maybe they’ll go wacky and make it a Quadrilogy.)

And now for the good stuff. After all, we still have a whole ‘nother game to start frothing at the mouth about! This is the most polished trailer I’ve seen from E3 yet… you can tell that Bungie have been doing this cinematic presentation thing for a while now, and they are ridiculously competent at maximizing the impact of everything they choose to show the public. I think that the strongest element of the Halo presentation style is the music: since Marty O’Donnell spent 24 hours crunching to put together the first iteration of the Halo theme before its release in 2001, he’s become (IMO) one of the best game music composers in the world. You can see his expertise displayed proudly in the new Halo 3 trailer, its musical track composed specifically for the purpose. From the Bungie.org newspost linked above:

Marty O’Donnell’s music will no doubt be heard over and over again. We can relate. The Studio has been thundering with the brass and bass of the trailer music for weeks.

Marty hired a 60 piece orchestra and a 24 piece choir to record the trailer music. “I want the viewer to have a feeling of anticipation and wonder for the first fifty seconds or so, up until Master Chief is revealed and they realize that it’s Cortana trying to tell them something,” he says.

Marty’s music was designed from the ground up to lull the listener into a sense of doubt, then wonder. “I want them to feel pride and longing the moment Master Chief walks out of the smoke,” says Marty. “I want them to get excited and perhaps even froth at the mouth when they see the Covenant Capital ship and then the incredible buried artifact. I want them to be left with that, ‘I can hardly wait to play this game’ feeling by the end with a slight, ‘I wonder what she meant by that‘ aftertaste.”

A 60 piece orchestra and a 24-person choir for a trailer! That’s what I call production value.

My fellow Marty O’Donnell fanboys can relive the audio from the new trailer in this mp3, ripped from the wma file by the always-helpful RenStrike:

DOWNLOAD: h3_e306_trailer_audio.mp3

Filed by sean at 4:35 pm under games
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