We had a rocking good time at the Halo 3 pre-launch party in Downers Grove, IL on Monday night. This was a DPE Event, but we had a lot of help from our counterparts in other parts of Microsoft (thanks guys!). We spent most of the day transforming the Multi-purpose rooms (which are classroom style venues) into a gamer friendly environment. We set up 9 Plasma TVs, 4 projectors and 13 XBOX game consoles for the event. It was a mad scramble at the end and we came down to the wire (Dave Bost and I had to run to Best Buy and clean them out of wireless controllers, because we had miscounted the number that we needed). In the end the place looked sharp and you could hardly notice that just and hour and 1/2 before there were customers using one of the rooms for a .NET Briefing. It was an awesome event, but there was one real downside - I did not get to play the game hardly at all! We played for a couple of minutes here and there while we were setting up the “game pods” for quality control purposes, but during the event I was too busy taking care of logistical items and talking to people to sit down and enjoy the game.

3 hours of nonstop Halo and no progress

On Tuesday I was so beat from the Monday night event (I got home at 2:30 AM) I did not even put the disc in. On Wednesday night I decided to load up the warthog and take on the covenant. I played for 3 solid hours from 10:30 PM until 1:30 AM. At 1:30 AM I felt I had to quit the game and the get to bed, so I pushed the XBOX button and shut down the console. On Thursday when I went to continue the campaign, I was right back at the beginning. It took me a second or two to realize that I had not done the “save and quit” before shutting down the console. So I had to start over, but that is not the worst thing. 🙂