Bungie is keen on living up to their word in bringing the world not only the best playing FPS the Xbox 360 has ever seen, but also the best looking one too. Content manager Frank O'Connor further inflicts pain to screaming fans with a recent hands-on experience of Bungie's third installment of the Xbox FPS series, Halo 3.

1UP posts these two paragraphs from Bungie.net: "Lit, shader effects, proper detail, atmospherics, audio, everything. The exteriors still needed some polish, but sweet crimeny Christmas. It looked amazing. Last week I talked about how we were adding all this hyper realistic stuff, while still trying to keep it true to the look and feel of Halo. The evolution of those ideas is that some of the test screenshots we took for an internal presentation, looked exactly like their concept paintings. Not just in terms of scale or detail, but the actual color palette. It's rich and vivid and full of life."

So what Frank is saying is that Halo 3 looks exactly like the concept art of the game. You know how it normally goes with concept art: months before the game is released, developers throw you a neat set of beautifully colored and nicely textured pictures to chew on and when you pop in the game, it's not exactly the state of the art visual experience you were hoping for. Well, as Frank O'Connor continues:

"As a matter of fact, we ran the screens back to back with concept paintings, and sometimes you had to blink to distinguish. Don't get me wrong, the graphics have a painterly quality, sure, but this is more to do with the impression they leave you than the details. A game's a game's a game. We're not going cel shaded or oil painting-y."

That last part kind of lost me, but it's obvious that Bungie has done a tremendous job with the third implementation of Halo. Chances are this is probably one hands-on experience of many to come, to further tease fans that cross days on the calendar. Sadly for them, they still have at least half a year to go.