Product Description

• Stunning layouts of hundreds of pieces of concept art from Halo 3. Enter the creative world behind the smash hit video game. • Commentary from Bungie artists on their vision of the world of Halo. • Hardcover, square trim book to showcase the art in a classic, lasting format. Interior

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191332 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

Customer Reviews

Mightily good
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R183OXN08KIJ51 If you're awed by the fantastic visuals of Halo 3 on screen, this book will give you the concept art that were used to create them

It is filled with concept art on the characters, vehicles, weapons and the environment. Each character comes with lots of design variations. Master Chief itself has 15 variations, all fully painted to the point I can't tell if they are 3D or digital paint. Some of the characters include ODSTs, Arbiter, Brutes, Flood and Strato Sentinel. At the end of the book, several pages are devoted to paintings of Master Chief.

The second and third chapter contains the war vehicles and weapons. There are lots of sketches and paintings. The really cool part is they have included lots of different rifles that weren't use in the game. The captions that appear throughout explain very briefly the ideas behind designs, same goes for all illustrations in the book.

The next section is the environment paintings. All look really fantastic and they printed them big. There are a few beat boards and storyboards but not much.

The last chapter is filled with random stuff. There are photos of miniatures, t-shirts, promotional items and toys.

The book itself is hardcover without any dust jacket with low gloss pages. The paper stock is not thick enough. The paper became wavy from the glorious art printed on it. Luckily, it doesn't affect the visual quality of the pictures in anyway.

This is a wonderful book to complement the game, highly recommended to all concept artists, game developers and fans of Halo 3. For the price, it's worth every cent.

There are more pictures of the art book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.

Good, but not perfect.
I enjoyed this book a great deal.

The quality of the print is good, there is plenty of content that will not have been seen before and not a single screenshot or 3-D render. Which already places it above every art of game book I have read previously. There is also a surprising degree of depth to the writing, the designer's thought process is covered more than the technical aspects, which I enjoyed but may frustrate some.

However, many of the pictures are infuriatingly small. For some of the massive vistas this is understandable as they simply would not fit, but there are a few pages with one tiny image in the centre and nothing else, why they could not have been printed larger is a question only the editor can answer. It prevents this being a five star book.
The writing style is also overly familiar, it is easy to read and understand but often comes across as slightly purile. They do however draw attention to a small mountain of details that you may have missed playing through the game.

Overall this is probably the best art of games book I have come across. The niggles are relatively minor and you could quite happily lose many hours pouring over some stunning pieces of artwork. If you are interested in the Halo universe, video game artwork or even digital design/painting as a whole this book is a must.

A good book
I enjoyed this book, the opening sections in my opinion are the best as I was looking for art based on the armour, characters and weapons. You get that well in the first about third of the book, with sections on allies, enemies, weapons and also vehicles. The vehicles section isn't the best, it shows a very tiny picture of a Human Frigate while the rest are mostly things cut from the game. The last huge bit of the book is based on scenery and mission layouts basically, which is why I rated this as 4 instead of 5. Too much scenery art compared to the rest of the sections.