Control room exploration and fun
Posted February 19th 2025 (replacing a minor 2006 article), updated later
Associated movies
Once you've got a Banshee soon after the start, you can fly back to the control room to explore and to enjoy some fun. I'll detail these activities in a moment, but first a few words on setting up.
Setting up with a handy checkpoint
To make setting up as easy as possible, you might like to use Easy. That way there's very little danger and you can pretty much run past everyone if you want. On higher difficulties you'll obviously need to take more care. A nice route to the Banshee is down the right-hand side as seen in BCM548. That lets you skirt around most covies, though on Easy you can take pretty much any route and still be fine.
For the eventual exploration and fun, I'd suggest a pistol and sniper rifle as a good combo. The rifle is useful for viewing things at magnification, and with light amplification when desired. Both weapons are available in the tower once you get outside, and I'd suggest getting them pronto, though you could get them later instead (more fiddly because you'll likely be trying to keep a checkpoint delayed at the same time). Incidentally, I also recommend getting a full complement of plasma grenades to play about with. You start off with only two, but can pick some up along the way.
It'll be good to get a checkpoint when back at the control room, not least because some activities may lead to your death. Boarding the Banshee triggers a checkpoint, and you can keep it delayed until back, using enemy threat and Banshee fire as appropriate - and potentially some jumping if you dismount on the way back to pick up weapons.
Boarding the Banshee also triggers loud music, set to continue for several minutes. If you want to kill the music to enjoy your control room fun with just the ambient sounds there, simply destroy the Wraith.
The way I've described things, you'll end up with a nav-pointer in your HUD. If you'd prefer a cleaner HUD, that's no problem. Destroy the first generator then go through the indicated doorway at one end of the bridge (you'll then have no nav-pointer). At the start of the long middle section of passage there's a checkpoint triggered, and you can keep it delayed until back at the control room.
Visiting the bottom and top
Moving to the exploration aspect, for starters you might like to fly down for a look at the bottom. Admittedly though, there's not a whole lot there. The ground is flat and featureless, and the side 'ribs' leave angled niches at the ground. It's rather dark too. Pity nobody installed any lighting. Nice view up with a zoomed sniper rifle though!
The top is very similar to the bottom except upside down. What were overhang niches now become perches you can dismount onto, though your Banshee will fall down into the void. Again, you can at least enjoy some viewing with a zoomed sniper rifle. Incidentally, Spasmodic launched up onto one such perch in his Halo 1 launching video DOSAGE.
Visiting the periphery
Below the level of the control platform, you can visit the sloping periphery which features eight big lights. In connection with those, there's an oddity. Over each light there's a floating 12-sided panel or 'disc' hovering several feet over the matching hole for the beam, but it's invisible from above, so you won't have known it was there. You have to get below it to see it. The underside is black, and the disc is non-physical (things pass through it).
It seems likely that the disc was Bungie's way of casting light onto the area around the light, perhaps to make things look more realistic. See my 2006 forum chat with Owm about this.
As for the lights themselves, the surfaces are likewise non-physical, as demonstrated in BCM548. You can get a novel view by being within a light and looking down into the pale yellow.
Caution: death zone!
While flying around the periphery, beware of the death zone below part of the gangway (towards the door). If you enter this zone you get instantly killed, and your Banshee is destroyed if you're in it!
If you were to jump down from near the door switch, you'd normally enter that zone and die. I imagine that's what Bungie put it there for, because normally the fall wouldn't be enough to kill you. Just for the record though, it's possible to jump down to miss the zone and survive, if you do it quite a way back from the door. Possible on PAL Xbox at least (my system).
Mini-Halo inspection and fun
A prominent feature of the control room is the 'mini-Halo' as I'll call it - or just the 'ring' for short - rotating around. I'm not sure if it's meant to be a physical object or some sort of holographic projection, but at any rate it certainly acts as if non-physical. You can have good fun with it, which was the focus of BCM549.
For starters you can track around it getting spectacular views, such as getting a view which skims along low down to the inner surface. This is some of the best fun you can have here, although glass shattering has a lot going for it too (see later).
It's not as easy as it sounds though, which is partly because the ring not only rotates but constantly moves its spin axis around (in a somewhat irregular way, which I find odd). Sometimes the ring may be up near vertical (it can get fully vertical), while other times it can be quite shallow, though never actually horizontal (maybe the minimum angle is somewhere around 25°). You may need a bit of practice to get good at tracking it closely.
You can also get close views of the ring (both sides) by hovering, though that's likewise easier said than done. The Banshee doesn't automatically hover in place, and it can take some delicate control to achieve and maintain a certain view. Something to notice: the ring's topography repeats, as if made of four identical quarter-strips.
Of course, you can also take a look at the ring using a zoomed sniper rifle. That can be useful for getting a close look at the signs spotted around the ring, notably including a large roughly rectangular one which has quite a bit of symbolism on it.
Note: I haven't tried to analyse the ring's movements in detail, but it appears to repeat a cycle which, on PAL Xbox at least, lasts exactly four minutes. And within that cycle it goes vertical twice, with those occurrences separated by what looks like exactly two minutes.
Other things to look at
As well as the mini-Halo, there are also some other floating objects to look at. Among them is a cute little polygonal ring orbiting around, as highlighted briefly in BCM549 using a zoomed sniper rifle. I'm not sure what it represents, but it appears to orbit in sync with a small planetoid image.
There's also the control panel to inspect, with all its weird animated elements, plus its own sounds.
Glass shattering fun
The glass panels around the circular platform have a bizarre property. Through contact, the Banshee can cause spectacular shattering (shard production), yet they remain intact! It makes no sense at all, but the shattering is a lot of fun so never mind. Actually, perhaps the anomaly is instead the fact that glass shards are produced from what doesn't seem like glass at all. The panels (which have no perceptible thickness, unlike the shards) have somewhat of a perspex appearance, and they're also unreactive to gunfire or blasts. However, I'll continue to call them 'glass'.
At first I was just cruising the Banshee through the panels, flying roughly parallel to them. You can go through one after another like that, around the circle (tip: you get stronger shattering effects if the Banshee's hull is close to the panel). But later I realised there was considerably more you could do, and I showcased things in BCM550. Basically there are various ways you can get the Banshee inserted into the glass to subsequently produce shards, potentially in high volume.
Typically the shard production would come from flipping the Banshee. For examples I refer you to the movie as they're not so easy to describe in words, but in particular, note what I called a 'diagonal slice' which gives loads of glass (see pic). It's easy to achieve, and when you dismount (which looks fatal), the game obligingly puts you on the platform. Repeatedly flipping to cause shattering has the side-effect of easing the Banshee along the panel, but you can always board and slide it back the other way, to dismount afresh and have more fun.
In some cases you can get remarkable automatic shattering due to the Banshee being unsettled. In the movie, the 'nose slice' and deeper 'mid slice' are configurations of this type, giving some spectacular effects, potentially including vigorous camera shake. You may have some trouble getting these effects though. I haven't explored the situation fully, but it seems like there may be quite a bit of sensitivity as to whether you get good effects or not. So it may take a few tries with Banshee insertion before you get good results.
NB: non-breaking shatterable glass panels like these also appear on the twin bridges deeper into the level, which also feature in AOTCR of course. You can enjoy some similar glass play in all those cases.
There are also short glass panels around the circular platform, on both the outer and inner edge, and these too produce shards without actually breaking. The mirrored floor produces shards too.
Fun with an Elite
After the level's first door you meet a bunch of Grunts plus an Elite, then just around the corner, a few more covies spawn at some point (possibly after you've passed that point), including another Elite. Once you open the door that leads outside, any remnants of the first covie group is removed by the game, along with any Sentinels, but that's not true of the second covie group. If you leave that second Elite alive, you can have fun with him later in the control room by making him rage after you.
One idea: get him onto the circular platform, then cruise around underneath in Shark style (the technique I put to good use at the first bridge in level 5), making him dive. That gives you an entertaining view, but actually the glass panels stop him going off. Except, there's a gap at the control panel, so he might dive off to his death there.
Talking of which, another recreation is to herd him along the path by repeatedly causing him to dive (your Banshee resting on the path this time), until he finally dives over the edge at the control panel.
For a good bit of foot-based fun, get onto the outer edge behind one of the large glass panels. From the other side he'll potentially shoot at you and repeatedly try to melee you, but to little or no effect. You can potentially shoot and melee him however, because he partly sticks through at certain times. Also you can tag him on the nose! That can all get quite amusing, especially how he takes swipe after swipe with no effect.
Yet another idea: get onto the inner edge near the control panel, to tempt the Elite to come after you. He often clumsily goes over the edge (similar to suicidal Elites at the start of level 5), and you can tag or rocket him, or whatever. Sometimes he instead ends up standing on the low barrier, which pretty much immobilises him, and that gives you a nice opportunity for other mischief.
Note: for having fun with an Elite, I suggest using Normal as a default, and preferably having a blue to minimise the amount of fire you take. On Normal, a healthy blue is easily put into rage mode with a single close Banshee blast, which is very convenient, whereas on Easy a blue is so fragile that it's a touchy job to make him rage without simply killing him.
Getting a later checkpoint
If you've created a set-up as per my default suggestion, bear in mind that you can potentially modify things later and get a new checkpoint. You might be interested in a weapon switch for example, or maybe you want to be in a certain initial state, with a particular action or activity in mind. If your old checkpoint was the one from boarding the Banshee, there are still multiple checkpoints available for completing the modification. One is the checkpoint triggered at the start of the long middle section of passage leading to the first generator. Another is the bridge-exit checkpoint I mentioned earlier in connection with eliminating any nav-pointer on the HUD.