Exploring the control room
Posted December 10th 2006
Once you've got a Banshee, you can fly it back to the control room to explore. In particular you can fly around the floating image of Halo for a close look, and get down to the bottom of the room.
Floating panel glitch
There's also a very weird graphics glitch to see. Over each 'searchlight' beam below the platform, there's a floating 12-sided panel 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. Get out and walk near the beam; you'll soon see what I'm talking about. It seems likely that the panel was Bungie's way of casting light onto the area around the searchlight, perhaps to make things look more realistic. See my forum chat with Owm about this.
Instant-death zone
There's also a strange instant-death zone below the door. As soon as you enter this zone, you get violently killed, and your Banshee is destroyed if you're in it. If you were to jump down from near the panel for opening the door, 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.