There was a lineup outside Vancouver’s Beatty Street Armoury on Tuesday night (September 15), but those waiting on the street weren’t enlisting. At least not for the kind of armed combat you might expect.

Gamers of all stripes were queued up to get a first glimpse at Halo 3: ODST, a new video game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The game, which will be released on Tuesday (September 22), is the fourth in the Halo franchise, after the trilogy of first-person shooter games and the strategy game Halo Wars.

ODST is a return to the first-person action and combat. Players take on the role of a Marine Orbital Drop Shock Trooper who is deployed into New Mombasa, Kenya, which has been occupied by an alien military force known as the Covenant.

Jeff Rivait, games and accessories product manager for Microsoft Canada, showed the Straight the packaging for the game’s special edition, which includes a controller that is laser-etched with Halo art and has a base colour that matches the camo green of the Halo 3 Xbox console. The special edition will retail for $99. The stand-alone game will sell for $69.

Rivait said that the event, which was advertised only through social-networking Web sites and the Canadian Xbox community, was a way for fans of the Halo titles to get immersed in the game in a way they couldn’t anywhere else.

In addition to providing a single-player story mode, ODST also includes “Firefight Mode”, which has four players cooperatively defending against waves of enemies that become increasingly larger and more dangerous.

Fans were admitted into the Beatty Street Armoury in small groups, and were led by United Nations Space Command “staff” through a recruitment protocol that included viewing the latest television commercial for the game (“We are ODST”, viewable here). The reward for passing through the gauntlet was entry into a main room where banks of Xbox 360s and screens were set up in groups of four to allow gamers to get a taste of the cooperative gameplay.

The choice of venue came out of the story behind the game, said Rivait. Unlike the first three Halo games, which starred the character of Master Chief, a genetically enhanced super solider, ODST is about human soldiers, recruited and tasked with protecting Earth and humanity from a faction of alien races bent on destruction and genocide.

“It made sense to recruit the best of the best of the Halo nation to give them a preview of the firefight mode,” said Rivait.

The event had an extra air of authority because security was handled by Canadian Forces members who drill at the armoury. They were very convincing in barking out commands to the recruits to keep things moving and to keep an orderly line.