here: http://www.gametab.com/xbox/halo.2/1472/ [gametab.com]

Halo 1 had horrible level design. For some stages level design went like this:

1. Take a room and make 20 identical copies
2. Join all the rooms together with corridors
3. ???
4. Profit

Absolutely horrible. The alien spaceship was some of the worst level design I have seen in the last 5 years. I hope things are better this time.

From ...ahem play testing at a uh friends house...all the way through I got to be honest when I say I wish I didnt have this arriving in the post in a weeks time. The magic of the first one jsut isnt there. Its about half the length and you can tell that it is just getting strugn out into a fresh "chapter" each year. It dosent play as smoothly, the multiplayer aspect of it is lacking compared to the first, the story is not as tight and fun as the first and its about half the length. To be honest it feels more like an expansion pack rather than a full and slaved over game. Its just a pity that the magazines jump on the bandwagon. It deserves to do well just not as well as it will do. Instad of your own money ask for it as a gift for christmas or thanksgiving. You wont feel so let down.

was that it was something anyone could pick up and play, and culture whores needed something to grasp to. All my friends who arent really gamers, love Halo, but everyone who is a gamer, realizes how lifeless it is, and that holds true with the second.

its more of the same. so .... 1) you liked halo: combat evolved and played it through to the end. you'll like halo 2. 2) you liked halo: combat evolved but got bored halfway through due to repitition. you may aswell just play halo: combat evolved to the end. 3) you didn't like halo: combat evoled. halo 2 will be the same. 4) you haven't played halo: combat evolved. buy halo: combat evolved first as you'll be able to get it in a bargin bin. (thats if your thinking of getting halo 2) there really isn't much new at all. can use both hands at once... a few more vehicules.... new storyline... a few new weapons. all in all what you'd expect in a sequel. still has the repitition to it. i found the first two levels stunning then it started to get boring again. AI is great again though :).

That's why...

I think they went too far the other way this time. The levels are so huge and complex that on several occations I was completly lost for 20 minutes or more.

A more honest review, at least I think so. 9.8 is just bullshit - it's nowhere near as revolutionary as Halo 1.

As much as I hate to appear the karma whore, I think people need to see a more balanced review of the game. Remember, we're putting our bollocks on the line with Microsoft's PR by giving the game below 9/10 - we just felt we had to tell the truth.

See the review here. If you like it, pass it on [gamerseurope.com]

I find the multiplayer to be completely unfriendly to system link lan play. If doing the regular 4 xbox, 16 player game, each players screen is about 75% clutter, and 25% viewable area. Text fully unrelated to your player scrolls by non stop, the giant radar circle STAYS ON THE SCREEN even when you tell it you do not want radar (completely stupid), the guns fill the screen up with (should have positioned the camera a little further ahead, just a tad).

The view itself seems blurred, its very hard to see objects which are in the distance, which I assume is Bungie conserving cpu to keep the game looking nice. Unfortunately all it accomplishes is a very crappy experience in multiplayer as it can be hard to see enemies at range unless zooming in all the time. It's also much harder to distinguish players from the environments overall as the player colors are less contrasting.

As for the single player, it felt like the game was rushed.
(possible spoiler)
Pushing the premise that the Covenant are attacking earth as the story in all the previews, and then only having ONE level where you are actually even trying to defend the earth, ya, good thinking there. The story itself is full of unanswered holes and events with no backing at all in the actual game. Sure it is nice to continue the story in the next game, but when the next game is needed in order to even comprehend what in the hell is going on at some points, gameover man, gameover. Maybe MS wanted bungie to just get the game out of the doors before building the hype machine for the next generation, or whoever participated in any form of public Halo 2 playtest put absolutely no effort in making recommendations to Bungie on things that needed to be fixed before release, either way the product feels incomplete and poorly executed. Sorry fanboys.

Maybe i'll just stick to Halo 1.

...and then forced Bungie to port Halo to the X-box.

Do you have any idea what you're even talking about? Halo went through so many changes that if it had been released on the Mac as originally planned it would have been yet another mediocre RTS game on a platform with a very small videogame market.

I'm not a Microsoft advocate, but because of Microsoft's purchase of Bungie, they were given an infusion of funds and resources to make what would have been an undersold and mediocre game into the best FPS on the Xbox, perhaps even the best FPS console game to date (yes I've played Goldeneye and Perfect Dark-- Niether game can is as good as Halo multiplayer, new technology notwithstanding).

For anyone interested, here's a look [fileplanet.com] at the evolution of Halo. Get an idea of what it would have looked like had Microsoft not been involved. Trust me... nobody would have bought a Mac just because the RTS Halo-as-it-would-have-been was on it.

More mirrors [google.com]

Not a big Halo fan, that reason being one of them (another being that I have a mystical device called a PC), but from what a friend of mine tells me they pretty much stuck to similar designs with Halo 2, though they tried to disguise it a bit better this time around.

Halo was not "born on the console". It was born on the Macintosh. Microsoft got hold of it and changed that, however.

30fps is video speed. The 'sluggish' speed of movement in Halo isn't because of the frames per second.

The movement speed is intentionally coded to be slower than Quake. It's far more realistic a movement speed. Let's face it, you can't run 60 mph. But if you just play Quake and HL and UT, it takes some getting adjusted to. That and you have to think ahead about what you're doing instead of just reacting to everything.

Yeah, that's the biggest complaint of the game, but it's well documented as to why that happened.

From what I understand, Bungie was in mid-development when MS came to them with truckloads of cash. They wanted to buy the company, and release Halo at the same time as the Xbox.

So, level design was scrapped, and the production time on the game was pushed up considerably, to get it ready for the Xbox launch date.

Since the game was so short in its original format, they just added a few layers of repetition to the single player maps, and shoved it out the door.

From a game design perspective, it wasn't the best thing to do... But from a monetary perspective, any economist would tell you they did the right thing.

You want to see a freaking honest review of Halo 2? HERE [gamercentric.com] Yes, we're pissed, and yes, SCREW MICROSOFT.

Halo PC is not the way people were meant to play Halo. It was released 3 years later with neglible changes. It was born on the console, and thats where the gameplay really belongs.

Balderdash.

Halo is a PC game. It was designed to be a PC game and the original version always will be an unfinished PC game. Bungy made it, and they made it great.

Unforunately, not long before the game was ready, Microsoft bought Bungie studios and shelved Halo. They then ported whatever they could from the carcass to the then new XBox just in time for a Christmas release. Thus Halo/XBox was born.

A few months later, Microsoft were kind enough to grace us PC gamers with a port of Halo/XBox to the PC. But make no mistakes - this was not the original version by any means. Because it's a port of an XBox game, game play is severely retarded due to the pathetic 64MB memory of the XBox, textures are repetitive and performenace is dog slow. This is Halo/XBox/PC.

I doubt Halo/PC will ever see the light of day.

Not exactelly. Marathon 2: Durandal was indeed ported to Windows95 - later open-sourced and ported to other systems; but the original Marathon remains Mac-only (the third game, Marathon Infinity, has basically the same code as Durandal, so maybe you can count that as open as well)

Nonono, it's like this:
In Soviet Russia, Halo reviews YOU!

Well, I can't speak for most of the online ratings, but 1up.com does have the review that will be printed in EGM. The game got all 10s. Now the reason I mention EGM is that in the past game publishers who advertised in the mag became upset over a few games that got low ratings. EGM's response was to say that they stick by their ratings and if they lose a few ads, so be it. I find EGM and most web sites to be pretty accurate as far as my tastes are concerned.

By the time you saw the "real" Halo at Macworld, it had already undergone massive changes from its original concept (it used to be an RTS, for one thing), and after MS bought Bungie it was virtually rebuilt from scratch for the Xbox.

vehicles - first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game.

Ah, yes, because, you know, silly games like Tribes 1 (and 2!) didn't have real vehicles, not like Halo.

</sarcasm>

>> Hi, my name is proof. Where am I?

In my liquor. 80 of you.

"somehow these games that get rated badly never happen to be the ahead-of-time-big-name-exclusives."

Yeah, sure...

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/driver3/index .h tml?q=Driver+3

I freelanced for GameSpot a few times, and they're a very tricky pub to work for. Their guidelines are kind of skewed: they tell you to put all your weight into the "reviewer's tilt" type of score. That never happens though, because you have millions of gamers rely on that one number near the top of the page (the average).

They're one of the few publications I've seen that don't say "augment your score with a written argument in the review". You'd think that was a given, but they know people rely on those scores to make purchasing decisions. You're right, though: it leads to some awkward reviews ("Story sucks, graphics are ok... 9.4").

Doom 1 was revolutionary; everything in the FPS realm has been incremental improvements and regurgitation since.

But Doom 1 was just an incremental improvement on Wolfenstein.

That isn't totally true, but all games are incremental improvements. The question is just how large the improvement was.

I personally believe that there have been a few standout games in the FPS that are worth noting as milestones.

Wolfenstein
Doom 1
Quake
Half Life

I don't think we have had anything worthy to be called a milestone since Half Life. Maybe one of the UT series. I have some hopes that S.T.A.L.K.E.R might really introduce something new.

You mean dual wielding is common on FPS?

It is in Bungie FPS. Marathon had dual pistols back in 1994. I was surprised that Halo 1 did not a have it.

Technically, Halo came out a month before RTCW.

The HUD is only displayed once you put on the HEV suit. The HEV suit includes a helmet (pictures of Gordon rarely include it but it's in the first game's data files and the suit wouldn't really offer protection without any form of headgear). I'd assume it's in the helmet.
Outside of a loading screen and the multiplayer model Gordon is never shown in the first game, the player wasn't supposed to know what he looks or talks like, Gordon was supposed to be exactly like the player and the player didn't know Gordon has glasses.

Halo was intended to be a Mac game first and foremost

It was NEVER slated to be a Mac-only game. Steve Jobs begged the Bungie guys to intro it at the Mac World conference to boost the idea that the Mac was a gamer's platform.

Also Bungies' efforts to make a RTS game was short-lived. They quickly realized that it was going to be a FPS along the lines of the Marathon series.

Their original platforms for Halo, the FPS, were Mac, PC, and Playstation2.

When Microsoft bought Bungie, Bungie scrapped a lot of their engine work and rebuilt it to meet the XBox technical requirements. What was (much) later brought to the PC was a port of the XBox game and what was brought to the Mac was a port of the XBox game ported to the PC. In a word, it was pretty bad. However, if you ignored the pathetic nature of the port itself, the game rocked.

We can excuse Bungie because they didn't make either the PC or Mac ports, they made the XBox game... and it was as good as any FPS can be on a console.

I can only hope they work themselves on the PC/Mac port of Halo 2 so it will meet their high standards.

No, this is not correct.

Halo was originally being developed for Macs and PCs with the Mac version scheduled to be released first.

Development for both was being done on Windows PCs. Sorry if you believe otherwise, but you're incorrect. The coding was being done on PCs.
The art/media, however, was being created on Macs.

If you don't believe me, you can read it directly from Bungie [bungie.net].

You'll be pleased to know that Halo's development originally commenced on the PC because the 3D stuff on the Mac wasn't up to par at the time.

Then MS threw tons of cash at Bungie and they sold out and Halo became a Xbox game (and laster a PC game). I feel it was a smart move on Bungie's part, even though I did send an email to bungie at the time chastising them for selling out.