Halo 2 Review

All in all, Halo 2 is everything you have already experienced on the Xbox. That's a compliment, really! (You can even use one of the cool Xbox 360 USB game pads if you prefer that to the mouse keyboard combo. If you do prefer the gamepad to a mouse, please give your PC to someone who will appreciate it and go back to your Xbox). It's still a fun shooter with some new features on the PC that fans of the original game will enjoy, with its great music and the enjoyable online component. On those merits alone I would have to say Halo 2 is worth the purchase. But, hold on. Don't run out to the store just yet.

What's Halo without a little traditional Warthog fun?

We've pinned him down, boys!

*SPOILER ALERT*
Well there is that cliffhanger ending. It feels like it was done to force players to buy the next game in the series. Would a game publisher stoop to something so low?
*SPOILER ALERT OFF*

Then there are the graphics, which are not up to par with other shooters today and a single-player experience which clocks in around 10 hours or so. Even with those shortcomings, I would STILL recommend people buy and play the PC version of Halo 2; IF it did not mean you had to upgrade to Vista to play it.

I bought and installed Vista Business edition on a separate hard-drive so I can dual-boot with XP back in December. I am currently running an AMD 64 3700+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, a GeForce 7800 GTX video card and using a couple of Raptor drives setup as a RAID 0. Granted, my system is almost 2 years old and I was planning on upgrading this fall even before I got Halo 2 but still, Vista's internal benchmarking system for games (a nice little feature) let me know while my processor was the bottleneck on my system; overall I should be able to run the program.

As I was trying to log onto the Live service, the system let me know I needed to update the service. No big deal. I dropped out the game, downloaded the update and then was told my current security settings would not allow me to install the update (It did not tell me what part of my security settings were preventing me from installing the patch, mind you). This puzzled me a little bit as my user account is an Administrator. So I began hunting for the security setting I needed to disable.

30 minutes spent with in system help and toggling off a lot of what I thought was the problem proved incorrect after each attempt to install the update. After an hour of playing with the Security Setting, I logged on as the Administrator account and was able to install the update. This shows two things:
1. I am not that bright and should have tried this approach 20 minutes sooner
And
2. That damn Mac commercial is right about one thing: Vista is too overzealous in trying to protect the computer from the user.
Call me crazy but in every other OS that MS has put out, when I list myself as an Admin, I get Admin rights. ALL the Admin rights. Not this time around. I'll chalk this one up to my inexperience with a new operating system and move on.

Once I logged back onto my own user account I fired up the game, logged into my new Live account and started the campaign. The intro played and soon I was controlling Master Chief on my PC. However, as other characters came on screen in larger more open rooms, gameplay would stutter and lag. I enabled the system performance gadget and watched as in almost every point of the game, my CPU operations were pegged. I made sure I had no optional applications running, ensured I had the most up-to-date system drivers, shut down additional services, and then moved on to lowering settings in the game itself. While my performance in game did improve slightly I was now playing at 800 x 600 with all effects turned down and my CPU was still maxed about 70% of the time.

To make sure what I was seeing was not solely a case of outdated hardware, I installed Command and Conquer 3 and tried it in both XP and Vista. In XP the game ran smooth as glass with the highest settings. In Vista the game chugged and sputtered even with the settings lowered. Big surprise, right? Everyone has been saying since before Vista released that it was going to be a pig for resources. And as I said, I did plan on upgrading my system anyway this fall when a game that could really take advantage of Direct X 10 was out (*Cough*Crysis*Cough*). But am I going to upgrade my system to play a game that I finished on the Xbox over two years ago? Um, no. I would rather bide my time and hang onto my money for the next 5 months as invariably there will be a more powerful generation of hardware out to greet that hot new game.

If the point in making Halo 2 a Vista-only game was to convince gamers to upgrade from XP just to play this title, I don't think it's going to be a huge success. In fact, the more jaded of us might say the Vista-only release of a game that does not use Direct X 10 and could have been targeted for XP is a marketing technique that is at best, questionable and will do more harm than good as it may add to the greedy corporate image MS fights so hard to dispel. However, for those gamers that are already running Vista on a beefy enough system, have not yet experienced Halo 2 on the Xbox or are just looking for some fun multiplayer action on the PC, this would not be a bad title to add to your collection. After the frustration of trying to convince Vista to let me run the game, I could use some fun to reduce my stress.