Halo PC.
First and foremost I'd like to extend a finger of gratitude to Microsoft for whoring the game in its original PC form from Bungie, and then converting it into a console game and using it as a market ploy to sell more XBOX's.
This devoted Halo fan wasn't impressed.
For those of you who don't know, Halo was going to be awesome and it was to come out for the PC. Microsoft, with their hefty money bags and devious corporate smiles, decided to buy out the company who was making the game, Bungie. They then told everyone that it was going to come out only for XBOX and that the PC release would be sometime after the XBOX release. Oh. Great.. Now I have to somehow wrap my hands around those enormous and incredibly awkward bear-claw shaped XBOX controllers to play my much anticipated first person shooter. That and play with a limit of 4 people multiplayer, unless I test my patience on the lag-plagued "Mplayer" Network. The bottom line is, controllers fucking suck for first person shooters. With a keyboard and mouse, first person shooters are infinitely easier.
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A scary resemblance
Sure enough, it was released for the XBOX, and successfully enticed more people to waste their money on one. I'm not going to review the XBOX version of the game, because I don't consider it to be playable. I can hardly even hold the controller properly, let alone aim with a sniper rifle and kill some Covenant.
This review is dedicated to the PC version of the game, which was a lousy butchered port from the XBOX. Big Surprise. Bungie was too busy with Halo 2 for the XBOX that they had no time to release it from their previous builds of the game for the PC. Solution? Hand the project off to Gearbox Studios, a respectable game company who did the Halflife expansion Opposing Force. The problem lies in the method they moved it to the computer, they did not rely on earlier builds of the game that Bungie had made. To save time and effort, they simply ported it over to the PC in it's dumbed down XBOX format, resulting in a very choppy version of the game for PC. Although however badly your computer dies trying to handle the crappily ported PC version of Halo, the netcode for multiplayer was completely redesigned to support up to 32 players in a single game (beat that, X-SUX). This feature alone gives the game tremendous online play value and saves it from being labeled off as a totally shoddy ported console game. In a typical online game, you would be surprised by the intense mayhem that goes on, that is of course if you can find a fast server. This game would definately have been a lot better if Microsoft didn't shake their money bags infront of Bungie. Not worth purchasing, and fits nicely into the 'I downloaded it for free' category. Nice try Microsoft, you aren't getting money from me this time.
