OT: Halo for PC

[zen.]

Halo for the PC is cool in that the graphics are crisper. Unfortunately, the way they did things, you can't use antialiasing or any of the other nifty effects your spanking new video card has (well, technically it's feasible but requires changing .ini files and downgrading other graphics...TMI, I know), so say hello to jaggies. Graphics and models are not that improved from the XBox Version, so expect older technology in terms of modeling and so on. Still, it was very fun to play and the campaign/story more than made up for it.

They essentially bring the XBox experience to the PC...almost exactly, even! You can decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but if you've played the XBox Version, you've played the PC Version.

Keyboard and mouse control, per a first-person shooter, is standard and much more exacting (to me, at least) than the clumsy console controls.

Now, the thing that irks me the most? They took out co-op play. What made it so fun on the XBox was the fact you could play through the whole game with a buddy. Despite the vastly superior capability of the PC to multiplay (with a full screen, no less), they decided 'that's not where they want to go'. This is not to say there isn't multiplayer...there is. From what I understand, it's pretty fun, too, but the couple of times I tried it, it was pretty abusive on-line. I'm no slouch in the FPS department, but it was pretty brutal.

So to conclude my ramblings: if you haven't played the XBox Version before, and it's going for $20, give it a shot. It didn't have much longevity for me; I played it through a few times, and have no compunction to reload that sucker...and I bought it for $40.

zen

[Renegade 13]

I've never played it on Xbox, and I just finished downloading the demo. Speaking of brutal, try downloading 135 MB demo when all you have is dialup! Took bloody near 14 hours of continuous d/l. Anyways, I just wanted to get a few opinions on it while I was getting the demo, and thanks for them. I've read a bunch of reviews for it, and most of them said that you needed a high-end system to play it without lag...can anyone confirm this?

[PvK]

You can't play co-op multi-player on the PC Version? That stinks...

PvK

[Yimboli]

i have halo for PC, played through on all difficulties. legendary was unbelievably hard, quite a challenge. took me a month to beat it, playing every second I could (but being an electrical engineer in college, i really dont have much free time). however, it kinda ran crappy on my desktop. I have a 2.4 GHz processor with 512 or 1024 megs of RAM (forget which, and im not at my desktop so i cant check it), and a brand spanking new nVidia 256 meg card. It ran choppy if I raised the resolution to even 800x600. I was very disappointed. 'course, it may just be cuz i'm using nVidia's drivers and not 3rd party by my manufacturers. it may run sweet on yours.

however, if it runs like ****, you will want to look up the -useFF command line option on google, which made things run a LOT smoother at higher resolutions like 1024x768, with the cost being less impressive effects (opaque shields, etc.).

overall, I must say that the game was awesome. I had never played it on console, and got it for PC and instantly fell in love with it. The lack of coop sux. but hey, there's always Halo 2. and the trailer for Halo 2 looks *amazing*

~tim

[ July 10, 2004, 20:46: Message edited by: Yimboli ]