Halo for the PC and Mac

smelialichu writes "According to this news article, Halo is finally on its way to the PC and Mac. Gearbox is handling the PC version, and Westlak Interactive is working on the Mac version, but it won't be released untill next summer. The official announcement says "Halo for PC is expected to be available in summer 2003. The Macintosh version is also expected to be available in 2003. Additional information regarding game content, features and enhancements will be announced at a later date." We can only assume they have some cool new features up their sleeves, maybe we'll be seeing Halo with even better graphics, optimized for the new Radeon? Anyway, this is certainly a huge relief to many gamers who thought they may never see Halo on their home PC's."

Comments

Something worth mentioning

[Y-Crate]

A lot of people have complained about how Halo was transformed over several years into several very different games. They like to blame Microsoft for this.

That would be a mistake, I'm afraid.

I read an interview with one of the Halo team members not too long ago where he explained that the team willingly threw out what they had on several occasions to start over anew because they came up with a better way of doing things.

Few people seem to know Halo started out as an RTS! The warthog (jeep) was something they were playing around with for some time as an extension of that project, and they had so much fun with it, they ended up creating an entire game around it. A 3rd person shooter.

Then, they threw that out and went for first person.

And abandoned the whole "We'll simulate the entire surfance of Halo and let you wander around doing what you wish, ala Morrowind" idea.

These were THEIR decisions.

The one negative aspect of Halo you can blame Microsoft for is the fact they imposed time constraints on the team. Halo needed to be ready and thoroughly bug tested by November 2001. They didn't have all the time they needed to make all the levels as nice as they could have been, and that is why there is some pretty awful repetition.

Give credit and blame where they are due, but don't blame Microsoft for every damn thing you don't like about Halo, or why feature X that was described in 1999 didn't make it into the Golden Master copy 2 years later.

Re:Something worth mentioning

[SimplyCosmic]

You've forgotten the one, simple and probably most important thing that we [i]can[/i] blame Microsoft for.

The fact that PC and Mac users will end up with a warmed-over port that should have been out last year, but has been put on ice solely to benefit the XBox.

Add to this the fact that it's a port from Gearbox Software, which with their track record means it'll be supported for a few short months, then all updating will cease no matter how many critical bugs remain.

"Microsoft issued a media alert to formally announce the development of Halo for Windows and the Mac," says the press release.

Oh thank god, now development can start on ports to Windows and Mac of a game that was originally developed for Windows and Mac.

*sigh*