Slashdot Mirror
Bungie Celebrates 2-Year Anniversary Of Halo Release
Thanks to Bungie.net for their feature commemorating the second anniversary of Halo's Xbox debut. The piece starts: "What started life as a pseudo real-time-strategy game for the Apple Mac has turned into the number-one-selling Xbox game of all time and a driving force behind much of the console's overall success", and goes on to elicit Ed Fries of Microsoft's remembrances of the scary moments ("Our first E3 press event went REALLY bad. The Xbox didn't even power up. Halo was the grand finale and we had some serious framerate issues and hiccups"), and the Bungie developers, fans and media's favorite anecdotes ("Halo rage is a beautiful thing. My plaster walls are free from damage now, but the amount of controllers I go through is atrocious.")
When - if ever - is the Mac version coming out?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Amen, brother. And MS will continue to have a noxious effect on the entire gaming industry. Don't expect it to end with Bungie, by any means.
... that's a road we don't want to go down. Not only will it inevitably affect the creativity of indie development houses (which is reason enough to avoid the situation), but on the console side of things it's worse. One is locked out of all future games from those developers unless he/she owns the proper console.
... *shuter*
For those of us who don't like MS and won't own an XBox, the fact that we missed out on the whole Halo thing is not even the full extent of the problem. This business of console makers buying large, successful developers/publishers outright
So not only did I miss the Halo phenomenon, sadly, I will also be missing the sequel---along with any other quality games the Bungie crew happen dream up. The above poster is absolutely right. Releasing Halo on the PC at this point is simply an insult. He's also right in pointing out that the glory days of Bungie are now behind them, with the acquisition virtually guaranteeing that.
As a momentary exercise in completely extraneous hypotheticals, and to drive the point home with much more force (given the audience), imagine for a moment that MS had decided to acquire Squaresoft instead of Bungie
/* Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau! La moitie de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau. - Corneille */
IIRC, Halo was first promised as a PC game, poised to be the next Starsiege/Tribes multiplayer/coop. What's hard to believe is that the Xbox (purportedly) runs a stripped-down version of Windows 2000 and DirectX APIs--- so why couldn't Halo have been ported sooner? Bugs crept in during the port which have yet to be addressed, but again why? The PC graphics are crisper/cleaner than those on the Xbox, but in two years, it could have been polished a lot more. Did Microsoft deliberately hold Halo PC back in order to let it remain the 'killer app' for the Xbox?
I was unhappy with the whole idea too, until I tried it out. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere has a better online gaming service. Very reliable, very browsable, and the lowest kiddie-to-human being ratio I've seen (partly because of the pay nature, and the very real penalty of having an account closed - instead of being to simply create an account with a new name). Plus, have you played online games on some other consoles? Games like SOCOM were completely ruined by rampant cheating - every kiddie online had a GameShark and it worked for online play!
Xbox Live just keeps improving, and does everything right. It will continue to bilk the $50 out of this MS-disliker each year, because it's a great product on all fronts, developed with some true innovation and problem solving (instead of problem creation). If only Windows were developed the same way.