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Halo 2 Multiplayer Modes Playtested, Recounted
Thanks to The Next Level for its two-part hands-on impressions of Halo 2's multiplayer modes, as shown at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles last week, including many videos of the action, and discussing "the changes to the heads up display", also noting gleefully: "Is carrying two guns worth sacrificing your ability to throw grenades? In a word: Hell Yeah!", before finally concluding of the Xbox title, due out this November: "It was by far the most fun and intense playing experience I had with any game at this year's E3."
Interesting note that I read about one of the E3 annoucements is that supposedly Microsoft is going to be releasing a version of the XBox controller for the PC. So it should mean that you can play Halo and Halo 2 more like what they are on the XBox if you so choose.
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The proliferation of Halo has little to do with PR people. I was an assistant manager at EB when the Xbox launched and continued to be until last summer. At the EB I was working at, Microsoft was too busy pushing Munch and Oddworld to really recognize Halo. It took a good 6 months until Microsoft really realized, "Dear God, we're still in the console game because of Bungie."
There are two related reasons why Halo has done so First, the co-op experience is great - you can breeze through Halo in a day with a friend, and then there is everything that happens in between. You start experimenting with jumps in the caverns, or messing around with the warthog. You're really just playing together, in a very sandbox-y kind of way. That rarely happened in PC games because anyone you really played with were miles away, or if you took the pain to get together you didn't want to waste it "playing."
Secondly, the ease in setting up multiplayer far exceeds the ease in setting up a PC lan. The xbox is a heavy beast, but a featherweight compared to the pain in the ass that is lugging around a midtower, a keyboard, a mouse, cables from here to kingdom come, and a monitor. About 10-20 of us used to have a LAN party every month. That is, until Halo came along. The 1-2 hours minimum in copying patches, maps, installing CDs you forgot or didn't have - suddenly became 10-20 minutes tops, and was just plugging things in. It was so much easier to bring friends too, because all you needed was a controller - not an entire PC. And, the Halo you played was exactly the same Halo someone played at there house. No one had an advantage because of a faster PC.
As you demonstrated, Halo's greatness is often lost on PC players, whom you refer to as "die hard gamers." It's greatness is difficult for PC people to understand, people who've gone to LAN parties for the last 8 years and can, in fact, get the setup down to 30 minutes or less. The feat of 16 players playing the same game at the same time is as difficult to comprehend for PC people who are used to 64+ people, but for video games it was a revolution. Sure, in comparison to PC FPS's, Halo is good. Not great, not bad, but good. Solid. However, as a console FPS, it is the seminal console FPS of all time. The controls are a dream for a console FPS, the graphics were amazing at the time, but more than that it was a pick up and play FPS. A friend who had played video games on his own but never an FPS could hold his own after an hour of playing. I'm not sure you could say that about most virgins to PC FPSs. What you saw of Halo wasn't really Halo. Halo is a bunch of friends in the same house or apartment, drinking beers or soda, cursing at each other from the other room, then taking as much time to recap, retell, and laugh at the stories made during the round that it took to actually play the round. That's Halo. It is a socially viral experience that has little to do with its single player.
What are PC FPS's? They are they elite, the bourgeoisie of video games. They are the ones in the high castle on the high hill. This form is shared in attitude by the people who play them exclusively. Go read some of the comments above on mouses and fps; the belief among PC FPS players is that the video game experience is a diluted, impure one. They're wrong.
What is Halo? Halo is the embodiment of concepts once held so dearly as PC-indiginous, Halo is the democratized FPS for the video gaming mainstream masses. This democratization, this bringing the FPS to the people, was an artform that Bungie pulled off brilliantly. You can say that Halo is average as an FPS, "inoffensive," "nothing new," or "special." That's fine. What you can't say though, is that Halo is not great. If you doubt the impact of Halo on video gaming, you just don't get it , quite objectively, quite plain and simple. You're being too PC-elite to accept that a game can be great, can be really good, can be amazing without you t