Slashdot Mirror
Halo 2 Ready to Ship
Thanks to pdawerks who alerted us to the post on the Bungie site stating that Halo 2 is ready to ship. It's filled with typical Bungie humor. "If you create a clan, do it because you intend to use it, and enjoy the camaraderie that Clan membership brings. We have systems in place to deal with "dead" or unused Clans. Unpleasant, pointy systems that reek of rust and blood and horror. Think Silent Hill meets Autocomplete."
Will a Red vs Blue series foolow? It had better be better than the previous one.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think for a lot of people it's the multiplayer experience, not the campaign.
In Halo1, of course, this was limited to split screen and/or system link. The fact that Halo 2 has live support will probably be reason enough for Halo fans to buy the game. Add in some dual-wielding weapons, destructible vehicles, more multiplayer game modes (and maps, naturally)...hard to go wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that it's not for everyone of course, and there's nothing wrong with that.
If you're not into multiplayer FPS, there's not nearly as much there for you. The storyline was pretty good (IMHO), it WAS a fairly linear campaign though. I've heard some rumors about little differences (like, an AI driver while you're gunning on a 'hog), but the single player will still come down to story and creativity in the gameplay. Pretty hard to judge that in advance - I could see it going either way. Maybe they focused almost entirely on multiplayer and the single player campaign will be left behind. Maybe they heard the complaints about the Halo1 campaign being repetitive and linear, and have drastically improved. We'll just have to see.
This post seems to confirm that co-op is back (for the XBox version, at least), that's always a good thing. I wonder if you can do co-op over Live? I have some friends that're hard to get in the same room but we all have Live...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
My friend won't buy any new XBox or PC games until this one comes out. He's been waiting for it all summer.
He plays the original HALO on multiplayer with either myself or his brother-in-law on an 8' wide, 6' tall wall using a Dell projector -- FOR HOURS ON END. I stopped playing with him about 3 months ago, because he knew where every dude was coming from, and the exact moment the AI would do this or that. He'd played it that much.
I've never seen a game with such replay value, or is my friend just a HALO nut?
At least, when HALO 2 does come out, I'll be able to see it in all it's Dolby DTS and 8' x 6' glory. It's a beautiful game -- unless you're still watching my friend play the levels he knows by heart 1 year after it's been released.
IronChefMorimoto
I don't care who bought them, or even who is working on them, all I care about is the quality of the games. In my opinion Bungie peaked with Marathon 2, and has been downhill ever since. The plot and gameplay on Marathon 2 were better than any FPS I have seen since, it was 5 years ahead of it's time for features like team play, customizability, and audio chat as well. I waited and waited for Halo to come out and blow me away again, but after the Microsoft purchase it took forever (3+ years after showing a working demo, and then it was only Xbox and PC. Even so, I tried it immediately on a friend's system. It was, sadly, obviously dumbed down for play on the Xbox, lacking half the features of Marathon 2, without the compelling, interactive story line, and basically without the fun.
Maybe Bungie will be back in all their former glory for Halo 2, but I am certainly not counting on it. I suspect this will be another cookie cutter game with the same crap as every other FPS and slightly more realistic graphics. I'm not sure a console can have enough controls to make a game truly great, and everything they put out will certainly be designed with the Xbox as the primary platform. Prove me wrong guys.
I just finished playing through Halo PC for the second time, only took me a couple days of free time, which since it was the weekend, added up to quite a few hours.
Anyway, I have a few observations on the game. First, they changed vehicle mechanics from the release version to 1.02 or 1.03 patch. That annoyed the piss out of me. It had to do with the traction that the warthog got, or its bounding box or something, but it affected the size of space it would squeeze through. I noticed because I patched it right in the middle of when you land on that island to open up the map room or whatever, which is a time when you are doing a lot of driving.
The game also runs like dogshit as others have pointed out. I have an Athlon XP 2500+ with a 333 FSB and 1GB of DDR333, and my disk is a two-drive stripe on an ITE8212 HW RAID controller. In spite of this the Loading... transitions are absolutely fucking horribly long and the game timer keeps running while they occur so you end up with your face in a wall when it finishes. There's generally no enemies around those things but it's still disorienting. Also, I have a GF4Ti4200 128MB AGP4x with sideband and fast write, and I can still only play smoothly at 800x600 on this system. This is hardly the latest greatest video card but it was pretty hot when Halo PC came out, and it's considerably better than the hardware in the Xbox. Either they really fucked up the PC port, or the game must run like crap at HD resolutions on the Xbox.
If Microsoft weren't so dead-set against people seeing the Xbox as the PC that it is, we'd probably have support for USB mice in Halo on Xbox. After all, USB to Xbox cables are readily and cheaply available. Then, I'd probably buy the game for Xbox. As it is, I'll wait until Halo 2 comes out for PC and pick that up. So far I've bought 0 new games for my Xbox because the only game I really wanted came with the sucker, and that's Sega GT. I did pick up tetris worlds, which sucks ass because you can't set arbitrary controls. It turns out that when I want to play Tetris on the Xbox I use fce-x and play Tengen Tetris instead.
If I hadn't hacked my Xbox, I'd be horribly disappointed with it. I cannot STAND playing first person shooters with a gamepad, which is why I gave goldeneye a miss even though I owned an N64 for some reason (the reasons were Pod Racer and Zelda, actually) and everyone said it was one of the best FPS games ever. Microsoft's delusional attempts to convince people that the Xbox is not a PC have cost them quite a few sales, I'm sure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
-User gspawn, forgotten password and too lazy to care.
As has had to be noted DOZENS of times all over the internet, Halo 2 is NOT ready to ship. They sent it to be certified, the last step before production, which is the step before shipping.
I would expect Slashdot readers to be above the masses in figuring that one out... 0.o