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Halo 2 Sells 5 Million Units
A witty GameIndustry.biz writer: "Avid gamers clock up 28 million hours shooting each other in the face on Live". They have word that Halo 2 has surpassed 5 million units sold through. The sequel beat the record achieved by the original game, which took 2 years to achieve.
I'm not at all surprised. I don't know anyone who has an Xbox and wasn't psyched about getting this game. I was psyched as well, but now I can't stop playing World of Warcraft.
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But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
EVERYONE sucks the same, though.
With PC FPS, you have the weenies who do nothing but play FPS games, and who can pick a pixel in the blink of an eye. They're simply not fun to play against -- nor fun to play as when your friends aren't.
Halo is great for multiplayer, because you sit there and game and no ammonut of practice with the game makes you wholly incapable of being beaten by you friend on the counch next to you.
stupid 1-button touchpad on apple laptops.....
It does get annoying sometimes, but for normal use, I right click about once every hundred to thousand left clicks. You can Ctrl-click to get the same effect as a right-click. And if you're playing games, you're better off getting a mouse; USB mice with a right button work well with the Mac.
But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
It is harder to hit a specific target. However, I'll offer these two counterarguments: 1) the screen, not the reticle changes as you move the mouse, so your brain works more like "keep scrolling...stop", as with a gamepad, than "move to there" as with a normal mouse cursor, and 2) derivative joysticks are a lot better for panning at a constant rate or quickly moving than carefully sliding your mouse or picking it up every time it runs past the edge of your desk.
Besides, how do you use keys for walking? It makes it hard to vary the rate at which you walk. Especially on Halo, there's a value to walking slowly such that you don't show up on the motion sensor, and changing walking speed can be useful for confusing people to snipe ahead.
And the buttons are better; dual-wielding is almost subconscious due to good use of the button layout, and having two joysticks of the same kind allow you to correlate your walking and your moving.
I've played using both, and I see them both as equal in strengths and weaknesses. Position controls have as many drawbacks as velocity controls.
The XBox is a great system, but one reason Halo 2 has sold so many copies is because there is not any other good games out for the system. I can say this because I own an XBox along with every other system and I barely have 4 games for it. I've bought several multi platform games in the near past, but they never seem to make an XBox version. Unfortunatly, since I do own all the systems, Halo 2 doesn't have enough appeal for me to purchase it. Games like Ninja Gaiden and HL2 do, though.
I believe the Halo 2 stats are for the last 24 hours combined while the Steam statistics are for the exact time it was recorded. I might be wrong though.