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Halo 2.5 for Xbox 2
Voodoo Extreme is reporting that the Bungie team may work on a project to port Halo 2 to the next generation Xbox, adding in additional content and improving overall gameplay and picture quality. From the article: "Can you imagine Halo 2 running at 1280x720?!!! We also wonder what was meant by 'all the stuff people expected from Halo 2 but didn't make the cut.' With this kind of top-secret info, you don't ask; you simply listen."
If only they'd hired a competent Project Manager that knew his/her stuff when it came to delivering software on time, under budget, and to spec, without continuous deathmarch sessions, then they never would need to come out with an "here's-all-the-stuff-we-wanted-to-put-in-but-coul dn't" version. Oh, and would have saved at least the industry-standard 10% of the cost on redos and wasted effort to boot. Guess it is easier to do it twice rather than do it right the first time.
Yeah, right.
'all the stuff people expected from Halo 2 but didn't make the cut.'
Like a real ending?
I'll admit I haven't played through all of the single player and don't know first hand, partly cause I would just rather play online multiplayer. However it seems like everyone agrees the ending is shite and I'm taking their word on it.
Even if they are saving for some sort of content download, what about the half of my friends that payed $50 for the game, who would have X Box live but they can't get broadband where they live?
I would also love to see improved networking code. Maybe I just don't know about the underlying infrastructure to appreciate why I get dropped so much, but I recall having better luck playing Quake 2 on my 33.6 modem then I have had with my cable connection that is more or less fairly solid.
Of course, the hard drive version will cost more than the non-hard drive flash memory version... so if they really are putting a Halo 2.5 pre-loaded onto the hard drive for the Xenon, well, it's a ploy to get the more expensive version to sell. And it also shows Microsoft knows they need Halo to sell copnsoles, despite what many an Xbox fanboi has stated in the past.
However, MS knows that Bungie won't have Halo 3 ready for the Xenon launch, so if this rumor is true, they're trying to have some sort of Halo at launch. They know that Halo single handedly kept the Xbox alive until Xbox Live and some really good games started coming out a year after launch (and anyone who says the Xbox could have really been selling on the other games besides Halo released in the first year is deluding themselves), so they could be hoping to do the same with "Halo 2.5"; IE keep Xenon sales going until better games start coming out for the Xenon.
That's a bit over the top. Pretty much all of the stuff in the collector's edition that they cut from the game was because they could get it to balance correctly.
They specifcally say that they didn't include the ATV because they couldn't figure out a reason to have it in the game either single or multiplayer.
All of the aliens that where left out where half finished ugly looking things.
In any creative enterprise, you consider things that you later deside are a bad idea.
It's easy to imagine Halo 2 at high resolution: you just have to imagine a world in which Microsoft didn't buy Bungie, and so the Halo games were published to sell games rather than to sell game consoles.
But seriously, you must be relatively new to PC games. Things got *way* better when Windows 95 came out and games started supporting it. Back before that, you needed a plethora of boot disks (or a cleverly constructed boot disk menu system) setting up various types of extended memory managers, TSRs, sound drivers, etc. If you wanted networked games, it got worse as you threw packet drivers into the fray.
You want to play Descent with somebody over the Internet? Can't do it, unless you payed for Kali, which routes IPX over TCP/IP. Doom was fun, but it originally did network calls via broadcast packets -- killing the entire network if more than a few people were playing.
Even after Windows 95, then 98, etc., things still got tricky. Do you have a 3dfx card? Then you want Glide -- OpenGL may not work properly. But what if your game doesn't have a Glide mode? Or what if you don't have a 3dfx card, but your game only has Glide support? (A pity -- I really liked playing Dethkarz with my friends, but it's 3D is Glide only. I could set up an older computer to play it again, but can't expect my friends to do so too ...)
Seriously, ignoring blips like requiring Steam (and an Internet connection) to play games like HL2, PC games are easier to get running right now than they have since they started requiring more than 640k of RAM and better than CGA graphics, and had to actually be *installed* on the hard drive. And as much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft, I also know that much of this `ease' is thanks to Microsoft and the semi-standardized APIs that Windows provides.