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Top 20 PC Games on Windows XP
ApacheVE writes "Voodoo Extreme has up a story called Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation. They call out some of the best games released in the Windows XP era, to mark the passing into the 'next generation' of PC gaming this past week. Some favorites include Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament 2004, Civilization IV, World of Warcraft and other titles that helped shape the era." Any titles you see missing from the list? The XP years were truly great, as far as PC titles went; how long do you think it will be before Vista has enough market penetration to make a difference in gaming?
Article spread out over 20 ad-laden pages. Didn't see a print option. Lame.
20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
18) Rome: Total War
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
14) Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
12) Guild Wars
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
08) F.E.A.R.
07) Company of Heroes
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
03) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
02) Half-Life 2
01) World of Warcraft
Seriously. A bloody ordinary Windows port of one of the more dull console shooters I've had a tinker with in years. About halfway through I just couldn't fight back the tears of boredom anymore.
I'd imagine millions of people still play Solitaire, by the 'merits' Halo has, I'm fairly certain it deserves a spot in this arbitrary list too.
Halo? A highly repetitive game that features midget aliens that ran around like toddlers on cocaine? A dark future where the elite special forces get issues crap guns by default? Sure, it was an exception FPS for consoles, but that has more to do with the high level of suck of FPSs on consoles.
Doom 3? A single trick pony, not that "sucks that in the future we'll forget how to attach lights to guns" is much of a pony to start with. It's gorgeous, but it's a crappy game. Game design has moved on since the original Doom.
It's not that there aren't better games. Where is Far Cry, which blew Halo's outdoor scenes away (It jumps the shark midway through, but there is still a lot of great gameplay)? How about Quake 4, which took Doom 3's amazing technology and coupled it with rock solid gameplay (and features the radical idea that a future military might issue its troops useful assault rifles!). NOLF2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
*Bah*
Search 2010 Gen Con events
20 -- Rise of Nations. It was ok. I really liked the nukes.
19 -- Halo. WTF? It was great on the XBOX but not a good FPS by PC standards.
18 -- Rom Total War.
17 -- UT2k4. Why this version? All of them were really good. Sequels should be disqualified.
16 -- MoH Allied Assault. It was ok. I really hated the way the game cutscened a lot. And the fact that it forced a tutorial sucked.
15 -- NWN. Great game and very modable. Still play this after, what, 5 years.
14 -- Max Payne. Loved bullet time.
13 -- C&C Generals. Never played it.
12 -- Guild Wars. MMO without fees. Awesome.
11 -- Civ4. After Civ3, I was really not willing to buy another Civ game. I still play Alpha Centuari though.
10 -- Warcraft 3. Not a big fan of RTS. Never tried it.
9 -- Doom3. Never played it. Too dark. Duct tape mod really showed how dumb game designers are. And WTF with batteries that last 10 seconds?
8 -- FEAR. Stupid name but great game. The demo gave away almost all the scary parts though. Bullet time and the nail gun was awesome.
7 -- Company of Heroes. Very fun for a RTS. Still, never played it more than a few hours.
6 -- BF1942. Played the shit out of this at LAN parties. Once Desert Combat was out, played the shit out of it again. The follow-ups sucked bad though.
5 -- KOTOR. Another port from XBOX. It was fun. Loved the moddable lightsaber.
4 -- Call of Duty. I was really burned out on WW2 games at this point. God, can we get another war?
3 -- Oblivion. Something about a first-person RPG just sucks. After 10 minutes of not knowing where the last rat was, I gave up and uninstalled it.
2 -- Half-Life 2. I guess it was OK. I only bought it because of CS:S
1 -- WoW. This game is a lot of fun and very social. Most of my friends play this to extremes. Once I got high-level, I quit. I don't have time to do the same 6+ hour crawl 20 times to get the uber sword of pwnage. I really loved the fact that I get credit for *not* playing. Makes leveling much easier.
So, where was X2 or X3? Both were lots of fun. How about GalCiv or GalCiv2? Empire at War was a blast as was Hero Quest. Flight simulators (all sims really) were missing. GTR, Falcon Allied Force, Flight Sim X, LOMAC, and IL2 were a ton of fun. As was Silent Hunter 3. Realistic sims are, for me, what really keeps me updating my PC. Everything else can be duplicated on a console. The first time you complete the ramp start in Falcon, you'll know the PC is king.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The Vista era was good, but nothing compared to the Windows 98 era (though I don't know that using OSes as a quantitative factor for determining gaming eras is particularly valid). I'll stack up Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Grim Fandango against the best games from *any* era.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Yah, I know those are old games now, but damn I have had a lot of fun playing them. I enjoyed Space Rangers 2 also...I guess I enjoy RTS/RPG games. Call of Duty/COD2 were not bad, either, but I did not burn myself out on WWII games. I also noticed that Warhammer 40k is not included which is too bad, I thought that was a lot of fun. How much repeat playability/moddability does a game have to have to be considered a classic? Maybe to be fair to this list we can have a comprehensive list made that shows game popularity by year (lets start with Atari 2600 games and work our way to the present)
/. of course) so I wonder what this list is based on, overall sales or overall ratings?
Sure Halo repeats itself, but you then again so did lots of games; Wizardry is a fine example of kill, heal, repeat. And that piece of software is over 25 years old now.
I didnt read the article (this being
(and I'm posting AC since im too lazy yo log in and karma whore or whatever.)
ps, I am currently playing around with KOTOR again..fun game!
What happened to games like MechWarrior and Fighters Anthology? The only game on that list that I think deserves to be there is COH. We need better game players to pick all time favorites IMHO.
The PC version of Halo was a lot of fun. The controls were just like any other FPS and the graphics were on par with other games made in that same year. My friends and I enjoyed playing Halo after ut2k4 became a bore and, in my opinion, it has a lot of great multiplayer maps (Blood Glutch, Sidewinder, and Death Island to name a few). There were many game types and had a decent number of hacks/mods to make the game interesting for quite a long time. If this list came out a few years ago, I would be shocked to not see the game within the top 5.
Saying the game should not be on the list of greatest PC games of all time because you didn't like the xbox version is complete BS. The controller issue you talk about is non-existent on the PC version and the graphics aren't that bad at all. It mainly sounds like your complaints are with the xbox itself and not the actual game.
Consider the real classics - like Zork. Or Reach for the Stars. How about Bards Tale, or Pool Of Radiance (the original, not the crappy sequel). How about Trade Wars? How about the original Warcraft, or Wing Commander:Privateer? There were some absolutely beautiful games in the old days, that still have not been beaten for game play and fun. Really out of all the games specifically designed for XP, the only two that I enjoy are Star Fleet Command:Orion Pirates and Neverwinter Nights.
The rest are mostly junk. I know that a lot of people lover WOW - heck, my three kids are addicted, but it leaves me cold. Same with Warcraft 3.
Yeah, the graphics are nicer - but that's like putting a Dior suit on a 500 pound human. The colors and style are neat, but what's underneath can't run, can't jump, and one flight of stars will kill them.
Oh, and for anyone who wants to criticize me - I'm 6 feet tall, weigh 250 pounds. I have lost 30 pounds in the last 7 months, hope to be down to 230 by summer. And considering how much better I feel at 250 - well I'd expect anyone who weighs 500 is going to have a rough time.
Best game of the XP generation: Nethack. And Windows ME, 2000, 98(SE), 3.1, MS-DOS, DRDOS, 4DOS, not to mention Macs, Unixes, Linuxes, WinCEs, Amigas, etc. And the only game that literally has survived a human generation - I remember playing it 20+ years ago for the first time. And I still do.
Nethack, the best game of this, past and probably future generations.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
Hasn't everybody upgraded to Vista by now?
What?
Good point. My gaming rig is a PS2 for action games (GTA, etc.) and my laptop for strategy games (Warcraft 3, Civ 4, etc.). That was my first XBox game. Maybe you're right. Maybe the XBox just sucks. That could be true. I haven't played a lot of other XBox games.
I don't respond to AC's.
Perfect score, I never played any of them! (Ok, really not that hard since I only use Mac and Linux OS on modern machines).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
What the heck is the point of the premise of this article? Why in the world would you group games by what the latest version of Windows was when they were released? Unlike many Slashdotters, I'm not one to bitch about the job the editors do, but it seems to me that they were seriously trolled by these 20 pages of ads.
Property is theft.
Cage match: Dinosaurs vs Cavemen. Two go in, one leaves.
GalCiv2 should really be on there. It's better than of the strategy games on that list, save for maybe Civ4. And it's close. It's the most well thought out 4X game of the WinXP generation, hands down.
Moo.
Where was Far Cry? In my opinion it was significantly better than the other FPSs on the list, with the possible exception of HL2. Doom 3 above Far Cry? I don't think so.
This list sucks. It's just more of the same old crap rehashed with newer graphics, physics, maps, AI, etc.
What about the games that actually tried (and succeeded) to do something a little bit different, like Grimm Fandango, Hitman, GTA, and so forth?
- James
I suppose that there's only so much love that can be had for Blizzard, and WoW was a no-brainer.
I know this could be considered off-topic, but it is game related and a good hint I wanted to share: to get the most out of your video card and computer in gaming, instead of buying a new LCD use the money for a CRT (21" for example). Get it with a high refresh rate (easy on the eyes, > 85hz IIRC). This way, you can play Oblivion at 800x600 on an aging card at say 60 FPS instead of at 1280x1000 (I forget the exact resolution) at say 10 FPS.
NOTE: for those uninitiated, LCD's only clearly display their native resolution. Otherwise, it will scale the picture and appear blurry. For example, displaying a 800x600 game full screen on a 1024x768 native LCD looks blurry and unclear (because it basically blows up the picture). Of course I would imagine playing a game in a window at 800x600 on a 1024x768 LCD would fix that problem; I just don't like playing games in a window, but that's me.
RTCW had the first truly decent teamplay factor since Tribes. Teamkillers were mostly just wasting their time, not being able to adversely effect the other players or the objectives, and hacks or "cheating" are relatively rare, unlike in most other multiplayer FPS'emups, such as CS.
Jory
Every. Last. One. of them involves violence and combat?
Wow. That's sad.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
(I made up a list for 11-20 as well, with things like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Escape Velocity Nova, but I figured they were all way too subjective to bother listing here.)
Not a single GTA? Sounds like either of the 3 last one was pretty important, and GTA:III on its own was quite a breakthrough, not to mention the commercial success and popularity of each episode.
You just got troll'd!
...Vista Drivers
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation
Given there's one DX-10 card line out there - nVidia's - and they're facing a class action lawsuit because their Vista ready card isn't Vista ready... Given that Vista takes away several audio features from Creative's line of sound cards... Given that the best known technical name in the gaming industry says it's not worth bothering with...
Can you really call the most current generation that actually works "Last Generation"?
As things stand, I was under the impression that all Vista does for gaming is disable features you have under XP. Oooh... And give you a couple of exciting menus for games and game specs.
I think they meant to play online.
The most popular - WoW - has subscription fees.
Why did you remove Company of Heroes?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change.
Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monitor, optical drive, sound card, keyboard/mouse and speakers then, and could definitely get it all now for less than £1000. The PS3 is slated to cost about £450, the Wii costs £180 and the XBox 360 is £280, for a total of £910 *if* you can find the Wii and PS3 for retail and don't have to get scalped on eBay.
I've read the "Vista capable PC + Vista = all three consoles + games + change" thing a few times, and it's simply wrong.
Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too.
Now, I'm impatient, but transcoding an hour-long home movie of my daughter's birthday (or whatever) takes too damn long on my PC for my liking. I don't do it enough to warrant a serious investment in hardware for it, but a 5 year old desktop is going to absolutely suck for it.
So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.
I remember when people said the same thing about XP. There was no reason to upgrade from Win 2k (or even 98), WPA was an egregious violation of privacy, etc etc. A quick look at Valve's Half Life 2 survery results shows that 88% of HL2 players are running XP SP2; XP is used by 97% of players.
Now I don't know whether or not Vista will gain a significant share of the gamers market, but I do know one thing - it's far too early to be predicting that it never will. Serious gamers are well used to dropping serious money on serious hardware, and mostly have a serious thing for eye-candy and modding their machines. If there's one thing Vista definitely supplies, it's eye candy. Any "serious" gamer already has a machine that's perfectly capable of running Vista, so that won't be an issue.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
MOH:AA is a truely excellent multiplayer game, no doubt about it. Shame hardly anyone plays it any more...
Back in the day, you could log on and have a really excellent game. Plenty of people on there, good ping times etc. Now, there are far fewer players, and far more of them are part of a clan which means there is little chance of them working with you. I suppose that was one of the best elements. There are plenty of multiplayer shooters, but few managed to get people to co-operate in an ad-hock kind of way like MOH:AA did.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I agree. The only ones who will play games on Vista is those with money for new hardware and OS. There have not been many great games for the PC compared to the consoles in the last years. This is due to the extreme piracy on the PC platform and WoW which own the PC market alone. I'll still play on my consoles and pick up a few of the upcoming games for the PC as long as they can run on XP/Linux and DX9 hardware. Why can't someone use the same technology as those Linux Live CD's for games? Just put in a CD and start playing. No need for Vista, and yet they should have a chance to use a very effective copy protection which doesn't hurt those who are honest. Oh no I forgot, they still save more money by developing it on a Windows platform. Piracy doesn't hurt them enough.
Morrowind was FAR more a PC game than Halo, and Oblivion owes it's success exclusively to Morrowind. I can't believe Halo got in instead...it was a PC game as an afterthought at best.
Unpleasantries.
Only one MMO on the whole list? Where are EVE, Co(H/V), second life, or any of the others? It's sad that, in the era of MMO boom, only one of 20 best listed games is an MMO (Even if it is #1)
Oh, and like a few others said, Far Cry should definitely be on the list.
> Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy
> all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough
> takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change. Not much of a geek/supergamer market, then.
You don't need much more power to run Vista than to run XP. 1 gig of ram instead of 512. Wow, that's a big expense, isn't it? I've had 1.5 gigs for years now (and it was cheap then). The tiny CPU requirement is laughable. You need a graphics card you can buy in a bargain bin - that is, unless you want to turn off all the eye candy (as I will be doing). Upgrading to Vista seems to be about the same cost as upgrading to any other Windows OS was. Not saying it's an argument for upgrading - I won't be (at home - I get Microsoft stuff for free from work) until I have to, but that's no argument against it.
> I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a
> difference.
From now on, people will be gettin Vista on their new PCs when they buy them, and they'll expect to be able to play games. How many new PCs are going to be bought this year? A *lot*. And next year, and the year after. You wouldn't release a game that's just for 95,95,me,nt,2000 today - you'd not be able to shift it. It's got to work on XP, and in a year or two it'll *have* to work on Vista too.
I'm finding something odd that 13 of the 20 'great' games are basically first person shooters and none of them are from small companies.
This is like a review of beverages that argues between coke and pepsi, or musical talent that's really concerned about whether Britney or Christina are better.
Not that some of these aren't good games, but he doesn't even show any variation in taste in the FPS games - he's got, what, four FPS's about "Let's go kill the aliens", and Thief or No one lives forever didn't make the list?
I'm sorry submitter, but your gene pool license has been revoked - you're no longer allowed to reproduce. Remember, just because we're making you eligible for a Darwin award doesn't mean it *has* to be fatal.
Not if you cooperate.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Perhaps it is, but I find it odd that someone who thinks they can put together that kind of system for under £1,000 can't find also the consoles for less than RRP.
I don't much care what "people" said. I personally never made the same claim about XP. For a start, there was nothing like the level of competition from consoles then, with PCs hosting most of the best games while today the consoles dominate the gaming market in the most popular genres. For seconds, XP was a significant technical improvement over the Win98SE or WinME platforms that were the mainstays of PC gamers until that point. Neither of these advantages applies to Vista.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?
IME, while businesses continue their three-year upgrade policies because far too many CIOs remain too stupid/naive to question that policy, almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment. In fact, the only person I know who is considering getting new kit in the near future is me, and I have specific reasons for upgrading now that are entirely unconnected with Vista.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?
r ticle.html
It's not a claim, it's a statement of fact. You can trivially discover its truth by finding a chart of PC sales over the last 15 years and see. Hundreds of millions of PCs are sold, in addition to ones put together/resurrected from the dead using millions of CPUs, hard drives etc annually.
In case you really are that lazy:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,121858-page,1/a
> almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment.
Irrelevant. The home market isn't very significant.
> In case you really are that lazy:
PS: sorry - didn't mean to be rude.
20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
01) World of Warcraft
So, thirteen of the twenty are available for the Mac, I'm surprised and pleased to say. If only I had more money and time for games...
I'd have to add Battle for Middle-Earth to that list. It was Real-Time Strategy like so many others, but it was fun. The individual physics of each troop member made the excitement factor rise over pretty much all the others. A troll wading into a group of soldiers and swatting them away; cavalry riding over a troop of orcs, not just flattening them, but bouncing off the horses; the wings of the Nazgul blowing troops aside; and the Balrog exploding from the earth, tossing anything nearby away.
It had true castle defense and sieging mixed with standard RTS fare: and it was all Lord of the Rings. Just a really well-made game that took RTS to another strategic level.
Sorry, I think we've lost the plot here. We're talking about the potential impact of Vista on the gaming market, are we not? In that case, surely the home market is the only thing that is significant!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
At least with doom 3 you got cool visuals, and they delivered what previous versions of doom delivered. I wasn't surprised - I bought the game because I wanted a shoot-a-thon. I liked it for that :) - plus its one of the creepier games I've ever played - especially later on when they introduce those floating heads.
Not only is it amusing, but in reality, The Sims 2 comprises half of the top twenty PC games if you look at game rankings, so FPS only wins by ignoring the fact that The Sims 2: Night Life and The Sims 2: Open For Business are lumped together as if they were just one title.
... to make it fair.
You could lump all the FPS games together under the I Have A Gun category
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Did they just pick all the best selling pc games of the last couple years? There's pretty much nothing on here that wasn't a big name best-seller. Even ignoring whether they're good games or not, it pretty much nullifies any kind of claim of validity on this list.
Grim Fandango predates the "Windows XP generation" by three years.
These are the ones I know:
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 -- ships with a working Linux installer. My brother has found an insane number of mods for this game, and was up to some 20 gigs of space for just that game and its mods before we both migrated away from that Linux install -- me to another computer, him to a new hard drive and Windows. Surprisingly, when I installed and fully patched the Linux version last week, it has a native 64-bit binary.
15) Neverwinter Nights -- Never played the game, but it does seem to have a native Linux version, and a Portage ebuild.
09) Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have decent Linux ports. They are also the only two id games to date that have not released full source code -- and, in fact, there is at least one decent mod for Quake 3 which is completely free now that they can compile the engine themselves and distribute the mod without requiring one to buy Quake 3 first.
And some guessing -- I think these will work under Wine:
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
01) World of Warcraft
Blizzard uses Linux to run the WoW servers, and WoW is OpenGL. I imagine this isn't a recent development, so it seems likely that Warcraft III would also use OpenGL -- and most OpenGL games work out of the box, even on vanilla Wine (without Cedega). I do know Starcraft works very well under Wine, and has for years.
There are also a couple of games I imagine do not work well at all:
19) Halo: Combat Evolved -- simply because it has always been a DirectX game and a Microsoft game. Kind of a shame, really -- I hear Bungie had planned Linux and OS X ports before Microsoft bought them.
02) Half-Life 2 -- I know this one kind of sucks. Basically, fonts look bad, even on the HUD. The game itself mostly looks OK, but runs slower, and the embedded ActiveX crap mostly does not work. This is one reason I keep an XP partition around. It's amazing how clean you can keep a Windows when you only boot it a couple of times a month for a LAN party. It's also worth noting that the original Half-Life engine works well under Wine, and Steam is tolerable, but I figure I may as well stick to one copy of Steam.
So, not great... On the other hand, it is forcing me to discover all kinds of great indie games -- Lugaru, Uplink, Darwinia, Nexus TK... Also, Wine does generally run older programs better, as they really can't program entirely by-the-spec, and so both the wine hackers and wine config tweakers have to work from real programs -- which means the older a program is, the more likely it is to be figured out -- thus, I'm discovering all kinds of great games that I missed.
As for Microsoft screwing OpenGL on Vista, is that still an issue? My first impression was that ultimately, driver vendors would be able to provide good or bad OpenGL support at their own discretion -- and that it would not be a good PR move if QuakeWars plays better on XP than Vista. But really, I don't think this was ever an issue -- the PS3 will always be hard to port to, and DirectX made it easy to port to the Xbox and the 360, and people weren't nearly as concerned with Mac and Linux ports as they were with a particular dev kit, and if that kit supported the consoles people want.
As for Win2K, of course. I doubt many games require XP -- in fact, I imagine most of them work in Win98, some better there than Vista due to the whole UAC thing (and maybe OpenGL).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Agreed strongly!! Especially if you consider San Andreas Multi Player, which is INORDINATELY fun, and should be even better with the release of .2.
San Andreas is arguably the greatest game of all time, not just on one platform, either....
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Yeah, currently I've got my schedule full with
1. World of Warcraft
Hopefully when my guild dissolves in another couple years, I can start checking out some of these other so-called "computer games"...
What do you consider a better MMO and why? Or are you simply trolling?
"Maybe you're right. Maybe the XBox just sucks. "
No he's wrong, the PC port sucks ass, the graphics (for some reason) played like crap (on a Geforce4 compared to the Xbox's Geforce2), the mouse control was incredibly slow even with acceleration and set to level 10, this combined with the overall boring gameplay (why were all of the levels identical within a "chapter"?) made a truely craptasic game.
The multiplayer wasn't even that inspiring, Quake/Doom/UT style gamplay with crappy weapons (spray "cone" physics for an assault rifle?!?!?!), ugh...glad I didn't pay for that one.
Halo IS over-rated - it's not bad but nothing special - not even close.