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Halo…you could call it the game that made the Xbox what it is today. It remained exclusive to Xbox due to a deal Bungie had with Microsoft. With all the money made from Halo, naturally Microsoft would want it on windows and mac to bring the Halo franchise to an even larger audience. I was a good idea to think that people who liked Halo PC would buy an Xbox for the second Halo considering it would never be coming out for Pc. Well, Im sure that worked out pretty well for them but now I shall tell you some about the craziness of the windows edition of my all time favorite game, Halo.

Super Sci-Fi Story

The last super military stronghold, the planet reach, has now fallen to the relentless Covenant Armada. The remaining of the humans super soilders, known as the Spartan II’s are believe to have fallen in the recent battles for Reach. You are the squad leader of the Spartans, The Master Chief. Onboard an old but still well capable human warship, you return to the planet Reach after a daring mission only to find Covenant warships all over and the planet being “glassed.” Realizing that staying there would only mean death, Captain Keyes of the Pillar of Autumn (your ship) orders the ship to turn around and boost into hyperspace at random coordinates to escape the Covenant. When the ship returns to normal space, there lies a gigantic ring world of some unknown texture in front of you. Then to no surprise, the Covenant have followed you through hyperspace. Now as the POA is being attacked, Keyes has no choice but to land on this ring world, what awaits them may change the Human-Covenant war forever.

Gameplay

Halo is a First Person Shooter game. For the under-knowledged, you view your character as if you were him. Your hands and gun are infront of your face just like if you were holding a real gun. The game consists of 10 action packed levels and on your first time through, they should be fairly long enough. For someone whos been playing since its release…they tend to be very short. Halo has very little load time which makes it convenient for us lazies. As you start up each level, there may be a short load screen, then throughout each level there will be designated load spots to load the next part of the map. These last for maybe a second. It might have been kind of hard to load each of these big levels at one time. Your screen, or also known as the Hud (head-up-display) consists of most of the usual FPS things. Ypu got your radar, ammo count, life bar and your shield. I very much liked the life system in Halo, much better then in Halo 2. Spartans and Covanent Elites have what they refer to as Mjolnir (spelling?) shield. These are rechargeable energy shields. Taking damage decreases your shield, and it wont take much, so when you take damage in a fire fight, its best to take cover behind something and let your marines handle the enemy while your shield recovers. It will recover at a fair speed if no damage is taken for a few seconds. When your shield is done it goes to your health bars. Theres about 10 of them and they usually go down one per hit. When all that’s gone, you die.

Throughout the game you'll encounter 4 types of Covenant monsters. Each come in multiple colors. Colors signify rank. First off, there's Grunts. There small, annoying and easy. They usually carry plasma pistols put can sometimes carry plasma grenades which can easily kill you. Next are, Jackals. They are a little bigger then grunts and carry shield with plasma guns. Elite's come next in line. These come in many colored forms. The standard blue form which carries usually plasma rifles and have a body shield which allows them to take much punishment. The red ones are faster and harder to hit. There is also the yellow ones. They carry plasma swords which kill you in one hit and they move very fast. Sorry kiddies, but you’ll have to pcik up Halo 2 if you wanna get your hands on the energy sword. Final for the Covenant is the Hunters. These things are fight and a half. They are the strongest of all Covenant and can take much punishment. They never appear alone and there will always be two of them when encountered. Try not to get up close to them because they will do a tackle like move to you and it will do heavy damage. There gun is a plasma type gun which can be charged up to a powerful blast which will take away just about all of your life if hit right. They are tough and are best to be taken on with a rocket launcher or pistol. Or if you wanna be pro, snipe them in the orange spots for one hit kills.

What's a futuristic fps without the futuristic weapons? Although im not to sure I would call the arsenal in Halo very futuristic. I mean, we got stuff more hi tech then this nowadays, never when 550 years in the future. There's many vehicles and guns to kill Covenant with. You’ll find assault rifles, scoping pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, along with a variety of Covenant plasma weapons. Fragment grenades and plasma grenades, which can stick to enemies, can be found all over the place as well. Kill something and its likely they dropped a grenade. When on the battle field you can find more advanced toys like jeeps, tanks and even flying things. Jeeps, refered to has the Warthog are the first of the vehicles you'll find. You can jump in any part of the jeep including; drivers seat, passengers seat and gunners seat. Get in the drivers seat and stop next to a marine. They'll get in the gunners seat and shoot at any Covenant. Find another marine to get in the passengers seat and shoot at enemy with there gun. Use the Scorpion tank to tear through the covenant ranks with ease. Speed ahead with the Covenants hovering single person vehicle known as the Ghost. Theres a good amount of vehicles in Halo, but the weapon count could be higher.

Online Awesomeness

The reason or should I say the only difference between the Xbox and PC versions. When Halo came out there wasn’t anything called Xbox live so there was no online play. Since FPS’s are meant for PC, it makes sense that halo would be good and pc. You get everything you had on the Xbox version plus quite the new crazy stuff. The added six new maps, the flame thrower and the fuel rod gun (the cannon the grunts used towards the end of the game), the banshee is now is multiplayer along with the new rocket launcher warthog and the gun turret makes its online appearance. Im not quite sure, but if my memory does me good then there is new options for game settings aswell. Finding an online game is quite simple. It puts in in the lobby and you just use the tops menu things to search for games. You can see a list of all the games going on now or specify your search. You only wanna see capture the flag games? Or do you wanna just do a good old fashioned Deathmatch? The choice is yours along with oddball, king of the hill and race. You can create detailed games using one of those types. Theres a lot of options to make your custom game different then the last one you just played. Join a game with upto 15 other players for some crazy explosive action packed Halo adventures. One flaw about the online play is that it allows 56kers…they usually cause some pretty bad lag. Oh and best of all, online play is free.

Graphics

Excellent, a great part of Halo. Everything looks so real. The water is see through and has those sort of swirly like things we see in real life. The grass looks just like grass. The outdoor parts looks simply amazing. The indoor parts might get a little repitive as you do tend to go back to some of the same levels, but there not with some change. Like in assault on the control room its all daytime and its snowing. When you go back there three levels later, its dark out and the snow stopped. Look at an enemy or marine or even a vehicles, see the detail and realism. No pixels or anything! Some marines even have badges or name tags on them which can be read. Some people would expect slowdown when there's the war parts going on with more then 10 characters on the screen at once, bullets and explosions going around everywhere. Even during those hectic carnage parts of mass battle going on, there tends to be little slowdown…aslong as your graphics card is good enough. Im not to knowledges about Pc stuff but when this game came out like two years ago, it required some pretty nifty pc settings, but that was two years ago. As long as you got good Pc game stuff, the game will run great!

Super Crazy Epic Sounds!

Explosions, screams, gunshots all crisp and clear. The sounds are amazing. The music damn well fits the game. At parts when there's a horde of enemies coming or during a battle, the music is more fast paced and heavy danger sounding. It sounds like sci-fi music and works great. Then at times it has some very epic sounding orcestral music perform by Marty O’Donnell. Im a big fan of the music, I’ve got the soundtracks to both Halo and Halo 2. The voice acting is also great. It don't get old with all talking characters saying multiple things. The Grunts are the only covenant that will talk which they say pretty stupid but not dull things. Throw a grenade at them, they'll run away and scream stuff like "grenade" or "were all going to die!" Your marines talk as well. They'll scream when shot, trash talk enemies, and say many other things! A lot of the random dialogue is humerous. Theres literally hundreds of random things for AI characters to say.

Final Comments

Halo is just great., magnificent, fantastic, super crazy, and near perfect. Any game that keeps be playing for 3 and a half years is worth your time.

Release: November 9th, 2004
Developer: Bungie
PC Developer: Gearbox
Genre: 1st person shooter
1-16 Player(s)
Online Enabled
Requires Windows 2000, Xp or ME
Requires 1.2 GB of hard drive space

Final Rating: 9.7/10