| Rating: | ★ |
| Category: | Video Games |
| Genre: | Action |
| Console: | PC Games |
The reason I make that distinction should be clear momentarily.
I enjoyed the PC version of the first Halo title, but I noticed at the time that it seemed to have serious trouble utilizing graphical features that other contemporary titles had no problem with.
At any rate, despite having to turn off anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and specular lighting effects, I was able to run Halo: Combat Evolved with no real difficulty.
Fast forward a couple of years. Due to the long-ass delay between the console and PC release of Halo, it's only been a couple of years since Halo 1, and *poof* like a magical cloud of suck, there's Halo 2 PC.
Installing Halo 2 - on the same machine - was an annoying experience. The game scanned my hardware, then spit out a message that my machine didn't meet minimum requirements, giving a checklist of "reasons why not."
1. must have over 384 MB video memory - my card has 512.
2. must have pixel shaders version 2 - my card does.
3. something else also that it said my card had - right in the error mesage - but that it also apparently didn't count.
Right.
This bodes well.
Got it installed, launched it, and found that the only way to get a playable framerate out of it was to turn ALL settings to lowest, turn off anything that seemed like a graphical enhancement, and set the resolution to 800x600.
To give you an idea of the outcome of this, THE ORIGINAL HALF-LIFE looks better onscreen on this machine.
But this machine can run Prey, and Doom 3, and Half-Life 2, all of which look far better than Halo 2, at resolutions of 1280x1024, with most of the settings on, with playable framerates.
So, why does Halo 2 - with its utterly incredible lack of detail textures, lack of lighting effects, lack of pixel shading, STILL have to run in 800x600 to get a good framerate?
The answer is simple: the XBOX (and 360) dev kits.
See, the XBOX, and the 360, interact with their video hardware in a special, proprietary way. This is fine for the Xbox version of the title. However, the devs evidently decided it was time for a break, and since the whole game is written in C++ anyway, it would run on Windows just fine as-is, so they "ported" it over without changing the weird hardware interactions one bit.
Which means that for Halo 2 to look decent on-screen, you need a Cray supercomputer, and 2 X1950 Radeon cards in Crossfire mode. Or some such outlandish concoction.
Let me put it like this.
Chrome looks better on-screen than this.
Medal of Honor looks better on-screen than this.
Call of Duty 1 looks better on-screen than this.
Half-Life looks better on-screen than this.
Far Cry looks WAY better on-screen than this.
Prey looks A HUNDRED TIMES better on-screen than this.
Guild Wars looks a hundred times better and runs with full effects at twice the resolution.
I haven't played enough of Halo 2 yet to know, or care, about the story, or multiplayer, or any other factor; the PC version of this game SUCKS.
The XBOX version may be utterly brilliant. I don't know. But I can't recommend this trash to ANYONE on PC, simply because the graphics engine is so massively, utterly fucked up.
