Halo: PC

[superkully]

After all the speculation as to whether Halo would 'work' on the PC, I'd be interested to know what people playing it think...

And the website says it does 1600x1200?!?! That must look amazing!

[H-Man]

It's good fun - altho you'll need a beast of a machine to run it at full detail with a high res (I don't think anything can run it on full settings at 1600*1200 ....... not even with a 9800 pro)

The new maps are good (big out door ones ) - as are the new weapons (flame thrower and fuel rod [i think it's called])

There's a new warthog with a rocket launcher on the back, which is deadly. It's also possible to have gun turrets in MP.

Everything that was in the XBox version is there (including the crappy maps :/)

I think it's worth owning if you intend to play it MP - SP the XBox version is better (imo) It's hard to explain why, on the XBox it's my fave SP shooter, on the pc it feels very average.

[Super Stu]

Well, Space did a 1280x1024 capture (frame rate was fine) and it looked like Halo with less pixelating, if you know what I mean. Kinda like ramping CS up to 1600x1200 makes no difference really to the sharpness of things.

They'll have to smarten up the textures a bit I think.

[H-Man]

It all depends on the map - and the no. of players and vehicles

[Super Stu]

Oh, granted it makes it easier to spot people in the distance, as they're drawn earlier. It doesn't make the close up textures any clearer though, they look just as filtered-to-**** as they do in 640x480.

Come on Bungie contractors (whose name I forget), wheel out the original uncompressed images and re-do us some nice textures.

[Chadruharazzeb]

I only played the 1st level and it looked **** compared to the XB version, in terms of textures at least. The actual textures in the ship looked terrible, and the shield effect was vastly inferior.

[Super Stu]

Monitor, I would say. Don't mean to sound like a stuck record here chaps, but the TV is immensely forgiving regarding aliasing and textures. To a lesser extent, the pants-effect is viewable on a plasma in 480p mode. Looks lovely on my cheesy telly truth be told, looks righteously awful in 480p with immensely expensive guff.

[H-Man]

Couldn't agree more Stu. SP stick with the XBox MP - PC \o/

[jezzace]

Well it doesn't look as good on my pc but then thats because I have a geforce 4 MX...still it has all the gameplay and mouse and keyboard is much better then pad.

[Valken]

Ran it at 1024*768 on my P4 1.8/640MB RAM/GF4 Ti4200 128MB and it was fine... you can lock it at 30... allow it to display a frame rate as close as possible to your screen refresh or disable vsync if you must.

With all setting on with my machine it ran fine with maybe a few stutters but I was running a few apps in the background.

Ramping the res up to 1280*1024 on my computer made the framerate suffer but I daresay that due to the nature of PCs being a pain in the arse someone with a less powerful machine could have no problems.

Visually it's nothing jaw dropping the higher res doesn't do the game justice and it looks dated.

In terms of gameplay it's the same game and it's aged a little too. I'm not 100% comfortable with the pace of the game when played with a mouse.

Multiplayer's pretty good but competition varies... the new maps are pretty nice, the wood/forest map is ****ing cool. Being able to deathmatch in Banshees is also pretty good.

Overall though I'm not too sure it's worth it. I've already tired of it rapidly and it's been uninstalled.

[angel]

its funny how people knock gearbox, bungie, MS etc even though the game isnt even out yet in the uk, and please dont tell me everyone has the US version. im sure they'l 'knock out' some lovely hi res textures but why the hell should they when people just download it.

[Valken]

That's unfair... I know several people who bought the full version from the US. I've got it on loan from a friend of mine and no, I didn't copy the CD from him.

[angel]

il bet your in a minority though.

[Valken]

Can't say that crossed my mind about me being in the minority.

I'm trying to figure out if you're pissed off with people judging an imcomplete game by downloading it from via p2p (when the complete game is "up") or because they're pirating though.

Well either way the game has lost a lot of the impact it had on the Xbox and had aged pretty badly.

[H-Man]

Valken wrote:

'Well either way the game has lost a lot of the impact it had on the Xbox and had aged pretty badly.'

Only in single player - in multiplay it is now so much more