Halo 2 PC, Ok, It Doesn't Look That Bad
June 14, 2007
Ok, some of you may have noticed my rant a few days ago about the ugliness that is Halo 2. I realized that it was a bit too ranty for my tastes, and decided to delete it before anyone commented on it (I'll never delete a post after a comment has been made). Anyway, I made some correlations between Halo 2 and Quake 2... after a recent discovery, I have to take these back.
After being over at Andy's yesterday, helping him with some Vista printing issues, he showed me a quite nice looking run through of Halo 2 on his PC. I noticed something, it didn't look like ass. So, when I got home I sat down intending to do something about it! Ok, well - I did some packing and cleaning first - to be truthful.
I fired up the game and jumped right into battle thinking that I had maybe been looking at it wrong. No, it still looked like ass. I went into the Video settings and upped the anti-aliasing to 4x thinking that maybe it made a giant difference. Nope, still no difference. Well, now what? Andy's looked so good... so I decided to go ahead and register for a Live account and see if there were some updates. Man, that was a good half hour of my life I'd like back. Their server even responded with a TOTALLY blank page after successfully registering. Still no avail...
Then, before loading the game I decided to double check my anti-aliasing settings. Loe! There was a new setting available "Level of Detail". I pushed that puppy up to high and was greeted by a decent looking game when I loaded up my last checkpoint.
The LOD setting was deemed, too difficult to code to be dynamically set in game. Fair enough, a few other console ports are that way - your Indians aren't star programmers. I get it. However, what Microsoft decided to do instead was to simply drop the option from the in-game menu. The usual state of affairs is to dim or otherwise note that it is not able to be set during gameplay. Oh well.
So, Halo 2 actually looks halfway decent. It's got a kick-ass plot-line and the controls feel a lot better than Halo's did. They're not quite PC shooter quality, but they're standable now. I consider my money well spent.
Also, this FireFox add-on kicks major ass and this robot song will be stuck in your head until next Tuesday.
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4 Comments
| Tagged: Halo, Computing, VideoGames
david 2007/06/14
nice FF addon!! :)
Jordan T. Cox 2007/06/14
David! Good to hear from ya! How's the baby coming along?
Andy 2007/06/14
See? Coming over here always gives you the answers to your problems. I'm excited to try playing Halo 2 against someone else. Some of the maps make for great snipers matches. On top of that, Chris' brother Tony made up a game type that is really fun, and best played with 3 or 4 people. No sheilds, no weapons on the map at all, no vehicles, no grenades, no radar. All you start with is the pistol. Everyone has three lives. Play til you're the last man standing. Makes for some pretty intense moments on those levels with a lot of small alleys.
Also, there is a pretty sweet map editor. You can create stuff just as nice looking an complex as the levels that come with the game... unfortunately I'm not awesome enough to figure out how to use it. Fortunately, there are people on the internets who are, and you can download the maps they've made! I've only found two so far, and one sucks and the other is ok, but the game hasn't been out long enough for anyone to have made anything really nice. I'm looking forward to seeing some good maps in the future.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/06/15
It sucks though that there are only 52 available servers, six of which are populated. Also? You have to be a Live GOLD subscriber to host. That means that there will never be any servers.