Halo 2
by Microsoft
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List Price: Our Price: $19.95 You Save: $10.04 (33%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Video Games See more product details |
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Video Game Reviews of Halo 2
Customer Review: Best game ever!
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely love this game. I played on the XBOX and was impressed, but being a pc gamer was a hinderance to my success in the game. I love playing Halo 2 on the PC. I have a 1.8 Ghz processor on a laptop I play it with and it works like no other game I own. Great job Bungie and Microsoft. Can't wait for Halo 3 for the PC as well.Customer Review: Same Great Game
Summary: 4 Stars
Microsoft, why have you forsaken us?? This is the same great game, but it was not ported very well to PC. The controls, with the mouse.... well, prepare for a workout. This game isn't DX10, yet microsoft makes you buy vista to play it, eventhough with a few lines of code, you could play it on XP. Long story short, good game, good free multiplayer, controls can be a pain.Customer Review: Disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
There was a lot of excitement about this game. I was excited too. Unfortunately the game is mostly a disappointment. I guess I thought because Vista was required that there might be something new in here. This is not the case. This is simply a port of the Xbox version. The graphics are years out of date and look pretty clunky. It is not DX10. The highly touted "Game for Windows" that was supposed to let us play with Xbox users does not. You can only play with PC users, and there aren't many of those. Maybe "Games for Windows" will be fixed in the future, but as it is now I find it very disappointing too.
This whole experience has been a disappointment all the way around.
Customer Review: BASTA Microsoft...!
Summary: 2 Stars
The Original Halo was a ground-breaking title. The expectation for HALO2 was so great that Microsoft decided to greedily milk its own users...
PC users have been waiting for HALO2 to be released for Windows for over 3 years. Now is too little, too late. Not to mention the shameless WinVista promotion.
All these years Microsoft was dragging its feet. Why? The release of (compatibility-hell) WinVISTA was coming - and HALO2 was planed to boost sales. Then WinVISTA got repeatedly delayed - and so was Halo 2.
RESULT: In 2004 the graphics were cutting edge, in 2007 they are just presentable. Even though the game requires an above average (and quite expensive) Hardware configuration, it actually looks worse than UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004.
QUESTION: why is HALO2 only compatible with WinVISTA since it does NOT take advantage of DirectX10?
ANSWERS : (1) let's help sell those WinVISTA finally!; (2) there are hardly any affordable DirectX10-compatible video-cards available; (3) let's charge the users for playing OnLine with WindowsLIVE!!
The gameplay and overall presentation is not that different from the original Halo. Sure, surfaces got better textured, shiny reflections got added and now (limiting and clumsy) dual-yield is available - but do these actually make a difference to a real gamer?
It is truly a shame that PC users get exploited in such shameless way. After all, HALO3 is getting released for X-BOX.
Wow! We get the privilege of playing the previous generation game! Aren't we lucky...
Customer Review: You need a WEI of 5 to run it! (Plus, the technical specs that are missing...)
Summary: 4 Stars
Until a really stable and easy to install patch comes out, this will only work with Vista, and a really good video card. (I'm sure that sometime this year we will see a true patch that will allow you to use it on XP, but then...)
According to the cover box and Microsoft website, your video card must be "NVIDIA 6100, ATI X700 or above." That leaves a lot to interpretation, and nowhere does it state the minimum technical specs required to run the game. So, here it is:
Video memory: 128 Megabytes or higher required
Supported pixel shader version: 2 or higher required
Supported vertex shader version: 2 or higher required
Copied from the game install warning screen:
"Halo 2 for Windows Vista is designed for computers running Microsoft Windows Vista with an overall Windows Experience Index of 5 or higher." Hmmmm, one would think that the requirement of a 5-rating would be in bold type somewhere on the box, especially since the majority of the mass-market computers sold off the shelf are well below 5.
I have the minimum requirements for the video card and 2Gig of RAM (in my Gateway MX6453 laptop)and it runs HORRIBLY, and, at times, not at all.
Make sure you have a really good video card, or else you will suffer.