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Halo was the first must-own title on the XBOX, and it is the greatest game that I’ve ever played. It is extremely well rounded, and a lot of thought was put into making this game. The graphics, for starters, are simply amazing. Screenshots just don’t do it justice, because you must see the mind-boggling detail to believe it. The bump mapped textures look great, and they’re among the best that I’ve ever seen in a game before. Most of the time you are too busy blasting your way through aliens to notice, but they are actually very well designed also. You can see the indentations on their wrinkled skin, and on some you can see reflections of their shiny body. The weapons are also amazingly designed; you can see every little detail. Another one of the many aspects that Halo excels in is the control. You wouldn’t think it would be anything that great because of the clunky and oversized XBOX controller, but it manages to be quite comfortable from right when you pick it up to after you beat the game. After a while controlling the Master Chief just becomes natural, and you don’t even realize that you’re holding the extremely awkward XBOX controller. It makes excellent use of the two analog sticks, one moves you forward and slides you left or right, and the other one lets you look around, very similar to that of the PS2 controls. The only thing that takes a lot of getting used to is having to take your thumb off the right analog stick in order to jump, switch weapons, activate, just about anything that isn’t shooting or throwing grenades. There is really no way around this though, and you’ll find that soon enough you’ll forget about this little tidbit.
The third area where Halo excels is the sound. Halo takes advantage of the latest Dolby Digital sound, and it sounds amazing. You can hear enemies walking up behind you, or even talking around the corner. One thing that sticks in my mind when I think of the sound is when I threw a plasma grenade at an enemy and when it stuck to him he yelled “Not again!” and ran until the fuse met the grenade and blew him up. Note that I only noticed the aliens saying this once throughout the whole game, so there is much variety in the things they say. Another thing that taunts you into going into an alien killing spree is that after one of the aliens kills you, they laugh uncontrollably at how they took you down. I soon found myself screaming profanities at the TV because the aliens wouldn’t stop laughing at me.
Halo has to be the most fun that I’ve had in a video game for such a long time that I can’t even remember any game that I’ve enjoyed more than it. You are constantly engulfed in the game, and completely unaware of the outside world. I lost so many hours of sleep due to my late night Halo frag-fests that it should have been considered unhealthy. Halo definitely has the single player down, but does it deliver for the multiplayer? Oh yes, indeed. Halo is the best multiplayer game that I’ve ever played, and it’s the only one that can occupy my friends and I for more than an hour. It’s so much fun to have four people playing team deathmatch, and being totally co-operative. That brings up another thing, the co-op is awesome, and is just as challenging as the single player. It’s awesome how you can have one person drive a vehicle, and have the other person shooting the machine gun in the back.
Overall, I must say go buy this game now. If you don’t have it already that is. This game is good enough to buy an XBOX just to play, that’s what I did. I’d also like to point out the system link feature, because it’s awesome. If you have a network set up in your house, you can have your friend bring over his XBOX and hook it up to the network and to a TV, and you can play multiplayer without having the annoying split screen. You can have up to 16 people playing Halo at the same time, which I personally have not done yet, but I hope that I can someday because it would be awesome. This game outshines all other games in graphics, sound, control, and just plain being fun, not to mention that it makes anyone who doesn’t own an XBOX want one very bad. Bottom line, Halo is the best game to grace my room in a very long time, maybe the best game to grace my room ever. -- Chris Vavra, PGNx Media
---- May 23, 2002
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