While I agree that whining won't help the situation, it certainly is, in many cases, warranted when it comes to Halo 2 Vista.
I am generally a patient person when it comes to games and siding developers when it seems reasonable, but Halo 2 Vista, whether due to problems of the Vista OS itself, or the time/budget constraints, or lack of skill on the developers' side, or a combination of all of these and more, is a pretty sorry product when I consider it (and it pains me in a way to say this considering I'm a huge Halo fan and of PC gaming).
Let's see why.
First, my PC specs (pretty acceptable machine - it's nearly 2 years old so gimme a break :P):
- Athlon X2 64 (2.7GHz)
- nVidia GeForce 7800 GT SLI (w/ latest official drivers at the time of install)
- 2 GB RAM
- Creative X-Fi (w/ latest official drivers at the time of install)
- Windows Vista Business
1) Installation was a headache. First, I tried to install the game but I got some kind of weird error message "Live gaming cannot be initialized..." Had to restart PC to fix this. Weird thing was, it was a fresh boot anyway before I tried to install the game the first time. So once I got installation going, I decided to try Tray and Play. Well now - for some reason the opening video chopped so badly (it flickered black and kept turning my LCD monitor on and off standby) that the game crashed. I then decided to reinstall the game fully before trying to play. Same deal with the opening video but somehow the game survived enough to go to the main menu. Later by elimination I guessed (and correctly so) that the latest official video drivers were the cause of many instabilities, so I installed the 160.03 beta drivers and it worked better. Well, so much for fuss-free gaming. I can say this was one of the most frustrating game installs I've had in years.
2) The online gaming system is inconvenient. The process of signing up for Live Gaming is confusing, as it seemed repetitious and I had to try several times before getting it right. Again, zero score for ease of getting into online gaming if you didn't already have a gamertag. Also, about the only thing I can do is browse servers for a game or create a local game. Luckily, I'm not big on online gaming so this wasn't a huge loss to me.
3) Now comes the big kahuna - the game features and quirks. The general feeling I get from Halo 2 Vista is that it plainly feels crippled, stupid, robbed of greatness and what have you.
a) Auto-aim with the 360 gamepad. FFS give me a break. This forum has some very good posts that illustrate the auto-aim. When it comes to gamepad vs mouse/kb, you can't add auto-aim to only one controller type and think you can "have your cake and eat it." It's unfair and I think any PC gamer who wants to use a gamepad for an FPS should suffer the consequences. Gamepads are horrible for FPS games no question about it; they're only bearable on consoles because of games being built around the their limitations and auto-aim is a byproduct of that.
b) No co-op gameplay on the PC? Argh. Shafted yet again.
c) Generally poor performance and video related bugs. I usually like to run my games at around 60-100 frames per second to maintain the fluidity I like. And to do that on Halo 2, I have to run the game at 800*600 w/4xAA multisampled and supersampled transparency AA (oh lord gotta smooth out the jaggies). And that's if SLI is enabled properly (to do that I have to toggle some video feature, like resolution or AA level to "trick" the game into restarting the video subsystem and detecting the SLI mode - this has to be done after each level or I'll suffer single video card performance). Why 800*600 resolution? Because the game is so fill-rate heavy. I don't know how it sucks up the fill rate like crazy when my 7800GT in SLI is so many times faster than a Geforce3 that's in the Xbox (to be fair, I think my system running Halo 2 vista running at slightly higher resolution with anti-aliasing vs the Xbox version is much smoother latter version but compared to current games the performance is not commensurate with the graphical details). Later in the game, especially in the forest-y levels I have to bump the AA level down a notch to maintain 50fps during firefights. This would all be okay if Halo 2 looked much better than it did. I think it looks bearable, but mostly because the art design still holds up. Technically it's dated as hell.
d) Mouse controls seem a little iffy. It's like there's some acceleration built-in no matter what. It throws my aim off in general, and luckily in single player it's not that big of a deal. In multi-player I'm sure I would be pissed, especially when going up against auto-aim enhanced gamepad wielding bastards. This forum has a few threads about the mouse acceleration issue.
e) Non skippable video intro. Do I have to watch that stupid intro every time I play? Is there no command line option for me to disable it? If it played properly it would still be bearable, but SLI makes the video flicker black every other frame. Okay, so even if this is nVidia's fault, at least give me the option to skip the video intros, eh? I had to resort to replacing the intro videos with empty files renamed with the actual video names.
f) No user save-points slots. What if I wanted to replay a fun previous level without losing my current save-point? Oh I can't. And for no good reason either. In Halo PC at least I could save the previous save point and go back to it later.
I could think of some more reasons to be pissed at the whole situation, but it's late and I need to sleep soon. In short, the only reason I bought this game was because I love the Halo universe and I couldn't wait to play as Master Chief again on a PC with proper mouse and keyboard controls. Hey, it's here finally but boy just count the number of compromises. I still had fun with the single-player campaign, but there's just this nagging feeling that it could have been so much more.
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