Halo 2

Preview - Bungie up the ante with the Xbox's most anticipated sequel.

Halo was without doubt the jewel in the crown of Microsoft’s Xbox launch, indeed, without its ground-breaking mixture of story, environments, vehicles, and AI, its difficult to imagine that Microsoft would have even managed half as well as they have done. All in all, it was plain to see why Microsoft were so keen to buy developers Bungie, and snap up this little beauty for themselves.

Its no surprise, then, that after the smash-hit sales and critical acclaim of the original, Bungie and Redmond are keen to get a sequel out the door. What we already know is that Halo 2 carries on from where the original left-off, pitting the Master Chief, the deifier of the evil Covenant alien race, once again against his foes, as they march toward Earth. New graphical overhauls are promised, as well as new aliens, and new weaponry – some of which will be derived from the master Chief’s new encounters.

More than double the number of driveable vehicles will feature, too, for both exploration and battle across the new huge landscapes we’re promised. Perhaps most exciting of all, however, is the Xbox Live support built in to Halo 2 – and it is this that will get even the most hardened of gamers salivating at the very thought.

A new and revolutionary graphics engine will make Halo 2, we’re promised, the toast of the industry – ranking alongside Doom 3 for innovation. Using new “real-time per-pixel lighting”, only made possible of late by the power of NVIDIA’s more recent graphics cards, Halo 2 will be almost indistinguishable from pre-rendered graphics. A la Doom 3. This new approach offers the opportunity for much-improved image quality, and greater detail – without the same hardware ‘expense’ as before.

This apparent graphical ‘simplification’, will result in models that despite the outward appearance of being more detailed are actually constructed of fewer polygons than the original! This will improve load-times and other memory issues, as well as benefiting online play where bandwidth is the key issue.