I will openly be the first to admit that I never saw the hype surrounding Halo, aside from the fact that it was the best shooter a console had to offer. Xbox live also seemed to help bring the community for this game together, allowing players from all over the map to play with one another. I never had an Xbox myself, but I gave Halo a few runs on my friends Xbox before I got it on my PC a few years back.

After playing it on the PC, yeah, I had fun, but I still didn’t see what supposedly made Halo so much better than the classics I knew, like Doom or Half-Life. After playing the single player campaign, me and a few friends got together, and we would play Halo 1 until the early hours of the morning. Multiplayer was definitely where this game thrived, but it was not the be-all-end-all experience I had been lead to believe it was.

Recently Microsoft made many gamers choose between XP and Vista by making the PC release of Halo 2 for Windows Vista only. Is Halo 2 really worth upgrading to Windows Vista this early in Vista’s life? We’re going to look at this game and see if it really is, or if it is just another over-hyped shooter in an overly flooded market of games of its type. Sure, the graphics on the PC port look pretty, but will that be all Halo 2 has to offer? Let’s hope not.