When your big Vista launch title is a game from 2004, it'd seem like your new PC operating system is in trouble -- unless that game is Halo 2. The game that powered Microsoft's only profitable quarter in the game space is coming to the PC and at Leipzig Game Convention in Germany, the game has its first public hands-on.
Chugging along on Vista, some immediate differences come to eye on the PC version of Halo 2 versus its console counterpart. Character models appear a bit more detailed from far away and the game's lightning engine reflects off of the gun barrels better than on its last-gen iteration.
Bungie Community Manager Frank O'Connor conjectured that at high levels of play both keyboard and mouse and 360-controller configurations would be on a level playing field (hopefully negating the obvious advantage in accuracy that keyboard/mouse players would have over controller-users). The kiosks at Leipzig have both control configurations available. The multiplayer in Halo 2 Vista feels a little sluggish right now, perhaps to alleviate some of that keyboard/mouse advantage. Whether it's technically true or not, it certainly feels like players aren't making their way through the maps as fast as they do on the console counterpart.
At the core, it's still Halo, but the deliberately slow pace of Halo's character movements -- which work gloriously on the console -- might be a touch too slow in the current state of Windows Vista. All of the great things about Halo multiplayer remain, excellent maps, great weapons and entertaining gametypes, but the current build of Halo 2 Vista just feels a little bit off. However, knowing what we do about Bungie, by the time Halo 2 PC is ready for release, we're quite sure everything will be ironed out.
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