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Halo 2
built 178 days ago
"The anticipated release of Halo 2, the sequel to Microsoft's best-selling 2000 game, is the latest and perhaps the best indication of how the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood has pervaded the video game industry. As development budgets for the most advanced games approach $20 million, the stakes for producers have risen accordingly. According to Microsoft, the marketing budget for Halo 2 is 'tens of millions of dollars,' perhaps more than the cost of developing the game itself (which the company will not divulge," the New York Times reported. "And just as a splashy Hollywood premiere attracts attention for a film, a video game's first-week sales can be critical to winning shelf space and retailer support. More than 1.5 million people preordered a $50 copy of Halo 2; if all of them pick it up the first few days, the game's opening gross will be $75 million, almost $5 million more than the animated film 'The Incredibles' did this weekend."
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Perhaps the most exciting addition to Halo 2 is the online multi-player option through Xbox Live. With Xbox Live, a gamer can play with friends or even total strangers via the Internet, using a broadband connection. Xbox Live has been hailed as a gameplaying innovation, changing the very way games are played. With Halo 2, this is certainly the case.
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Online multiplayer Halo 2 battles take on new intensity with technological and feature set advances, and clans can more effectively strategize and trash talk using the GameCom Halo 2 Edition. An optimized speaker, noise-canceling microphone, and contoured one-ear fit maximize the audio for gamers' complete immersion while letting them stay aware of what's happening in their other reality, the living room. The GameCom Halo 2 Edition ... provides a weightless, custom fit for hours of comfortable play so gamers can deliver a premium performance.
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Unlike its predecessor, Halo 2 allows players to compete with each other via Xbox Live, in addition to the original game's support for split-screen and System Link multiplayer.[11] Halo 2's Xbox Live mode offers changes from earlier online first-person shooters. Traditionally, one player sets his or her computer or console up as a game server or host, specifying the game type, map, and configuring other settings. The game software then uses a service such as GameSpy to advertise the game to the world at large; other players choose which game to join based upon criteria such as the map and game options each host is offering, as well as the ping times they are able to receive. In Halo 2... Xbox Live players do not choose to host public games, and they do not specify individual maps and options to search for. Instead, players select playlists that are geared to different styles of play.[11] For example, the "Rumble Pit" playlist offers "every man for himself" game types, and "Team Skirmish" offers 4-on-4 team games, which are primarily objective-based games like Capture the Flag. Bungie occasionally deletes the unpopular game types and adds new ones.
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Since its release in November of 2004 Halo 2 has been plagued with many forms of cheating. It started with gamers discovering that if they pushed the "standby" button on their modem it would allow them to move about the game doing anything while everything else was frozen. Later on the "Dummy Glitch" was discovered where players could turn invisible and capture a flag without the opposing team even knowing. In April 2005 Bungie released a patch that completely got rid of the Dummy Glitch and made it so that using standby was much harder and only a small percentage of modems can still use it to manipulate the game. All seemed well but unfortunately in June 2005 people with Mod Chips in their Xbox found out that because the downloaded content maps were stored on the Xbox hard drive rather than the disc that it was possible to hack them and use special cheats in the game. Examples of these cheats are the "Super bounce", Super speed, Rapid fire, Needlers that act as rockets, auto aim snipers, and many others.
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The Halo 2 soundtrack was mostly composed by Martin O'Donnell, who had ... composed the music of Halo. Steve Vai provided guitar backing for many tracks. Additional tracks were also provided by various outside musicians, such as Joe Satriani (for the remixed theme song, which includes new guitar solos).
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Halo 2