It's almost too exhausting a prospect to trawl through the myriad of options available, to be frank, so before we weed out the interesting bits it's probably worth considering what we wanted that didn't make it into the final cut. The answer is probably not as simple as you were hoping it's got almost everything you could want from the online aspect of a game, but yet still manages to omit industry standard features that conspire in some senses to render it less than satisfying. So, doing it "the old fashioned way" we grabbed a few hours here and there to find out for ourselves what the most important online console game ever had to offer above and beyond what you'd expect. But rightly or wrongly, Microsoft didn't allow for multiplayer reviews, and inferred, in fact, that testing for the service was still ongoing right up until the last minute. Suffice to say that the same rules didn't apply to Doom III, Half-Life 2 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which have all been slapped with bizarrely unfair and unhelpful reviewing restrictions, which seem to serve no purpose other than to benefit the larger organisations. For the first time in living memory a genuine worldwide embargo was set, giving publications such as this a genuine chance to compete on a level playing field - at least in terms of the publication date. If you've read a review mentioning multiplayer, the chances are it's not much more than a mention: most Halo 2 reviews (including ours) were all frantically scribed in the few hours between receiving the game on Friday morning and Sunday evening when the worldwide embargo was lifted.įair play to Microsoft, though. Microsoft didn't even turn on the servers until the day after we posted our single player review (despite us having reviewed from a boxed copy), and, to be honest, we didn't have the chance to rally 12 TVs and 12 Xboxen (not to mention multiple copies of the game) to engage in a System Link marathon, and we didn't feel that this would adequately represent the 'real world' in any case. We wouldn't normally treat the single and multiplayer facets of a game as separate entities, but in the case of Halo 2 we didn't really have a whole lot of choice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |