Xbox port with Xbox limitations

The technical side is naturally the bit that is interesting - the story is already known. Sadly the Vista version doesn't really differentiate itself visually from the Xbox version. Some of the textures have received a minor facelift, but beyond that the visuals are exactly the same. This is not good news; Halo 2 was already looking a bit dated on the aging Xbox three years ago. Releasing the same thing without a major visual overhaul three years later, as a release trying to promote Vista as the gaming platform of the future, is a pretty weak showing.

I guess someone forgot to upgrade the bitmaps of those shells flying around...

Enemies look fine, but the maps feel blocky and the texture quality varies greatly.

Halo 2 also feels too much like a console game - at first I was bit puzzled trying to figure out what the problem was. It wasn't the controls - you could go WSAD-mouse just fine (or plug in a gamepad and play like on the Xbox, if you so prefer). How about the visual quality? Yes, the textures are low-res in places and the geometry is simpler than usual, but that wasn't it either. Then I figured it out - Halo 2 uses a different field of view than most PC shooters. When you play a console shooter from a couch, your TV is usually at least five feet away, so it feels natural that you see things in front of you with a narrow FOV as the display doesn't fully cover your field of view anyway (unless you have an absolutely monster TV, or watch it too close). PC games are usually viewed less than a feet away from your monitor, and the display fills the view - so PC games tend to have much wider field of view. After some highly inaccurate manual measuring, Halo 2 for Vista appears to use a FOV of around 60-70 degrees, while just about every other first person shooter on the PC uses a default FOV of 90 degrees.

High settings are most visible on characters, and there are proper character shadows.

Same at low settings - looks even uglier, if that's in any way possible.

If your system can't cope with the visuals, you can further degrade them for low end systems. Video settings are limited to resolution selection, anti-aliasing level and a single "level of detail" switch. When you drop down this level of detail, already fairly low resolution textures get a bit uglier, and you lose character shadows.

The manufacturer's minimum system (2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and Get it! Radeon X700 or Get it! GeForce 6100), while technically able to run the game, is not really suitable unless you turn the visual settings way down and are happy to run the game at the original Xbox resolution (640x480). As is customary, the YouGamers minimum is set to give you acceptable performance at the most common flat panel native resolution (1280x1024) with graphical settings as low as possible without degrading the visuals to a mess - in this case the lowest setting is still playable. The YouGamers recommended system will give you constantly smooth play (in this case, 30fps+) without too severe visual compromises at higher resolutions - 1680x1050, 1600x1200 or 1920x1200.