Blame it on CNN. I was working out in the GYM when some newscaster lauded HALO 2. Record sales blah blah blah. I thought Halo? What is this Halo of which they speak? I told my wife about it a couple of weeks before Christmas and lo and behold Halo was in my stocking. So you can blame my wife TOO! Another engineer I work with , Paul Evermon, stated once "If you're playing halo and you see IGLOOCR3W1348, that's my grandson kicking your ass!". Sorry, I don't want anyone's GRANDSON kicking MY ass! You can blame Paul too.
Early January 2005. What is the deal with Halo? I hear it is a not so good port to the PC. Here is the machine I am trying to run it on: Gigabyte GA-K8VT800M Motherboard, Athlon 64 bit processor 2.4GHZ, 1GB DDR RAM, nVidea GeForce 5200 with 256Meg of Ram, DVD player, 580 Watt power supply, Direct X 9.0c, Windows XP Service Pack 2. My system kicks the llama's ass! The thing tries to load, flashes the Logo screen and then goes back to Windows.... I've tried every switch in the book. I've tried antialiasing both application and also off, same with Anisotropic filtering. Tried -nosound, tried forced to 640x480 no worky. The only thing that works is -safemode and then there is no sound. I can't hear what the trainers are yelling at me! Very frustrating indeed. I've heard rumors that Halo has problems with XP SP2 and 256M graphics cards.
Upate: 1/7/05- Even though Microsoft says that 5200 series cards are not affected by the problem, they are. I copied strings.dll and binkw32.dll and halo autopatch 1.04. Miraculously, it WORKED! Now I am a Halo addict. The product is much more impressive with sound, NAV indicators and the radar scope. Go here and do what they say.... regardless of what system you are running. I take back everything bad I said.
Some observations regarding Halo. The original game was made for the XBOX, a Microsoft product. They then ported it to Windows. I believe there is a lot of market hype behind Halo, as CNN never mentioned a video game on their new show before Halo2. That is where I first heard about it. I figured people were lining up all over so it had to be good. My experience is that the graphics are great, but Microsoft, Bungie Studios and Gearbox did a terrible job of porting and testing this game. I have never been so frustrated with a product as this.
O.K., so Halo isn't so bad at all. I've actually become addicted. I've been playing it quite a bit and don't consider myself a noob anymore. I go online to the gamespy server and jump into various games. There are from 1000-3000 people playing HALO CE for PC online at any given moment. There are hundreds of servers out there. My favorite is Alabama T3 No Foul Language. Favorite map is Blood Gulch.
Keep in mind that I am 38 and have never played a FPS game before. I was really into video games when I was a teenager, but then life got in the way. FPS games didn't exist in 1984.
{KK}KeKe - man we kicked ass this one time!
keke Keke's Website Keke's E-mail{SOI}MGLIB - he taught me a bunch of stuff! Thanks! I don't know his real name, but works for Strategic Outsourcing Unlimited in Ohio.
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©2004 Charles C. Bader
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