Halo 2 review Although my amazon pre-order arrived a day late, that gave Mike and I time to polish off the first one on split-screen co-op.

My opinion of Halo was that is was one of the most playable console FPS's, although flawed, most significantly by repetitive level design. There were other minor gripes too, but nothing serious.

Halo 2 had a lot to live up to, and my verdict, based on ten hours or so of split-screen co-op play, is that it lives up to and exceeds all of my expectations. Again there are some niggles:

Some character and background detail seems to initialise slowly - so you briefly see an untextured surface before it renders correctly.

I wondered if this was something to do with using Pal-60 mode? but don't know...

Split screen co-op by default now splits vertically when playing with the xbox in widescreen mode, rather than horizontally as it did in Halo.

This is apparently rectified by booting your xbox without a disc to get to the dashboard, and switching out of widescreen.

Gripes apart, it's a spectacular looking game. The pace hasn't let up since it started and the story, as with Halo, is intriguing. I told a friend it was worth buying an xbox for... he did, and he loves it :-D
  ¶ 4:38 PM