Keyboards do it better

By Martin Kingsley

"Eat my flames of purity you vile cliff face!"

Everybody's played, or at least watched someone play, Halo. It was the flagship title of the Xbox, and one of the prime reasons why Microsoft's big console didn't go the way of the Dreamcast.

And let's not forget to mention that its one good looking game in and of itself, with pixels clean enough to eat your dinner off of and big shiny coronas to help you go blind.

When it came out that everybody's favourite Half Life expansion pack developer Gearbox would be doing the port from Xbox to PC with the help of the original Bungie team, the news was greeted with mild scepticism.

After all, who are these Gearbox chaps, anyway?

However, a year down the track and everybody can rest easy; Gearbox have delivered a superb conversion of this alien-shooter-par-excellence, with LAN and TCP/IP multiplayer, full graphics card support, a plethora of configurable options…basically everything but the kitchen sink.

Nope, it's there too...

Rocket turret-equipped Warthogs part of the PC multiplayer game

The story of Halo is pretty simple: Assault rifles with ammo counter insets, motion trackers, creepy crawly intergalactic parasites, big-arse Gatling guns, dropships and trigger happy space Marines.

You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd just stumbled on a copy of the canned Alien: Resurrection video game, if not for the fact that the main character of Halo is a nice big green cyborg going by the handle of the Master Chief.

With rifle in hand and emerald color scheme firmly in place, the Master Chief tromps across the landscape of the Halo ring, blowing the shite out of anything even remotely alien-looking.

With that pretty little summation out of the way, let's get rolling, eh?

As I said above, Gearbox have done a really, really excellent job, and I must commend them for it. In a world where only one or two companies seem to be capable of producing decent ports, Gearbox have gone truly above and beyond the call of duty in their quest to code Halo for the PC.

The multiplayer works perfectly, the levels are nicely balanced, and the fact that there are no bots to speak of is a minor gripe, really, when you consider how full the servers will be getting in a few weeks once everybody gets there mitts on Halo for PC (HPC for short, mmkay?).

Covenant rocket launchers are a larf. Ha!

For those who don't have Internet access, you won't have to resort to bots in the face of the excellent single-player campaign on hand.

There is barely a minute's rest between firefights and your next step could easily lead you into a shotgun-blasting frenzy of blood, gore, ooze, charcoal and cordite.

It's poetry in motion, I tell ya. Pure poetry; brings a tear to my eye, it does [It really does make him cry - Ed].

Every little teeny weeny bit of effort that Bungie poured into their magnum opus is present in HPC, and nowhere can I really fault them or Gearbox.

You'll need a reasonably modern rig to experience the full range of the Master Chief's green fury, nothing extravagant is really required; I'm running a quite comfortable 30fps no matter the level of action on screen with a relatively modest Athlon XP 2100+ and a Geforce4 MX440, so for anybody with a system above this, it should be plain sailing.

What else can I say? Hmm…… Oh, yeah, I know: Read Will Barker's review on Halo, unconverted and original, for the skinny on the whole deal, and remember, 'talk softly and carry a big assault rifle'.

Game: Halo: Combat Evolved
System: PC
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Gearbox Software
Distributor: Microsoft

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Halo: Combat Evolved is on the shelves now.