Halo Combat Evolved (Mac)

Halo is, however, anything but. The enemies are stupid (i don't mean that their AI is lacking, but rather, that they are programmed to be invalids and cowards) and excessively numerous. There were many times where I found myself in a gun turret, with my hand off the keyboard, holding down the fire button and leisurely offing fifty or sixty enemies.

After you've gunned down about a thousand incompetent fools who yell "run away, he'll kill us all!" things start to get a little boring.

Halo lacks interesting level design, an interesting story, interesting weapons, or even interesting gameplay. The things that would be "revolutionary" about Halo would be the use of vehicles during combat, and the occasional squad-based skirmish. However, Battlefield 1942 has both of these factors, and in greater amount. There were about five different vehicles in Halo, and there are forty plus vehicles in BF1942.

The worst part about Halo was the massive onslaught of weak enemies. Instead of battling a few, well trained enemies that would offer some kind of challenge, you fight against seemingly endless waves of pitiful enemies.

Perhaps the only thing I found of value in the game was the tactical use of grenades, and the ability to only carry two weapons. The latter would have been much more limiting and interesting if there were more than seven or eight weapons to begin with.

Bottom Line: Halo leaves much to be desired. If you're looking for a first-person shooter with a variety of vehicles, look to Battlefield 1942. If you want squad-based or tactical/realistic action, Counter-strike will leave neither you nor your wallet hungry. And if you want an action packed blow-em-away multiplayer game, they you should look no further than the Unreal Tournament series. If you want unispired level design, a weak story and microsoft (re: really, really bad) physics, than grab yourself some halo.

In the highest resolution mode it can get a little jumpy but it's still pretty playable on my machine. It wouldn't run initially; I had to load the included "additional performance" stuff on the disc and load a new Radeon driver for 10.2.8 and it works just fine. I have no idea why all these people are having so much trouble with this game. My system's fairly run-of-the-mill, and it's a laptop, and in my case it works fine. I have no complaints.

It's also nice because in 800x600 it plays as well as it does on the X-Box and I can play it in the car. When you have TONS of enemies it can slow down a little bit but not much. The X-Box does this too. You're not sacrificing anything except the gamepad. I thought it was weird to play it without a control pad but I quickly got used to it, even just playing with my track pad.