I promised in my Halo 2 First Impressions entry last week to review the Halo 2 online multiplayer and online experience. Time to deliver.
Last Friday, my friend Brehan hosted a Halo 2 LAN party at his friends house. We had 4 xboxes, 3 TVs and 1 digital projector. We had as many as 9 people playing at once and it was fantastic. Very true to the experience of Halo 1 multiplayer, but it is now even easier to setup and modify game types in a LAN environment. I hope that I can attend some future Halo 2 LAN parties, but with the advent of online Halo 2 multiplayer I'm not sure it will happen.
I have now logged on to play Halo 2 on Xbox Live (the online gaming service) 3 times and I have enjoyed it each time. The ranking system works well, and drives my competitiveness. It also insures that I play against similarly skilled players. I get to play against enough better players that I am definitely improving. The biggest problem is the wait for a new game. The system is pretty slow at finding appropriate game type and players, but Bungie says they are aware of the problem and have a solution.
One thing I have really noticed is how much playing multiplayer Halo reminds me of multiplayer Marathon. If you aren't a current or former Mac gamer or a Bungie fan boy, you probably never heard of Marathon. Marathon was Bungie's first big game. It had a great LAN multiplayer mode that was a lot of fun during college. I can personally blame 1 failed college class and many sleepless nights on this game. Many of my best memories of college revolve around playing Marathon late at night in the school newspaper office.
UPDATE: I mentioned above that Bungie had promised an update to fix the waiting problem. Well wouldn't you know, they released it this morning without me noticing it. Not only does it fix the wait time issue and an annoying bug for people using HDTVs, it also provides a new multiplayer map for everybody!
So like most of the Xbox owners in the U.S. I went and bought Halo 2 yesterday. Thanks to a very understanding wife, I was able to spend about 5 hours playing it. The game is simply awesome. First of all, the gameplay is built on the standard set by the first Halo, so it has a good foundation. Then, Bungie added enhancements in a very careful way so as not to change those foundations. This makes the game both feel familiar and very new. The graphics have greatly improved since the last game. Everything looks very crisp and clean. The human characters have started to fall in to the "uncanny valley", but it's not really distracting. The story is really interesting, and I got one pretty good plot twist only a few levels into the game.
I have yet to play multi-player, and probably won't until I finish the campaign mode. Once I do I will write a short update as to my impressions of it.