Rampancy

Louis Wu at HBO pointed out a BBC article wherein is mentioned some show-stopping bugs in PC Halo that apparently are causing BSODs in Windows XP, which they claim is a rare occurrence. Interesting.

Enemy Down and Europe: ClanBase are adding Halo ladders for players in Europe. Thanks Louis.

Two years ago, Microsoft's Xbox console debuted with its first must-have game, "Halo: Combat Evolved."

That's the opening line of Associated Press writer Matt Slagle's review of Halo for the PC, appearing now in Yahoo News and, no doubt, in newspapers around the country. Those two years might have been used garnering information pertinent and useful for writing a review of Halo (or indeed for any computer game). Sadly, Mr. Slagle seems to have been doing something else with his time.

The review ranges from the merely inaccurate...

You play as Master Sergeant, an armor-clad space marine in the crosshairs of a war with an advanced collective of aliens called The Covenant.

Master Chief, guy. Look, it's even got fewer letters! It's easier to type than Sergeant!

... to the glib...

I can't remember the last time an action game had me checking my watch so often.

... to the insulting...

After all, the Xbox is essentially a mid-range PC wrapped inside a black plastic case. Perhaps Microsoft didn't want to crimp sales of its marquee Xbox game. Whatever the reason, Halo on the PC is too little, too late.

The Xbox's processor and hard drive might qualify it as "mid-range", but its GPU is not-- and certainly was not when it was launched a full two years ago.

... and finally the contradictory...

For owners of extremely fancy, high-end computers costing thousands of dollars, Halo's graphics are sure to dazzle.

Hold on a second here. At first, the author wonders why Halo took "so long" to come to the PC, since the Xbox is basically a "midrange" PC, and then he complains that the system requirements are too high, because most users don't have the horsepower to see the dazzling graphics?

Here's a clue, Mr. Slagle. The Xbox version was for those people. The PC version is basically for people with high-end computers costing "thousands" of dollars. (Last time I checked, almost all the computers worth having cost "thousands of dollars". If your budget runs more to the "hundreds of dollars" range, and you want to play Halo, buy an Xbox.

And for you, dear readers? Well, if anyone else feels like (politely, please) letting Mr. Slagle feel that he was perhaps ill-prepared to produce this review, then perhaps sending him a nice email would do the trick.

Have a nice day!

Thanks to GlennKM in the HBO forum who pointed out this review.

UPDATE: Shishka, over at HBO, noted that he emailed Slagle, who said a corrected article has been submitted. No note of what (other than the Master Sergeant flub) would be changed. At this moment, the original article is still available.

John Petrick at AEG, a company that seems to be doing PR for Microsoft's game studios, sent us an email that mentioned SketchFactor's post at Bungie.net that the new Halo client patch v.102 needed to connect to the Dedicated Server v.