I'm afraid you've missed the point. Hell you've gone past the point at around 2,000 mph. Allow me to explain:
A port can roughly be split into two sides - good and bad. That's not to say the game is good or bad, but that the port is good or bad. This afflicts console to PC conversions most, that the conversion is sloppy and is in places worse than its console brethren. As you said, Halo should easily be running on 1280x720, or 1024x768, with all the juice turned up without the need for a dual supercomputer (though I would like a dual supercomputer...). But it doesn't and it's mind-boggling how they failed in this area. Then they tried to tack on a few extra bits and pieces that aren't worth a dime and you have to wonder what they're playing at. With the likes of PlanetSide or Quake 3 or Counter-Strike floating about another standard multplayer isn't really going to be impressive and it's not. It's nice sure, as I said in the review, but it's nothing special.
However, that's the port. They mucked up the port. They lost points for that and they did with me. But the game, the actual game, is still one of the best FPS titles out there. It's the best FPS on the Xbox and it's now one of the best on the PC, this much is undeniable.
A poor port, a great game. Logical enough I'd have thought. 8.0 for you sir.
Comments
narcogen
Not Quite What I Meant
No, I never said that Halo should be running at those resolutions with everything on without problem. I speculated that reviews were being skewed by that perspective. Halo's renderer is a strange thing; even on the Xbox, it's one of few games that is incapable of going about 640x480, no matter what kind of display you're using for output. It does just too many texture passes. It's not "mind boggling" at all to anyone who's talked to the original developers over the years about what they were doing with Halo. What I found odd was not that Halo has trouble at those resolutions, but why people familiar with PC games (and I admit, these days, I'm not, really) thought Halo's graphics were so low-quality.
Narcogen