Ever since my iMac bricked I’ve been jonesing to go online and play. We have a new PC now (Yah, with Vista. It came installed. I didn’t have much choice. And it was half the price of replacing the iMac–which has been such a great experience except, you know, the logic board frying twice in three years). So I downloaded the demo.

Weird.

First reaction: what’s with all that blood? By the time you take the beach (the demo gives you “The Silent Cartographer”) you’ve pretty much spray-painted quite a number of patches of sand red and blue or purple. Not quite the game I would be encouraging the kiddies to play (I didn’t know about the flood until it was too late).

It is possible that the iMac version had these features but gave me a less processor-intensive version. The PC gives me lights that the Mac version normally missed, so maybe the blood is another level of detail (the powerpc iMac had a single core processor and 256k ram; I’m no using AMD dual-core with a gig of ram but it still has problems which I assume is the fault of Vista bloatware).

Blood is not the only difference. The colors are more… deep? Garish? It works sometimes. The warthog looks a lot more jeep-like close up, gritty or something. But the red and blue armor of multi-player looks like it produced by crayons and a lot of force.

I’ll get used to it.

I’ve linked the PC version of Halo 2, but I can’t really recommend it. They now “offer” a month of free internet play. Isn’t that generous? A whole month for what, if you buy Halo 1 is perpetually free.

On the other hand, I played about ten minutes of Halo 2 recently on the Xbox. Thumbsticks are of the devil! I hate them. I want to aim with my whole arm.

Still, if I buy Halo 2 for the boys new Xbox, I have a lot more certainty regarding play quality (isn’t that weird?). So I’ll probably go with it now that internet play is no longer free.

FWIW, here’s my earlier game review.