With so many amazing Xbox games already announced, we can’t decide what to put on our first cover. Which of the following would make you buy our premiere issue?

One of the options is ‘Halo exclusive – Best-looking console game ever.’ It’s currently trailing the ’50 reasons to buy an Xbox’ option… you know what to do.

Just take a walk through the space station in Halo, an action game based on Larry Niven’s classic sci-fi novel Ringworld, and you’ll notice fingerprint marks on triple-glazed windows.

Well, Ringworld misinformation aside, it’s always nice to see a Halo mention in the mainstream press…

“We are never going to have little health pods that you run across… you get your weapons and stuff from killing others, but there won’t be magical shit that flies out of their bodies.”

On vehicles:

“Vehicles in Halo are really, really survivable… it’s going to take a lot to take out a vehicle.”

On Xbox hardware:

“We never thought we could have something this big on the PC and we never really could, even if we were really tricky.”

(This is in reference to the graphical power of the Xbox, not its selling power.)

On PC/Mac versions:

“At this point there is no PC version of Halo, there is just the Xbox version. We’re not even gonna think about the PC version until we all sleep for about a month afterwards! PC and Mac gamers should have hope, though, we have some ideas.”

There are some other fun bits – the AI gunner will tell you you’re driving too fast in the warthog, for example – all in all, we wish we had a more complete scan, but we’re happy we have at least this! Thanks, Kalis. Update: Apologies to Darkman, who originally told us about this scan on our forum, then mailed us the scan – I mistakenly thought that ‘Darkman’, ‘D V’, and ‘Kalis’ were all nicknames for the same person.

In fact, many of Microsoft’s games are shaping up nicely as the company prepares for its fall launch. Halo, a game that I once wrote off as a mistake in Microsoft’s marketing, may just be good enough to break the curse that has vexed first-person shooters on video game consoles. (With the notable exception of Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64, no first-person shooter has ever made it into the top 10 games for annual sales.)
With horizons that look more like Roger Dean posters than video game art, Halo looks spectacular. It has oceans with rolling ripples, amazing lighting effects that include real light physics when you use flashlights, and all kinds of intelligent monsters to battle.
Halo may not look quite as realistic as RS2, but organic environments with plants, rocks, and humans are harder to recreate than synthetic scenes like Death Stars. And people are much harder to make than fighter craft. In other words, Halo is an ambitious project that was more suited for computers than video game consoles – and Microsoft may yet pull it off.

Hmm… a game showing people, and outdoor scenes, doesn’t look as realistic as one showing fighter spacecraft? I’m not sure that’s exactly what he meant to say…

I ignored making tracks now as it didn’t matter, the appearance of body parts should be clue enough that I had been here.

Neil Grattan drops us the first part of his new Fan Fiction, ‘The Great Escape‘. Check it out, along with the rest of our Fan Fiction section!