This past Sunday, the Hushed Casket (THX) gathered for a private Halo PC LAN party. While we’ve been known to throw a Halo LAN party or two, we’ve never hosted a PC LAN event. Much was learned.

(BattleBitch pwned kb/m)

You see, Halo PC came out in 2003; two years after its release for the XBOX platform. Since our community is dominated by XBOX gamers, it’s been difficult to find enough traction to consider hosting a PC event. After all, XBOX Live has gotten stronger and some great XBOX games that have come out in the last 5 years that have attracted the attention of our community: Halo 2, Call of Duty 2, Gears of War, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 to name a few. With games like those, I know for a fact it was hard to convince friends to invest in the hardware to try computer games; even with some of those same games offering the same and more experiences than the console counterparts.

(Guess who?)

During the release of all those great XBOX games, the Hushed Casket members still held Halo 1 as the standard of first-person shooters on the console. To this day, the core group of THXers prefer Halo 1 to even Halo 3 [article at Newsweek].

In the last several months, there was discussion of holding a Halo PC LAN instead of our traditional XBOX LANs. Why? Because the XBOX players could play with their controller and they would have the benefit of multiplayer gaming with full screens (not the splitscreens that would be required with XBOX Halo). For those unfamiliar with Halo 1, back in those days there was no XBOX Live and Halo 1 only supported up to 4 XBOXs in one game. So, if you wanted to play an 8 v 8, you could only use 4 TV’s and each TV would have 4 gamers splitscreening.

(J-DOGG)

Perhaps the modern shooters on the XBOX 360 have actually helped some of the hardcore XBOX gamers to open up to the idea of playing multiplayer Halo 1 in a full-screen atmosphere. This is because games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 now support 16 in-game players all playing from there own XBOX 360 on their own TV. Maybe we don’t want to LAN Halo 1 on small screens. (That didn’t stop us from having a Halo 1 LAN two weeks ago. [vids and pics from the XBOX LAN two weeks ago])

The LAN started at noon and gamers filtered in and out through the day until late that night. We had good 4v4, 5v5, and 6v6 games playing classic Halo 1 gametypes on classic Halo maps. I installed the Halo PC dedicated server software on an old 800 MHz Pentium 3 XP box. The server ran perfectly.

(Mikeulus)

The only hiccups in the PC LAN were with people having incorrect settings on their BYOC equipment (video settings, network settings, sound card issues). Other than those issues (which were to be expected at a first-time LAN), the LAN went smooth and there’s definitely a base to build upon.

Some of us learned that our old PCs can actually handle the Halo PC software just fine. Afterall, the minimum system requirements are a 733 MHz CPU, a 32 Mb video card, and 128 of RAM. My wife’s 15” DELL Studio laptop ran the game just fine. The next time there’s a BYOC LAN, I can just pack up the laptop and a mouse and I’m good to go. Sure beats carrying around an LCD and XBOX 360 hardware, games, and peripherals.

Notes from the LAN:
1) Networking was the biggest issue. Switches don’t broadcast IPs. Routers would work better. We had to connect to games via direct IP address and the dedicated server wasn’t visible in the game server list to all clients. XBOX 360’s don’t have any issues with this.
2) A Ventrillo server would have been great for voice chat. But, that would have been an extra layer of hardware (microphone) that I don’t think would have been adopted by everyone.
3) The latest version of Halo PC software is 1.0.8 even through the software advertises 1.0.7 as the latest version. *cough*Sawnose*cough* Even Microsoft’s official Halo PC page is behind the times offering version 1.0.6: http://www.microsoft.com/games/PC/halo.aspx
4) CD Key checks are still in place. Yeah, don’t even try it.
5) MacSoft, the company that made Halo for the Mac (ironic but awesome at the same time), was acquired by Destineer Studios and they are no longer able to sell the game or CD Keys. They don’t hold the license. Who holds the license and where can a guy buy the Mac version? Once the online retailers like Amazon are exhausted, Mac users will be out of luck. That’s probably a position that Microsoft doesn’t mind Mac users being in. However, don’t forget that Halo was originally being developed for the Mac [10 Years of R.net]. By the way, $150 will get you a copy of Halo for the Mac on Amazon.
6) Time to dream! We certainly hear the rumors about Halo 1 being ported to run on XBOX Live, perhaps as an XBOX Arcade title. The dream lives on deep within Halo Nation. But wouldn’t it be _more_ likely for Halo PC to be offered as a free add-on to a Windows operating system. Imagine Halo PC being offered with Windows 7. Who knows. Maybe some clever programmer at Microsoft will embed Halo PC inside MS Excel 2010. But really, Halo PC is being neglected, as evidenced by the latest version of the software being hard to find and locate; probably because the support contract ran out a while ago (…or was used to make Brothers in Arm – I kid; kinda). Halo PC’s probably would make more money for Microsoft if it were free in Windows 7 that if they continue to sell the game separately.
7) Did you know? Gearbox Software wanted to increase Master Chief’s running speed when they are porting Halo PC. This is why the exclusive Halo PC map named Infinity is so large. GBX thought that MC would be running a lot faster. Thankful that MSBungle shut this one down.
8) Also, I flew a hornet in a Halo 1 before you did it in Halo 3. It dropped bombs. TTYL.
9) The jury is out as to whether we’ll LAN XBOX Halo or Halo PC next. There haven’t been many negative comments about the LAN. And I can tell you right now we could all be gaming Halo 1 multiplayer against our friends. After all, Halo PC works well over the Internet when connected to dedicated servers.
10) Speaking of dedicated servers, if any of the HBO-COERCE crew ever want the gametypes, synide is hosting them privately. Get with him or me and we’ll help you out.
11) Man, I’m tempted to throw that server back up. jay?
12) D1ESEL. Where the heck are you? Zyos?
13) E3 is next week. What will MS and/or Bungle show?
14) = 7*2

/ pEAce