Halo 2

1001 Video Games

Halo 2 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cheats

Since its release in November of 2004 Halo 2 has been plagued with many forms of cheating. It started with gamers discovering that if they pushed the "standby" button on their modem it would allow them to move about the game doing anything while everything else was frozen. Later on the "Dummy Glitch" was discovered where players could turn invisible and capture a flag without the opposing team even knowing. In April 2005 Bungie released a patch that completely got rid of the Dummy Glitch and made it so that using standby was much harder and only a small percentage of modems can still use it to manipulate the game. All seemed well but unfortunately in June 2005 people with Mod Chips in their Xbox found out that because the downloaded content maps were stored on the Xbox hard drive rather than the disc that it was possible to hack them and use special cheats in the game. Examples of these cheats are the "Super bounce", Super speed, Rapid fire, Needlers that act as rockets, auto aim snipers, and many others. Most of these issues were eventually dealt with through patches.

Development

• The development team included 70 people.
• Microsoft lawyers forced Bungie Studio to change the name of the alien antagonist because it carried Muslim overtones.
• Contains 17,000 lines of combat dialog.
• Just like in the first Halo, Halo 2 also has a weird enemy that's been hidden in the game's code. It's called the Juggernaut and it can only be found using a modchip. It looks much like the Engineers from the first Halo, except it looks more like a flood. It just floats around.

Leaked Copy

On Wednesday, 13 October 2004, a pirated copy of of the game leaked out to the public, and quickly spread on peer-to-peer networks and IRC.

References

• The hippo heads that appeared on the shotgun shells in the first Halo are visible on the walls in the map "Headlong".
• The Halo maps "Blood Gulch" and "Battle Creek" return in this game under the new names "Coagulation" and "Beaver Creek".

Sales

• In the US and Canada alone, 2.4 million copies of the game were sold in the first 24 hours of its release. That averages out to roughly 27 copies a second.
• Had 1.5 Million preorders before its release, making it an XBox "Platinum Hit" months before it was even released.

Soundtrack

The game's soundtrack includes contributions from legendary guitar legend and G3 member Steve Vai, who performs most guitar riffs in the game and did the main theme. You can find his work in the Halo 2 , Vol. 1 Soundtrack CD, which includes all of the orchestral and incidental music in the game.

Secrets

Right at the end of the game there's a grunt that doesn't do anything, its just like the grunt from the first game except it says: "I wish that food nipple was waiting for me at the starship, cos man have I worked up a big grunty thirst"

Trailer

The largest trailer for this game was released in movie theaters. Near the end of this trailer, the usual www.xbox.com URL is replaced with "www.ilovebees.com" for a moment. If someone goes to the website, they encountered a website which seemed to be under the control of a Halo-type artificial intelligence. This website continues to be changed, telling a multifaceted story which many believe explain how the Covenant find Earth in Halo 2.

Awards

• 4Players
  • 2004 – Best Console Multiplayer Game of the Year
  • 2007 – #3 Biggest Disappointment of the Year
• GameSpy
  • 2004 – Game of the Year
  • 2004 – Xbox Game of the Year
  • 2004 – Xbox Shooter of the Year
  • 2004 – Xbox Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
  • 2004 - Best Use of Xbox Live of the Year
  • 2004 - Best and Worst Ending of the Year (Xbox)
• Golden Joystick Awards
  • 2004 - Runner up to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as Most Wanted Game for Xmas
  • 2004 - Runner up to Sonig the Hedgehog as Ultimate Gaming Hero (for Master Chief)
  • 2005 - Xbox Game of the Year

Information also contributed by ~~, Tiago Jaques, MegaMegaMan, piltdown man and Zovni