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Halo® 2 is the sequel to the highly successful and critically acclaimed Halo®: Combat Evolved . In Halo 2 , the saga continues as Master Chief-a genetically enhanced super-soldier-is the only thing standing between the relentless Covenant and the destruction of all humankind.
 The defeat of the Covenant in the first Halo game was only a temporary victory, as the alien attackers have renewed their mission to wipe out all of humanity. Despite the human military force's and Master Chief's efforts, the Covenant have breeched the Earth's defenses and have left its inhabitants in a dismal situation. In the midst of desperation, players assume the role of Master Chief and lead the resistance against the Covenant to save the people of Earth from a gruesome demise. Halo 2 will feature an immense and epic single player mode, as the story picks up where it ended in the first game. In addition to the single player mode, Halo 2 will also feature a redesigned multiplayer mode. While the first game limited players to LAN connectivity, Halo 2 takes multiplayer missions online by way of Xbox Live.
Halo 2 Features:
- The epic story continues: Following the demise of the Covenant at Halo, the Master Chief must defy the Covenant march once more as they fast approach earth's perimeter. Failure is not an option.
- Mind blowing graphics: A new graphics engine brings the Halo universe to life - dynamic lighting and shadows, sprawling rendered environments and obsessive attention to detail make this game nothing short of spectacular.
- Powerful new weapons: The Master Chief's arsenal gets some serious new additions, many of which have been pried from the twitching claws of defeated enemies.
- More driveable vehicles: Even more ways to speed into battle or explore the game's vast landscapes.
- Multiplayer on Xbox Live : Imagine the ultimate Halo experience - battles between human and Covenant forces, frenzied vehicle and infantry engagements, squad-oriented operations, real-time voice communication - and you're getting close to picturing the multiplayer revolution on Xbox Live.
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Halo 2 Strategy Guide
Unlockable: Foundation Multilplayer Map (w/ Glitch): Unlock the hidden Foundation level in Halo 2 multi-player by completing the single player campaign on any difficulty. Due to a serious glitch in the game (and one that will not be corrected), you will need to do the following to unlock the Foundation map for a specific profile:
- Start a co-op game with a profile with access to the last episode (The Great Journey) and a completely fresh profile (i.e., one that has not even started the campaign game).
- Fight to through the last episode until the players need to board Banshees to progress.
- Have the new profile player perform a barrel roll (both directions) and a Loop-the-loop (stick down and A button).
- Complete the game as usual and the new profile will have access to the Foundation Map. Since profiles may be renamed, you can delete your old profile and rename your new profile w/ the new map.
Cheat: Grunt B-Day Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: The Arbiter
Word: Grunt Birthday Party
Effect: Shoot enemy in the head and they will explode.
The very first time you get a banshee, fly down, below you is a large beamlike structure (not to be confused with the one directly below you that turns and goes vertical) running from the arm of the station you just came out of to one exactly like it on the side opposite. Below this structure are 3 cylinders hanging down, with cylinders of light shooting out of the bottom that look like they are what keeps the station floating. If my explanation is too vague, they are the absolute lowest parts of the station. Now go to the middle engine and land on the top part of it. This and the other engines connect to the large structure mentioned earlier. The tops of the engines come up to meet the structure at an angle, where this angle is under the connecting structure and coming up to meet it, there is a place to walk (like being under a bridge). Under one side you will see the six grunts with the skull in the middle.
Cheat: Catch Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Metropolis
Word: Catch
Effect: Allies throw alot of plasma grenades.
Right after you get out of the sewers(Tunnel), there is a big area and 2 ghosts, kill every thing first, then go to the middle of it where you see a arc that leads up onto a building, grenade jump by it to get enough height to start climbing it. When you get to the top take a left and hug the wall around the structure and the skull will be there.
Cheat: Envy skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Delta Halo
Word: Envy
Effect: Cloak instead of Flashlight, 5 second cloak with 10 second recharge
When you first come out of the big building and see the turret and 5/6 shield up on the wall there is a wall over to the left hand side with the two grunt turrets on it, the big block and door are at the far end of that wall... In the room that the block is blocking there are two dead grunts and two plasma swords. There's a door being blocked by a rock. Jump on the rock. Then jump on the ledge that's located above the blocked doorway. Turn left and jump up on another ledge. Grenade jump up to where you'll find Two Red Elites - That become cloaked, surrounding a skull. Pick it up, and it reads Envy.
Cheat: Assassins Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Regret
Word: Assassins
Effect: All enemies in game are permanently cloaked, AI cannot see them and so are no help at all.
Just after you get off the gondola, and go in the structure, there is a big block of stone, jump on that an you can get on a ledge that leads out to the Covenant turrets, facing back towards the structure, jump up another level around the right side of the structure, It is pretty straight lined from here. You should find the Skull on a ledge when you make it around. No visible change to the HUD, BUT all enemies become invisible.
Cheat: Anger Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Gravemind
Word: Anger
Effect: ???????
Here is another Halo 2 skull: Fight all the way through the Covenant city until you reach the outdoors. As soon as you are outside, stick to the right-hand side and walk along the wall. You should see a Covenant wall thingy with a red rail on it. Jump up to it (crouch jump helps) and at the end there is the Anger skull in a small grav-lift.
Cheat: Iron Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: High Charity
Word: Iron
Effect: Allies are immune to melee attacks
On the final grav-lift on "high Charity", look up. A skull will pass you by. Hold X as it passes you to receive the status.
Cheat: Famine Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Oracle
Word: famine
Effect: Weapons picked up only have half ammo.
After getting off the long elevator ride, you will come to a room where convent and flood are fighting below you, and you have to break the glass to get to where they are fighting. If you crouch/grenade jump up on the opposite side of where you came down, the skull should be up there.
Cheat: Black Eye Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Great Journey
Word: Black Eye
Effect: Shield won't regenerate, when you melee someone you get energy power back, so if you melee someone you get a little bit of shield. So you can get a bit at a time all the way to overshield!
 SGT Johnson will pilot the scarab and shoot at a building I am calling the Control Tower. If you take a banshee to the tower you will notice that, aside from where spires jut out of it, it has a round slope all the way around. If you take the banshee right up to the slope and as high as you can go, you can almost get over it. Here you must jump out of your banshee to land on the less steep part of the slope. If you turn your banshee to the side or all the way around, it may make it easier to land on the less steep part. Also, try to have your banshee land on a platform below, so you can use it to get back. Once you are on the slope, climb the rest of the way up it. If you are on the right of the door, then you have to jump onto the ledge next to the main part of the building, and then walk up a steep part in the direction of the door. Walk up that, then around and down on the other side. On this side (left of the door from scarab's perspective) you can walk onto the hills and grass. You will notice several angled spires, some of which connect to the building. You must climb the one that is directly opposite the door you would use to enter the tower. It's steep but you can walk up it. I suggest jumping while walking to speed up the process. At the top is a skull which gives you the "black eye" effect - you only recover shields by meleeing enemies. This is only found on legendary. Reverse the process to get back to your banshee (hopefully) or just jump off a cliff and the effect will stay with you.
Cheat: Infinite Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Quarantine Zone
Word: Sputnik
Effect: Explosions and melee have more of an effect, which may be the result of less gravity.
From the start of the level, look to your left for an Elite. To the left of the elite there is a tunnel. Head into the tunnel and go straight until you reach a cliff. Now turn left and follow the cliff till you reach a rock wall. To the right of the wall and the cliff is a narrow passage, skull is at the end of that passage.
Cheat: Thunderstorm Skull
Difficulty: Legendary
Level: Cairo Station
Word: Thunderstorm
Effect: Makes Covenant "silver" and More Difficult
It's past the two loading docks past the armory type place and in the next big room. It's in the very highest location in the room. It's under a trash can, I hit it out of the way and its just laying there. http://cheats.ign.com
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Halo 2 Gameplay
Microsoft and Bungie have gone to great lengths to keep Halo 2's single player campaign a secret, except for releasing the bare minimum necessary to get the hype ball rolling. The first showcase of Halo 2's story was in the X02 announcement trailer in 2002, in which we first witnessed Earth under assault by the full force of the Covenant. It exhibited exactly what Bungie aimed to do with Halo 2, displaying the graphical power, deep, exciting storyline, pulse pounding sound, and utter excitement for all to see. Bungie was serious about making Halo 2 the best they could, and it was to be the second coming of the Xbox. The second major showcase of the game came during the E3 2003 demo, which took us to the city of New Mombasa in Africa. It showed us an image of a city under heavy attack from Covenant forces. It showed us new features, such as duel wielding and vehicle jacking. There were other offerings from other studios that E3 that had better graphics, but no game looked as fun as Halo 2. When the intro cinematic cut to first person you wanted to pick up the controller and play. When Master Chief beat down a Brute you wanted to try the Battle Rifle yourself. These videos told us very little about the main plot, but through their leaving much to the imagination it made the hype all the much greater and the wait all the more difficult.
 Halo 2 picks up soon after Halo 1 left off, with Master Chief and Cortana escaping Halo and heading for Earth after using the nuclear reactor inside of the Pillar of Autumn to destroy the sprawling ring world. In Halo 2, Master Chief returns to a space station orbiting earth. Now, this space station isn't just some space outhouse filled with toilets and glass, it contains one of the humans' most powerful weapons: the MAC (Magnetic Acceleration Cannon) gun. Many Halo fans will remember the MAC from the popular Halo books, in which they are used to defend Reach from Covenant attack, albeit unsuccessfully. The game starts with Master Chief loading up in his brand spankin' new Mark VI battle armor, and then going through the same tests as you did with Halo 1: look up, look down, look right, look left, pick inversion/non-inversion, move onto the shield charge test. Once completed, Sergeant Johnson walks through the door and accompanies Master Chief to a ceremony during which you receive word of a Covenant cruiser heading to earth. I love bees aficionados will recognize this as the party Jan and company were heading to when the sirens went off. I won't touch on any more the story, but needless to say it only gets better.
The first thing you will notice is the brand new Heads-Up Display (HUD), and the lack of a health bar. Health packs in Halo 2 have been completely removed, leaving players with one big energy shield. The energy bar has also been moved to the lower left hand corner of the screen, right on top of the radar. The shield also now recharges quite a bit faster drastically changing, and in my opinion improving, the gameplay of Halo 2 as you no longer have to search for health packs. Another fantastic decision by bungie was the idea to implement dual wielding. Now you might be thinking dual wielding isn't anything new, and you are right. But the manner in which the developers put the option in is not only beneficial for a skilled player, but adds for tactical advantages and is a crap load of fun. Their is nothing like shooting an elite with a fully charged plasma pistol, taking down his shield, then ripping him apart with the SMG in your other hand. The Battle Rifle is a great weapon
falling somewhere between the Pistol and Assault Rifle from Halo: CE. Bungie balanced the weapons in Halo 2, so that no one weapon was overly powerful as was the pistol in Halo CE. One distinctive difference, among many, that you will find between other FPS and Halo 2 is melee attacks. Halo: CE brought it to the table in a very usable way. I spend countless hours whacking dead Covenant until the ground was painted with their colorful blood. Not only does Halo 2 include melee attacks, it perfects them. Every weapon has a melee attack, some more powerful then others. For instance the plasma sword is a lot more powerful then any other weapon at close range. Put the aiming reticle on the person you want to hit for two seconds until it gets red, press the right trigger, instant death sending them flying across the map. Melee attacks look better with improved animation, but they also feel better. In Halo, when you hit someone the screen moved very little or not at all. In Halo 2, when you use a melee attack, the screen bends in a way that makes it much more immersive.
All vehicles have gone through a major overhaul. Any vehicle in the game is destroyable which lead to some pretty entertaining explosions. Take the Warthog for example; shoot the hub caps, they fall off. Shoot the warthog with a rocket launcher, the wheels fly off and put the vehicle in a state of scrap metal. The Warthog this time around controls much tighter. Whipping the back end is still possible with the addition of the hand break by pulling on the left trigger. The Scorpion tank has changed little with the exception of the control scheme. One of the complaints Bungie received from the Halo: CE was not being able to move one way and aim the canon the other. The tank now performs much like the Master Chief does, left stick moves the tracks, right stick moves the canon. It works much better then it did in the first Halo. The Covenant also has a fleet of vehicles at your disposal. The Ghost is back with a new feature called boosting. In fact, every single Covenant vehicle can boost but not without a few drawbacks. While boosting, the vehicle can't fire its weapon system and it can barley maneuver. The Banshee is back with a new edition that people who have played Crimson Skies might be familiar with. You are able to execute dodging tricks in the air with simply pressing A and moving the left thumbstick in any direction. Point the stick left or right, your Banshee will do a barrel roll. Vehicle jacking is a brand new feature included in Halo 2. At first it might seem like a gimmick, but the first time you pull it off it is immensely satisfying. To do this, approach any vehicle and press X. Depending on the vehicle you can either push them out, or throw a grenade inside and kill the driver. This feature is very usable in both the campaign and multiplayer.
With the long list of new features and additions, such as vehicle jacking, dual wielding, destructible environments, and destructible vehicles, Bungie has delivered a very fresh game experience. In conclusion, Halo 2 offers consumers with one of, if not the best playing games out on any system... ever!
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Halo 2 Graphics
Per Pixel Everything
 One of the biggest advances in HALO 2 will be the new graphics engine. A radical change in the rendering philosophy makes possible -- as the teaser trailer probed, real-time graphics that are almost undistinguishable from pre-calculated rendering. To better understand why HALO 2 looks as good as DOOM III , the other benchmark in real-time graphics , you have to first understand the change in the rendering method.
Traditional real-time graphics utilizes light maps. Although this method is faster and more flexible, it lacks resolution and it doesn't work for dynamic objects. Projected textures don't give much detail for the surface and that's why you need to increase the polygons count in the models' geometry in order to improve the detail.
The trick in Per Pixel Lighting is to use textures as data. These textures, called "normal maps", contain information about the direction each pixel is facing relative to a light source. And since the lighting information comes from pixels (picture elements) which are the smallest units that can be displayed on the screen, per pixel lighting creates lighting and other custom shading effects at a pixel level. Thus, the quality of per pixel lighting is far superior to previous techniques.
You may ask "Why they didn't do that before?". Well, the truth is that real-time per-pixel lighting wasn't possible with previous hardware. Per-pixel shading was first introduced by nVIDIA in 1999 with the GeForce 2's Nvidia Shading Rasterizer (NSR) but it was with the introduction of GeForce 3 that developers have, for the very first time at their disposal, full control of the rendering process using programmable Pixel Shaders, thanks to nVIDIA nfiniteFX architecture. Now, all the subset features of per pixel lighting became possible. You should keep in mind that the Xbox's GPU, the nv2A, is a mix of a GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 because of its dual Vertex Shaders unit.
Features such as bump-mapping can now be utilized to give flat surfaces a greater detail without increasing the model complexity.
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Halo 2 Audio
 Of just about all of the video games that have come out over the last few years, Halo probably has the most recognizable theme song. We've all heard the chanting monks, even if only in passing, and the swelling orchestral music has even been remixed into a techno song. As the man behind the music, Marty O'Donnell has brought game tunes to a whole new level, and sound fans will be happy to know that he's coming back for more with Halo 2 .
In many way, the music in games has come a long way in the last few years. In the past, music would be slapped over the action at the end of the process, and the two didn't always match up. However, now we're seeing music used as an integral part of the game, and it is often used to set moods just as it is in film . The same can be said for sound effects. If you've ever jumped as you heard a rocket fly past your head, you'll know what I'm talking about. Amazingly, Halo 2 is even better in both ways than its predecessor, and most of the credit goes to Marty and his team. http://xbox.gamespy.com
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Halo 2 Gameplay Controls
Did you like the control scheme with the original Halo? If you answered yes, then Halo 2 is going to feel like an old friend with a fat wad of 20's in his pocket. Very few things have changed. Force feedback is of course back and better then ever. You can feel the recoil from weapons and the lumps of sand being ran over by the warthog's beefy tires. Everything feels extremely solid, no problems here. This is a breakdown of the controls that can be found on the back of your Halo 2 manual:
A- Jump
B- Melee Attack
Y- Switch Weapon/Dual Wield
X- Reload/Action
White- Flashlight
Black- Swap Grenades
Left Trigger- Fire Weapon
Right Trigger- Fire Left Weapon/Toss Grenade
Left Thumbstick- Move
Right Thumbsick- Look
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Halo 2 Replay
 For most of you Halo 2 fans the word replay registers as multiplayer, as it does mine. These are the multiplayer options that will be available to you upon receiving this game. You may battle against your friends and enemies with split screen, system link, and Xbox Live. Xbox Live obviously being the best option, but some people might not have broadband access in their area yet. Split screen is still a lot of fun, but four players is rather weak. System Link is in with all of the available game types that can be played online. You can connect a combination of 2 to 16 different Xbox's, but Xbox Live is what all Halo lovers have been waiting for. So many rumors on the net pointed to Bungie developing a 1.5 disk that would make Halo playable online. Bungie did look at that option, but decided that Halo 2 should be the first Halo game to be playable on Live.
If you do have Xbox Live, the moment you pop in the Halo 2 disc it will ask you to make a user name and then log in online. Halo 2, like all other Live Aware games, lets people know what exactly you are doing in a game. People can invite you to play online with them even if you were battling it out with a Brute in campaign mode. Whether it is a party invitation or a friend's request, with any form of invite, you can attach either a voice message or even a text message all made possible with the new Xbox Live 3.0 feature set.
There is a difference between match-made games and party rooms. The biggest distinction between the arranged games and match-made games is simply that in arranged games you play against the same people over and over again, adding people and occasionally having people leave, just like at a LAN party. However, with matchmade games, you play against different people each time, unlike an immensely lame LAN party that people leave after each round.
Did Bungie accomplish making Halo 2 the best online multiplayer game that rivals what you experience in a LAN party? Oh, you bet they did. Not only is their no lag whatsoever, but you get a screen all by yourself. If you want to take three other people online, you can do that too. This is the first online game that supports four different people on a single box while going online. Bungie.net is connected to Halo 2 in an exciting way. Want to check your stats from the last game you played? Done. Do you want to see how many head shot you had in a match held last week? Not a problem. It even tracks what weapon you you used to kill someone with and shows you a diagram of the map with the spot you killed that person in. Amazing, I know. Halo 2 multiplayer delivers what every Halo fan has wanted for the past three years, and then some. You will not find a better playing, looking, sounding, and feature rich Live game then Halo 2. http://www.talkxbox.com
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