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Halo is one of the best games I have ever played. When the Xbox launched in the US, I actually flew out to New York and brought one back with me, since I didn't want to have to wait months for the UK launch. The main reason that I was so desperate to own an Xbox was that I wanted to play Halo, and I consequently spent the next week glued to my sofa playing the game through on all the levels.

Halo originally started life as a PC game before Microsoft got its cheque book out and secured it as an exclusive launch title for the Xbox. It was pretty much a stroke of genius on Microsoft's part, because the ability to play Halo was enough to justify the purchase of an Xbox for a great many people, myself included.

So what is Halo' At its most basic level it's a first person shooter game, except that is, when it's a third person driving or flying game of course. For me, Halo is the most impressive single player game since Half Life. In fact, in some respects I find it a superior game to Half Life, although I'm sure there are many people out there who will disagree with me on that point.

The key aspect of a great single player game is a strong storyline, and Halo definitely has that. If ever there was a video game that deserved a Hollywood makeover, this is it. The gist of the story, at the beginning at least, has you in a last desperate battle against mankind's enemy known as the Covenant. In trying to escape the Covenant you find yourself crash landing on a mysterious ring floating in space. However, the ring, or Halo as it's called, hides a secret far darker than your Covenant foe.

When Halo launched on the Xbox the graphics were breathtaking and now that it's finally made its way onto the PC it looks even better. Of course the difference is that anyone with an Xbox can enjoy great graphics on Halo, whereas you'll have to have a pretty powerful graphics card to get the best visual experience on a PC.

I ran Halo on a new machine that I'd built in preparation for Half Life 2, but since that's running late I thought I might as well play Halo through yet again. The system has an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and an ATi Radeon 9800Pro graphics card, which together manage to get the best out of the game. I pushed the resolution up to 1,280 x 1,024 and put most of the effects on their highest settings, and I have to say that Halo is truly beautiful to behold.

It's one of those games where you can find yourself getting shot while you're busy admiring the lighting, or reflections or the water that you're wading through. The high graphic detail is particularly useful when you're picking out an enemy in the distance with the pistol or sniper rifle.

But Halo isn't just visually impressive. There are aspects to the gameplay that other games have literally been crying out for. One feature that I really like is the way you can only carry two weapons at a time. With most games your character seems to have some kind of magic bag that can carry limitless amounts of weapons and ammo, but in Halo you've got to choose your weapons very carefully or you could find yourself in a tight spot. In a game based in a distant future world, it's good to see that a certain degree of realism can still rear its head. Another nice touch is the melee attack option, so even if you've run out of ammo you can still bash an enemy to death with the butt of your gun.

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