Halo's the best FPS multiplayer I've played in years. And I'm speaking of this as playing with 3 friends on a small TV, splitscreen.
All the PC FPS I've played multiplayer have been pretty damn boring . . . FEAR, Half Life, Team Fortress (both versions), Unreal 3 and especially Counterstrike. . . why do people play this game??? It sucks balls. I buy them for the single player, and that's fun . .. but multiplayer? I played Unreal 3 on a friend's computer (since mine's not good enough), and man, the players are just bouncing around like pinballs. Halo physics are a lot better. Even if perhaps they're designed for a console, that's okay. I used to play the original UT all the time, and it was fun, but since then . . . nothing I've played has been all that fun.
But yeah, Halo 2 gave me many wonderful hours playing with 2 or 3 friends for that's for sure. As for Halo 2's story, it's nothing exciting . . it takes itself far too seriously. But it's entertaining enough. I mean, most FPS end up with: fight the aliens (Half Life, Prey, Duke Nukem), fight the demons (Doom, Painkiller), or fight the inhuman bad guys (FEAR, Half-Life) or sometimes just fight the bad guys (Wolfenstein3d, Sin). So really, they're all the same.
As for Xbox live, well . . I played Halo 3 for a few hours with a friend of mine on there a few months ago, it was okay. Though for some reason all the maps are new (the Halo2 DM maps were so much better), and all the weapons are kinda wierd . . . but it's still fun throwing a sticky bomb on someone's ass. Or better yet, on someone's face. I love doing that. Some big glowing blob on their screen, and they know they're gonna die. Hell those sticky bombs are my favourite weapon.
All this being said, I don't own a console, and don't plan to get one any time soon. I did think about picking up Halo for the PC, but when Halo 2 came out as being Vista only, it was pretty clear what Microsoft was selling and I can tell you that it wasn't Halo 2 so I thought screw that.
If ya'll want to be haters, go no further than Steam. Man I hate that fricken thing. If I buy a copy of the Half Life Anthology in a store, it should be the Half Life Anthology, period. I should not need Steam and an internet connection, to download the last 5% of the fricken game. Talk about over-bearing copyright protection. And how they get off, selling INCOMPLETE games in a store, is beyond me. Would people buy a car without a ****ing steering wheel? I don't think so. But that's what they're selling basically. Last Valve product I'm going to buy that's for damn sure.