If you were intent on being very, very bad, you could now find Halo 2 on the internet via Bittorrent, console P2P apps, and newsgroups, despite the fact that the game won't be officially released until November 9th.

It appears that sometime during the development of the French-language edition somebody ripped the game and put it up on a french warez newsgroup. Finally, the French contribute something to America's culture of violence! I'm glad you guys have come around.

Anyway, I'll be downloading this without qualms -- I've already got a copy preordered (Outpost.com has it for $10 less than everywhere else, if you're shopping around). Besides, this is the unfortunate nature of unchecked cross-border game proliferation: if I don't want to get slaughtered online come November 9th, I've got to make sure I'm as well-prepared as the least scrupulous of the world's nerds. Nobody said digital brinksmanship was pretty.

I didn't even really like the original Halo that much. Movement in it is slow, the weapons are unbalanced, and the game doesn't have much visual pop. For purposes of reducing my friends to a fine virtual paste, I've always preferred Doom 2 and Quake 3. Unfortunately, as graphics card capabilities blossomed, staying on the bleeding edge of PC gaming became tremendously expensive, and Halo is the best of an admittedly meager selection of console-based multiplayer action-heavy first person shooters.

There's something to be said for submitting to a universal standard -- even if it's an inferior one. Speaking Esperanto may be totally awesome when you can round up enough people to do it, but it's still probably not worth the trouble. I may prefer to rain fiery death upon my opponents in Quake, but if I find myself at some unknown friend-of-a-friend's house, a few rounds of Halo serve as the official language of male-bonding diplomacy.

In the end, the only objective in these types of games is to maintain your superiority over as many prepubescent brats as you can, for as long as you can. To this end, the huge numbers of people who'll pick up Halo 2 will improve my meager odds considerably.