Even if you bear in mind the company's well-earned reputation for creating excellent games for the Mac and PC, Bungie's epic Xbox first-person shooter is of such a staggeringly high level of quality that you can't help but be surprised. Halo is a complete thrill ride from beginning to end, an experience perhaps best described as a 16-hour-plus version of the siege scene from the film Terminator 2. Those who've spent the last few years looking for a first-person shooter as good as Rare's GoldenEye 007 or Valve's Half-Life will be happy to hear they need look no longer.

You play Halo through the eyes of a character known as the Master Chief, an enigmatic cyborg commando whom you don't know much about but whom everyone in the game seems to have heard of and talks about reverentially ("He's taller than I thought." "Glad you're here, sir." "We were worried before you showed up, sir."). Halo takes place in a space-faring future, where Earth's forces have come into conflict with an alien race known as The Covenant. In the beginning of the game, you're awakened out of a cryo sleep and learn that The Covenant are trying to obtain a mysterious artifact--perhaps a weapon--on an artificial ring-shaped world known as Halo, and it's up to you to prevent that from happening.