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Well this is a bit of a gift to those Halo fans out there. Playing these games on your X360 with in the Xbox backwards compatibility mode will increase the games’ resolution (normally this wouldn’t be the case). This little bit of graphical oomph means you can continue to love these classics for a few more years without the titles seeming ‘ancient’ when you upgrade to your HDTV. Uh.. whenever that is.

To clarify, the “new” version of Halo or Halo 2 is simply the disk you have already. Pop it into your 360 and it’ll load up just like before. You will have to log into Xbox Live to enable Halo 2’s online functions, but both games will work immediately.

But here’s another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn’t look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they’re running on a PC at those resolutions.

-Della Bitta