Halo 2: One Year Later - Widescreen on Xbox 360 @ 720p

To celebrate Halo 2’s first birthday, Bungie takes a look at GASP Halo and Halo 2 running on Xbox 360, and a bunch of other "really cool stuff":

A while back, Microsoft announced that the 360 would have some level of backward compatibility. A handy feature for folks with big Xbox collections moving into the future. We worked closely with that team to ensure that Halo and Halo 2 both performed according to plan. That meant a lot of work for our test team.

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.

Bungie - Halo 2 Anniversary Special

Certainly good news for the Xbox 360 camp, with gloomy shadows cast over the PS3’s backwards compatibility this can only mean more converts for Microsoft in the next-gen console race.

the Inquirer - Halo gets new look for Xbox 360