IGN had to put their Xbox 360’s through its paces, and popped in Halo 2 to see what would happen, and it worked just fine. It looked a little better and played in 720p without issue. They played multiplayer against someone on a normal Xbox, and it still worked.
Halo 2 worked on our Xbox 360 running in 720p and blazing. Since we had enough new retail units in house, we tested out Halo 2 on our Xbox 360s and connected an Xbox, too via SysLink. Guess what? It works. Halo 2 can be played cross platform on Xbox and Xbox 360, it works. We connected four Xbox 360s units and one Xbox. Voila, it worked.
We played Beaver Creek and Ivory Tower and we had the full list of maps. The game plays exactly the same as it plays on Xbox. It’s still Halo 2. If you stand around and look at things, you will notice small differences and improvements, such as crisper, sharper looking objects. But the textures all look the same, and the game doesn’t seem to run any faster.
That is a really great success story for Microsoft, and will hopefully show people that when the Xbox 360 works, it really works, and the whole backwards compatibility thing really works well as you can even challenge people on the original Xbox.