I finished Halo yesterday (in order to be up-to-date when the 2nd part comes out). I had given it a go when it came out on the PC, but that was just running painfully slowly and ended being not much fun. On the Xbox however (strangely) that is not the case (if you ignore the last bit of the last level which is chugging quite heavily).
It has great music and great art-direction (with some cleverly used cube / environment maps), a good AI, nice physics & vehicles and a decent story. It also has some repetitive levels in the middle section and some vehicles (Scorpion) are underused. The gameplay decision to only be able to carry two weapons at a time makes for some interesting choices and definitely adds to the game.
Overall, I’d have to agree with one of the video interviews of the Bungie-people stating that “Halo” is basically 2 minutes of fun over and over again. Getting into close-quarter fights with the Covenant or the Flood, throwing some grenades and seeing the bodies fly is simply good fun. 😀

“Phantom Dust” is a game developed by Microsoft Game Studios Japan, and seems to flying under everyone’s radar, as MS has said it will only be published in Asia. It is developed by the guy who worked in “Panzer Dragoon Orta”, and is even more visually gorgeous.
It has you fighting (3rd person) enemies in fully destructible post-apocalyptic urban arenas (more adjectives, anyone?) with some sort of deck of skills (attack and defense) that you can map to the face buttons of the controller to pick them up. It seems to be very much tailored for online play on Live, where you can (supposedly) trade skills and (obviously) fight.
It has gotten very good reviews from Japanese magazines (34/40 and 36/40) but Microsoft is still vehement on not publishing it outside of Asia — in spite of it already having an English language option. I don’t get these people…

I played this with Patrick for quite a bit yesterday. First off, shame on EA for not including Xbox Live functionality (which is in the US version). Other than that, it was surprisingly fun. A major factor in this was probably the ability to build your character to pretty much resemble your real self; that’s why we spent the first two hours creating the characters. But once you see your virtual character doing any of the completely overdone celebration or anger reactions, we were on the floor laughing.
The game is surprisingly easy, I’ve never had so many chip-ins in any other golf game I remember, but as I won, everything seems to be in order.