The Halo franchise has been one of the most popular and sometimes polarising of recent memory. It helped launch the original Xbox and has had a series of successful games since. Most recently though Microsoft announced a Russian only release of Halo Online, a first person shooter based on the Halo 3 engine.
It sounded like it was going to be pretty terrible, but there was no way we were going to see it anyway. Except people have come up with clever geo-blocking tools that allow them to circumvent Microsoft's checks and get a game in on the free to play FPS and from the footage now available online, it doesn't look too bad.
The engine has clearly been heavily modified since Halo 3 was released over eight years ago, but it runs smooth - apart from the stuttering causing by the geo-blocking tools - and looks like a real Halo game, so kudos to the developers.
Whether anyone outside of Russia will be able to play it as it was intended in the future is anyone's guess, though you have to wonder what the point of making a game like this is, if you're going to restrict it from being played in some of its biggest markets.
