This Week In Games 4.30.10

John Bee [ Fri Apr 30 2010 1:24 PM ]

Simon Cottee's Rule

Starcraft II beta now on the Mac.

MS killed the original Xbox Live service on the 15th, but a group of dedicated Halo 2 players are keeping their boxes attached 24x7. Even though the service is gone, they can keep playing as long as they don't disconnect.

A California law criminalizing the sale of mature games to minors will go to the Supreme Court.

The battle between Activision and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 developer, Infinity Ward, just got substantially bloodier.

Cub scouts get video game awards.

This is a little bit old and out of date, but hey, so is Roger Ebert.

Wickedest cutting board ever.

A (potential) kids trading card game about actual real things!

French Atari bling.

Great animation by Simon Cottee. The music and imagery were produced entirely within Sleep is Death.

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Public Comments (3)

- rei_ayanami
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- Neo Tokyo
- Posts: 18
Microsoft = hostile to gamers [ Sat May 1 2010 12:07 AM ]

Like Microsoft doesn't have enough cash to keep a handful of Halo 2 servers running for the next 100 years if necessary. You've got to be fucking kidding me. Cheapskates.
Sega shut down all their Dreamcast game servers in, like, 2003. I remember thinking at the time that they should have been forced to provide a free downloadable server package for people to run on their own LANs or on the internet. Instead, they sat on it and never released it and the network component of these games will die. I'm pretty sure that "evaporating online play" feature was not disclosed in the shrinkwrap license.
Keep this in mind when considering migrating services to "the cloud". Sometimes clouds just dry up and vanish.
- johnbee
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- Since 2008-05-22
- Posts: 41
Agreed, but [ Sat May 1 2010 10:21 AM ]

MS is not alone in this. EA has killed a shit-ton of online gaming servers in the past year, including a couple for games with a 2009 moniker. I'm sure other publishers do the same when there's low adoption. Just the same, it's totally messed up to see a game lobotomized within a year of release.
I guess MS is giving Halo: Reach beta access to 12 of the hangers on, though that's pretty small consolation for losing a game they've been playing online with friends for 6 years straight.
Probably a big reason why they killed the original Live service is because it was gimping the current service. A lot of the original live enabled games could be played on the 360, so that Live service needed to match what the old games expected. One of the things I know they had to limit was the max size of friends lists. Seems like a bit of a tangle that I'm sure they're happy to have gotten past.
- johnbee
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- Since 2008-05-22
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Last player leaves Halo 2 [ Tue May 11 2010 9:06 PM ]

Via Kotaku:
Final Update: Shortly before 11 p.m. PDT, May 10, 2010, Apache N4SIR left Halo 2. He says he was booted from the game. This is the end of multiplayer on Halo 2 and the original Xbox Live.