Skip to main content

The Death of a Game and the Triumph of the Human Spirit

Mmorpg gamers know that when a company shuts down its servers a game dies. The ending of Microsoft Live support for the original Xbox has brought this reality home to fans of other types of online game including the once all powerful Halo 2.

The servers were officially closed on 15th April but any game that was currently online was allowed to keep playing. In a move that sends shivers of admiration down my spine a small group of dedicated Halo 2 gamers have refused to turn off their Xboxes. As long as they keep online and playing the game lives on. Microsoft pulled the plug on April 15th but now nearly two weeks later the die-hards are still holding out and still playing. Unfortunately dodgy internet connections and console overheating are working a steady battle of attrition, as of today only 13 gamers remain online.

Forget about the politics of this for the moment. Forget about loss of dedicated servers, PC versus Console, always online drm schemes and loss of gaming heritage. This is just an epic story of human persistence in the face of adversity. I salute those 13 gamers.

Comments

Thallian said…
/salute!
Tesh said…
Very well done, methinketh. Too bad players can't connect to those intrepid souls' machines and expand the numbers.

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

Exploiting Checkpoints in Deadspace 3

Dead Space 3 has a rather strange save system where inventory is saved when you quit the game even though progress through the story is lost. The game has both "hard" and "soft" checkpoints. The soft checkpoints are far more frequent but are not permanently saved. If you die while playing you respawn at the last soft checkpoint but if you quit the game  you will return to the previous hard checkpoint. Since hard checkpoints are relatively infrequent you can lose quite a bit of progress unless you are disciplined enough to always wait till the next hard checkpoint (indicated by a symbol in the corner of the screen) before quitting. This sucks of course and is the type of thing which convinces me that save anywhere is much better than rigid checkpoints. The developers of Dead Space 3 decided to soften the blow of losing progress by allowing you to keep your entire inventory and health when you quit even though you lose your progress in the story. Collecting loot ...