Tag: Video Games

On The Last Days of War (Halo 2).

Post author By Matthew
Post date 30 March 2011
3 Comments on On The Last Days of War (Halo 2).

This has been a long time coming. A way too long time coming. I mean this actually took place in April of 2010, almost a year ago. Way to go, me.

If you care about it, you probably already know what happened, but for those who are still intrigued, here’s a little synopsis. Halo 2, which would be the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, had its Xbox Live servers turned off. What does that mean? No more online play over Xbox Live on Xbox or Xbox 360. Without going too far down this road, it’s actually a unique thing and a problem historians are facing. YES! There are Video Game historians that are trying to preserve the history of Video Games. The problem is you can always save the code and whatnot, but you can’t recreate exactly what it was like to play multiplayer on a massive scale. It’s a little easier with games like Halo 2 because you can sort of copy it by having LAN sessions. The real problem comes in with MMO games. Those you can’t just fire up. Ok, that is not the topic at hand. So, Halo 2. It was such a popular game. When the game came out people were so excited. I still remember the launch date : 11/9/2004. Midnight launches are pretty commonplace these days, but they were not so much when Halo 2 came out. I remember I missed school to get Halo 2. Yeah, it’s nerdy and a little extreme, but I don’t regret it at all. Although reception of the game was mixed, tons of people played it. I remember when Xbox 360 first came out most people just used it to play Halo 2 while waiting for some more meaty titles to be released.

When I heard that the Halo 2 servers were being shut down I decided to take one last night to fire up H2 and play some games. It was fun and here is some pictures of the events. It was fun because almost everyone had the same idea so there were plenty of people playing. Dedicated fan base. So dedicated that it took Microsoft a long time to actually turn off the servers for good because some people were playing marathon sessions and apparently it was against their policy to kick people still playing. Anyway, here is to you Halo 2, thanks for all the fun times.

Tags Halo, Halo 2, Servers Down, Video Games, Xbox

Blog Day 2011 Nonsense Personal Video Games

On Mundane Talents or Skills.

Post author By Matthew
Post date 6 February 2011
1 Comment on On Mundane Talents or Skills.

I’ve been sitting here for the past 20 minutes or so racking my brain as to what mundane talents I may posses. I have been coming up with goose egg. For that matter I can’t even think of any talents I posses. The only thing that comes to mind is that I know an exorbitant amount of information about video games, new and old. It is fairly common knowledge that I am a wee bit entrangled in video games. I have been entranced by their siren song since I was able to hold a controller and have spent a large chunk of my time playing them as well as researching their history. Because of this I can tell you how many iterations of Game Boy were released and that there was a special edition Game Boy pocket released only in Japan that was backlit.

GameBoyLightBox

I can also tell you that there is extra sound chips found in Japanese Famicom games. Due to this oh-so-useful information I can also tell you that the American Mega Man 2’s hard mode is the Japanese regular mode and that there was no normal mode. Also, that in Japan Mega Man is called Rock Man, which is why his sister is called Roll. Get it? Rock and Roll. Really this is pretty mundane and only interesting to a select few individuals, and if you are one of those people. Please, let’s be friends.

Mega man2 title us

Rockman2

Tags Blog Day 2011, Game Boy Light, Mega Man, Mundane, Rock Man, Talents, Video Games

Japan Nonsense Video Games

On The Launch of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd

Post author By Matthew
Post date 6 December 2010
1 Comment on On The Launch of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd

I thought this might be interesting to people here stateside. This will mostly just be a picture post, but I will give a little context. Monster Hunter is an action-RPG by Capcom in which you take the role of a, wait for it, monster hunter. The game consists of quests and leveling as well as armor and weapon upgrades. It sounds typical, but there is a large community aspect to the game. I think this is why Japan is so gaga over the game. Japan has a different structure as a country. People commute daily, and most people do something during the ride. Since the population is so dense if your chosen activity to pass the time happens to be playing a handheld system, you can probably bet someone else is doing the same. This lends itself to people questing together without the aid of the Internet. Internet gaming is actually not that popular in Japan as it is in America. Think how big Xbox Live is here. That install base does not exist over there.

Not to delve too far into the reasons why Monster Hunter is popular in Japan, but suffice it to say it’s on par with Pokemon. The latest edition, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd for PSP, was just released on December 1st to great acclaim. It was announced that Capcom shipped over 2 million units within the first week, which is impressive. This doesn’t tell how many were actually sold to consumers, but that is a pretty huge number. I accumulated some pictures people posted on twitter and I kind of wanted to post them here to show the popularity it has. All credit to the original photo takers. I apologize for not writing who I got them from. If you recognize it as being yours (and you won’t because I have the smallest readership in recorded history) just let me know and I will be more than happy to give credit where credit is due.

*Update*

According to recent numbers from Famitsu (Famous Japanese gaming magazine) Monster Hunter Portable 3rd sold 2.14 million units in 5 days. That is sold to people not shipped to retailers. That is insane!