Xbox v1 games, systems no longer Live; Microsoft's pulling the plug April 15
By Richard Lawler 
posted February 5th 2010 4:39AM
posted February 5th 2010 4:39AM
posted February 5th 2010 4:39AM
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Game over man, game over!
@BUNT2 And there really is nothing they can do instead of stopping these old games? o.O
@BUNT2
It's okay, I picked up an extra life.
@BUNT2
I think Engadget has this wrong. This is what other places are saying.
"So say you downloaded an Xbox Originals game onto your Xbox 360. That game will still play just fine, but don't expect to go online with it. The same general rule applies to every vintage Xbox title no matter the grander Xbox platform."
So, you CAN still play your games, just not on LIVE, which is ok because live for the original xbox is all but dead anyway
@PBB
That's what they meant...
@PBB
Uhhhhhhhh...... That's exactly what engadget is saying.....
@PBB That is what engadget said you spa
@BUNT2
Oh but come on, no one has more than 100 friends. Bill Gates said so. I mean, "640K ought to be enough for anybody"... and "we will never make a 32-bit operating system".
@BUNT2
This is sad and engagdet is right...we need to get some more Halo2 live action in while it's still around. Halo2 on live will be missed. I remember when it first came out back in August of 2004 I was on a business trip and had to wait almost a whole week before I could play it. Halo2 made XBOX live the success that it is today. So let's all get back on it these next few months and live it up. Just please...no deleveling, superjumping, or ghost sword death matches on lockout. Slayer rockets to 30 anyone?
finally its about time they cut off the original xbox and its games. Maybe they can have more room on their servers now to make 360 games run better online.
@DaveBach
November 2004... I was just a child. No really, I will still in Middle School! It was 11:30pm when I arrived at Gamestop (then EB Games). I was just 1 sub-freezing hour away from getting home and missing school the next day. But wait... I got in trouble that day. I did something, but I can't remember what. My mom, who is normally a very laid back person, said that if I missed school that day, I wasn't going to play Xbox for a week.
I went to school, and when I got home, I loaded Halo 2. But wait, what's this? I have to wait 10 minutes for matchmaking, if it even works? Bungie said the servers were overloaded. But it got better after a few days.
Ah, the memories. If only my copy of Halo 2 didn't get scratched to hell, I'd be right there with ya. So I'll be playing Halo 3 and pouring one for New Mombasa.
Why would this ever hold back the number of people on your friends list, piss poor excuse really. While I understand the need to cut off old stuff it should never have stopped a good developer.
@LordBrian Because if you sign into Xbox Live with an Xbox or Xbox 360 you're connecting to the same service, with the same friends list and gamertag. If everything is that tightly tied together, having a separate friends list would cause more complexity then is needed.
- D
@LordBrian Simple solution: 1 big buddy list, where you can favorite up to 100 people. On 360 games, everyone shows up. On XBOX games, only the favorites.
Or give us groups.
@Daphoid
If GameType = XboxOriginal then
Load100FriendsList
Else
LoadFullFriendsList
End If
@Daphoid
@LordBrian : While that's a great idea, MS has probably decided that the cost of setting it up is greater than the sum of the PR benefit and the Live subs of original Xbox users.
Incidentally I just got my original Xbox back on its feet this week and was looking foward to some nostalgic Halo 2 action, so I suppose I should get a move on. On the upside, this is hardly an impediment to my Legendary run and the shut-off gives me no excuse not to chuck in that 300GB HDD I've been thinking about for so long.
@LordBrian Ya look at Intel. That's proof that you don't need to get rid of legacy support and you can still achieve good performance. (please note sarcasm)
I can't say this affects me, although I do find it strange. I never played original xbox games on the 360 because it was always so buggy with poor frame rate. But I would be mad if I bought one off of the digital downloads and then was told I couldn't play it anymore.
@LordBrian
Limitiation of the Original Xbox's UI. The list only went to 100 and by the time they would have gotten around to updating it, the 360 came out and its all history now...
Besides, Nobody bitched this much when Sony removed backwards compatibility from the PS3?
You can't have new and shiny and expect the old dinosaur to work at the same time. OS X vs. Windows is a prime example.
@PBB
"Besides, Nobody bitched this much when Sony removed backwards compatibility from the PS3?"
Please tell me this was sarcasm. All I ever hear is bitching about PS3 bc. I've seen plenty of people state that as the only reason they won't buy one. I never really understood why it's such a big deal, but to each his own.
@LordBrian
Which friends should it load? Does it really make sense to have it load only 100 when the ones I want may not show up. Which means MS would have to develop a way to let users pick which ones show up on their Xbox.
It isn't as easy a simple if statement. I can't believe people actually high-ranked your comment. Guess it shows that there are many intelligent folks on Engagdet. I should have kept the comments off.
@daaper
Yes it was.
Personally, this won't affect me. All of my XBOX originals are in a closet gathering dust anyway.
Price of progress.
@PBB They aren't removing backwards compatibility, just the ability to play Original Xbox Games Xbox Live Online Multiplayer, any original Xbox games anyone bought through Live will still work (as well as the disc versions), just not the online multiplayer.
@suneohair
Well as it stands now, If you have a friends list of 100, the ones that are currently online fly up to the top in alphabetical order and offline picks up at the end accordingly, which is ALONG way from the friends list on the original xbox where you had to search your list for online friends.
@Mitch
Oh I know, but the other 90% of posters don't. Personally, the article is somewhat misleading / confusing compared to the others I've read today
@LordBrian
I was going to tell you making a 100 user list for the old xbox be compatible with the new xbox isn't that easy seeing how you can't update the old xbox's code.
But after further analysis, seeing as how you posted in VB, you must be very new to computers.
I think it's a bit poor on MS's part to kill support on games downloaded via the 360. I mean I'd be feeling really short changed if I'd just bought an original title via my 360 only to find that any Live features would be going the way of the dodo....
@BurtonBytes -This seems like a real slap in peoples faces who bought those titles through xbl on the 360. I am really shocked they would cut off all those halo players who moved up to a 360 and then were playing the d/l versions. Seems like there would be a lot of angered customers, no matter what their reason is. People who got mp focused origional xbox games recently should be refunded.
@Duke
I fully agree. It's short changing people for no reason, and what i think is more annoying is that to keep a few servers kickin over in the background would cost Redmond next to nothing, proportional to the amount of paid up Live users...
I mean some Dreamcast titles only just got their servers yanked...come on Microsoft do the right thing....
@BurtonBytes They are not killing off the games, just online multiplayer.
That's why you don't buy into MS. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone? MS can't innovate. They have the worst UI and user experience. All they can do is bribe consumers and developers. Do you really think MS would have been able to gain significant market share joining the sector out of nowhere?
@Proud Japanese - why yes, yes I do! Because that's exactly what MS have done in the console sector.
@Proud Japanese
I disagree with everything you just said. I despise Microsoft, but I love my 360 and its UI/UE.
@Proud Japanese
You can still play the game, you just can't get on LIVE with it. Honestly, when is the last time you played an XBOX original on LIVE? 3, 4 years ago?
@Proud Japanese
The UI for Netflix on the 360 is infinitely better than the UI for Netflix on the PS3.
The original blade interface was a bit odd, but the new card system for NXE is really nice.
@ModernTenshi04
I would actually disagree with that. I used Netflix on my 360 for a long time. All of a sudden, it started to crawl. It would take 10 minutes to load my queue (not a very big queue either). I would select say, a season of The Office. It would take another 5 minutes to load up the episode list.
I have reinstalled it with no luck.
Switched to the PS3 and never looked back. I prefer the interface and the quality adjustment which happens on the fly and not by interrupting your show or movie.
So let me get this straight they sold us Xbox original games that work on live but now there pulling the plug on the xbox live part of those games epic fail
The funny things is i just powered up my old xbox today and went through some of the older games I've kept. :(
Oh God, this is bringing an end to the pinnacle of all for me, The Almighty Splinter Cell Chaos Theory Multiplayer... I think I'm gonna cry.
I always get mad when a server for a certain game gets shut down, regardless of the console or game. It's disappointing.
Who's up for Halo 2 every day until they pull the plug?
From @XboxSupport on Twitter:
Yo!! For the official FAQ on the breaking news about changes to Original Xbox service, peep this: http://bit.ly/bkWcqK ^MB
From @XboxSupport :
Yo!! For the official FAQ on the breaking news about changes to Original Xbox service, peep this: http://bit.ly/bkWcqK ^MB
You mean people still have unmodified Xboxen?
It would be one thing if the service was free. But it's not. People pay good money for x box live, myself included, even when everyone elses's online is free. People don't pay them to be lazy . A workaround for this doesn't seem like it would be that hard at all. For example you log in to xbox live for a gen1 xbox game. Xbox live will see its a gen 1 game and then only display 100 of your friends, say a combo of your 90 most used and then your ten most recent. Not that complicated.
This seriously grinds my gears.
One of the reasons I picked up a 360 in the first place, was due to the promise of a decent amount of backwards compatibility, including online play.
Though I still cannot play my copy of Marvel v. Capcom 2 without serious animation distortion, and yet they sell a "perfect" version on Xbox Live...but that is for another time.
While I understand there are ways to circumvent these troubling decisions (Ala X Link Kai and XBConnect) that still only solves problems for some of my games I play on XBL.
What kind of terrible world would we be living in without being able to hop into an online match of Phantom Dust?
I don't even want to know...
@mtnDewFTW Why do you have to bring up something that's completely off topic. Dick.
i still havent figured out how recover my gamer id password on my 360, is there anyway to reset it? ive checked the support section and theres nothing on this topic. i made it a while back and cant remember it now. :-(
@ImDaIllest Yea me too :(
I've had XBLive since it first came out 7 or so years ago. Had to make a new GT cuz I cant recover my old classic one!
@ImDaIllest
Contact customer support, you'll have to somehow prove its your account over the phone
@Fest
So theyll be able reset my password, really? Wait, how long do they put you on hold cuz i hate that shit. you've done this before?