About a year ago I picked up an Xbox as part of the special platinum pack deal they had going. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Xbox was pretty much dead on arrival when it hit Japan, with the vast majority of the (huge) game playing populace over here just not being interested. This is a shame, because it’s a great system. Back home there’s a stack of great titles released every month and it has a lot of support. Surprisingly enough, in Perth I know more people that own Xboxes than PS2s by quite a decent margin but in Japan its exactly the opposite. So, because of the low take up in Japan its very hard to get decent games over here.

The problem is, I can’t import games from home or the US because of the ridiculous DVD region system the megacorps have in place. Last month I discovered Play-Asia.com, a site in Hong Kong that has a pretty awesome selection of Xbox games. The neat thing is, games from HK are the same region as Japan but most of them include both a Chinese and an English option. Why the Japanese insist on dubbing straight over the English tracks rather than leaving them and providing it as an option (easy to do on DVD) is something that absolutely infuriates me as it happens on foreign rental DVDs as well. It makes zero sense. If you’ve already got the content, why get rid of it? The mind boggles.

As an experiment, the first game I picked up from PA was Bungie’s Halo 2, probably the most anticipated Xbox title this year and one that’s apparently been selling like hotcakes. As an aside, the sales data for Japan is also available and for the first week of release in Japan Halo 2 sold around 40,000 copies. To put that in perspective one retailer in America, Gamestop, sold 500,000 copies of Halo 2 in the first day. That’s how small the Xbox is in Japan. Anyway, Halo 2.

It’s great. Really great. A perfect example of how a simple idea can be made a million times better through careful execution and a whole lot of polish. Halo is a bog-standard 3d shooter, there isn’t a whole lot to set it apart from the pack in terms of gameplay dynamics. However, where Bungie come into their own is in telling stories. The world of Halo 2 is rich and detailed, with believable characters and stunning environments. The story is well paced and the ingame cutscenes do an excellent job of advancing the plot. At times you really do feel like you’re playing around on the set of a high budget sci-fi movie. The best moments in Halo 2 come when you’re interacting with the AI in a believable fashion. Burning down an 8 lane mega-highway in a converted jeep while the guy on the back frantically plugs away at tailgating hovercraft with the mounted machinegun, and the dude in the passenger seat leans out the side to pick off an oncoming tank with his rocket launcher is as close as it gets to gaming nirvana. After the ending though, I’m already set for part 3 in the series, the sooner the better.

Posted in 8-bit on Monday December 6, 2004.

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