Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Halflife 2 Coming to an Arcade Nowhere Near You

Posted by Zonk on from the use-the-dance-pad-mr.-freeman dept.

Phill Proud writes "Arcade board manufacturer Taito is set to begin sales of an arcade version of Halflife 2, including a multiplayer mode, in the Summer of 2005 (Japan) "Taito will develop an arcade version for their original "Type X" circuit board. The Type X is an arcade game circuit board running Windows XP Embedded that can use the Windows game development environment. The arcade game will be a customised version of the Windows software and will allow 3 game modes - a "Story mode" for single-player play, a "Battle mode" for players country-wide to compete in real-time and a "Mission mode" for players to collaborate tactically.""

8 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. that's ok... by evilmousse · · Score: 2, Interesting


    there aren't any arcades near me anymore anyway. ..and this isn't helping. bring back the quarter!

    1. Re:that's ok... by dykofone · · Score: 5, Insightful
      A quarter would be awesome. Arcades lost their luster for me when I started having to pay $1 for Area 51 because I couldn't afford Time Crisis 2 at $2. Pretty much the only arcades left any more are at places like Dave and Busters, where you get a point card that really starts to screw up the budgeting. "Let's see, $10 got me 4378 points, and Tokyo Wars costs 653 points, so that makes it cost how much?"

      On a slightly related note, I was wating in the airport recently and realized how well an arcade would do there. I might even be willing to spend $1 for a round at some shooter, since that'd be cheap compared to the $8 Big Mac I just ate, and beats the hell out of watching the Weather Channel while sitting on those akward benches.

  2. Here's hoping by BortQ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I hope for their sake that Half-life 2 doesn't suck.

    --

    A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
  3. No Where Near You (Not!) by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not if I'm in Japan you insensitive clod!

  4. Re:Yeeks! by vhold · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's probably going to have some extremely simple watchdog piece of hardware that will reboot the machine if it ever stops receiving it's ticks from the OS, or perhaps even the game itself (since the game itself is a kind of crashable operating system)

    If you wanna see something cool, in Counterstrike: Source, which uses the HL2 engine, open up the console and execute:
    "+showbudget"

    It brings up this dynamically updating chart showing each of the game's subsystems and how much time, in milliseconds, is being spent in each one, with a kind of color coded historical running graph at the top showing each component's share and the total time spent per frame. Kinda pointless for an end user, but in a way it's rather englightening to see what the most expensive operations are. There is an even crazier realtime full on function level profiler available through the console as well, but I havn't really messed with it.

  5. I expect some graphics changes... by Zangief · · Score: 2, Interesting

    To match the japanese tastes

  6. Re:Smart Decision by Taulin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    American arcades need a new direction. Charging more for less gameplay time is not the solution, and is the main cause of the decline we see today (starting with Dragon's Lair). Most arcade games today to no reward better players with extended time. As mentioned, cafes are on the right track, and should be extended to 'Console Arcades', and be similar to water slide parks. $x for x minutes. $x+1 for the whole day. Have setups for teams, competitions, high scores, etc. Have them based on home games, who cares. Rental movies are the same as those bought except stores pay more for licenses, etc. Same thing should be available for console arcades.

  7. MAME here we come by cyrax777 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I wonder how long before Mame emulates it.