Worldwide Halo 2 Tourney Nears End

Team Xbox is covering a Worldwide Halo 2 tournament with contestants from around the globe. The tourney is nearing completion, and the contestants for the global championship are being finalized. The event is to take place on June 10th via Xbox live, with participants from all 24 time zones. From the article: "The United States and Japan regional contests are currently underway, with the winners being determined by the end of May. The winners from each locality will vie for the honor of being crowned Xbox Live Halo 2 World Champion, playing entirely online via Xbox Live."

Comments

News release after the win

[Anonymous Coward]

After winning the tournament, the 13 year old winner was heard screaming into his headset. He then referred to his opponents as "gay". He plans to travel the world if his mom lets him.

Nitpick

[Otter]

These seem to be 24 Xbox Live "regions" (i.e. countries), not time zones. I believe there are people in all 24 time zones, but you'd be hard pressed to get up a decent tournament in some of them.

Nitpick of a Nitpick

[EyesofWolf]

I agree with you, mainly because there's not 24 time zones. Some countries, states, or regions observe half hour conversions. I think the number of time zones is in the neighborhood of 39, but don't quote me on that.

easy

[macshit]

It should be easy to win the Japanese tournament: Just be the one guy in Japan that owns an xbox!

[The other day I saw a big display in Shibuya station to push (tepco) broadband service, and they were offering a completely free xbox to the first n-hundred customers to sign up. I watched for a while, and it was pretty funny: they'd get some guy to sign up, and ask him "Thanks for signing up; would you like your free xbox?" (they literally had a pile of xboxes there to hand over) -- and every single time, the answer would be something like "Oh, no I don't need one". They can't even give them away...]

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's mostly the endemic racism in Japanese culture. Their sense of cultural superiority ensures they can't even imagine owning a a console designed by a gaijin Western company, even if it was constructed in local Asian countries.

And before anyone replies - I personally think racism exists at pretty much the same level in nearly all countries... usually however, the prejudice is expressed in different ways than technology purchases.

Re:easy

[macshit]

That's complete bullshit. There's certainly racism etc. in Japan, but the xbox's failure had little or nothing to do with it (indeed MS windows is as much a monopoly in japan as anyplace). Microsoft simply failed to provide sufficient reasons for anybody to prefer it to the juggernaut that was Sony and the comfortable familiarity of Nintendo. [If it had been smaller and cheaper maybe more would have picked it up anyway -- but it wasn't.]

Not only were xbox games (especially the initial ones) targeted at rather different U.S. tastes, but the over-the-top "bigger and louder is better" bombast of typical xbox marketing, which works so well with U.S. teenagers, is far less suited to japan (this is also a reason why the gamecube was much more successful: being small and cute isn't a liability in japan).

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats bullshit, Japanese like American/Western stuff, thats why they adopted baseball, made wide eye's in their cartoons (anime), listen to our music etc... Low X-Box sales has nothing to do with xenophobia.

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

psst...the xbox is manufactured in mexico, not china.

Re:easy

[InsideTheAsylum]

That's absolutely true :)
The reason why lots of japanese people don't buy XBoxes is because of their constrained living quarters that just can't quite accomandate and XBox. It's not the choice of games... it's the size of the gamebox.

Re:easy

[MBraynard]

I keep hearing that - it's totally stupid. The Xbox is not much larger than the PS2. It's not an issue at all.

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

psst... where the xbox is manufactured depends on where you live. Asian and Pacific Xboxes are manufactured in China.

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so very, very naive to believe this myth.

Re:easy

[Fred Or Alive]

Why does everyone forget Europe!

* EXPLODES *

Our Xboxes are made in China as well (at least mine is) but do you mention it? I hate it when people forget that games are sold in places other than North America and Japan and East Asia. FFS the UK is the 3rd biggest games market in the world!

* UNEXPLODES *

Sorry for the rant, just feel like a nice rant every now and again, and being a gamer in Europe gives you lots to rant about. I know where European Xboxes are made actually has nothing to do with the converstation as well...

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never been to Japan. Trying living in a 8 x 10 room for two months. Yes, thats a place in one of the more expensive hotels. Size makes all the difference over there.

Re:easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Xblob is fucking huuuuge.

Its obviously larger than a PS2, and its waaaay fucking larger than the new PS2.

Re:easy

[jdubois79]

Although the Xbox isn't that popular, there are still a great deal of Xboxes in Japan, especially fueled by Halo 2. Xbox 360 is getting a TON of press, and with developers such as Sakaguchi and Team Ninja working with them, they might actually be able to break into the Japanese market this generation.

But what is nice is that because xboxes aren't popular, I can pick up used games for about 10 bucks. And my system was only 100.

And the number of Xboxes in Japan as of 4/10 is 46,6068 according to Famitu Xbox Magazine.

Re:easy

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Granted the PS2 is larger than your average console, but the fact that you can have it stand on the side really does make it use less space.

Re:easy

[KillShill]

the reason is simple.. on this side of the pond we measure our worth by the bigness of our ...

they measure theirs by the smallness of theirs.

i don't care if you live in a closet, being able to buy a ps2 and gamecube but refusing a free xbox based on size is a completely rediculous reason.

it's about some perceived coolness factor that only a weirdo (to us) native can see.

they are just plain idiots, even if i were japanese i'd tell that to people there... as long as they were smaller than me ;)

Re:easy

[MBraynard]

So what alternate dimension are you from that has such unusual physics as size is altered by the perceptors angle?

Re:easy

[IntergalacticWalrus]

OK then, it was bad wording of my part, replace "space" with "footprint". Do you understand now?

Re:easy

[MBraynard]

I understand, but am disappointed to learn that this alternate dimension of space saving does not exist.

I can put my Xbox on the side, too, btw. *shrug*

Lag?

[Prien715]

I know light travels very fast.

Google says light travels:
299 792 458 m /s == 299 792 km /s
The earth's circumference is 40 076 km (we're not stringing fiber through the center of the earth so diameter would be incorrect).
If I remember correctly, current networking hardware can do maybe .7 the speed of light.

So let's do some math. 40k km / (300k km *.7) == .190 seconds.

So a ping of 190 before we even get started on network protocols if you live across the world. Even at the speed of light, we're still going over 100 milliseconds.

I know this is a publicity stunt, but can't we at least acknowledge the role of physics in making a game playable? (For a FPS competition, even a ping of 100 milliseconds would be unacceptable).

Re:Lag?

[0kComputer]

Assuming your calculation is correct, that would be right, but you would need to cut that in half as the data isn't going to be routed around the earth to go 100 miles away. So, .95 (worst case) would be more accurate.

Re:Lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan is only 100 miles from the US?

No wonder they got to pearl harbor so fast!

Re:Lag?

[drxray]

Latency is usually quoted as a there-and-back time, so the grandparent is right. That might be because he forgot the two cancelling factors of 2 though.

Anyway, a good scientist checks theory by experiment:
ping www.nintendo.co.jp (from Europe)
result: 254 ms

Yep, about right.

Re:Lag?

[RemovableBait]

Note, while what you say is theoretically correct, your example is not. Half of 0.170s (or 170ms) is not 0.95 (950ms). I can see that what you meant was 95ms, but in the context of data routing, 170ms is a little more like it as time is going to be wasted along the way through various packet filters or firewalls. The response time of the hardware alone (not the sending time) is likely to rack up around 20ms in a 100mi journey.