With Xbox Live support for original Xbox titles set to be discontinued on April 15, the online multiplayer of Bungie's beloved Halo 2 doesn't have much time left. On April 15, all original Xbox games will no longer be able to access Live (whether played on an original Xbox or an Xbox 360). The reasoning behind the decision is to allow Xbox Live to continue to evolve in ways that are currently restricted by the ongoing support of original Xbox games. But as a result, unless you pick up a copy of Halo 2 on PC, the last opportunity to play the game online will be on April 14 -- and Bungie is planning on having the game go out with a bang.

Details will be revealed in the upcoming weeks, but a post on Bungie.net tells fans to "mark your calendars now - on April 14th let's all rally to go online for one last hoorah." It'll be "[o]ne final farewell and one final opportunity for all of you to kick our asses at Halo 2."

Beyond Bungie staff joining in on the fun online, your guess is as good as any as to what else they have in store for Halo 2's last day online. Whatever it is, the game will have had a hell of a six-and-a-half year run.

After more than seven years, Xbox Live will cease to support the original Xbox beginning on April 15, 2010. Microsoft announced today their intentions to discontinue the service on their first game console, and by extension, any of its games that are playable on the Xbox 360 -- including Halo 2. The change comes as part of an effort to continue evolving the Xbox Live service for Xbox 360 gamers; the continued support of the original Xbox has hindered Microsoft's ability to do certain things with Live such as increasing the friends list cap of 100 people.

In a letter to Xbox Live members, Live general manager Marc Whitten explained why they're making the decision:

On April 15 we will discontinue the Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox v1 games playable on Xbox 360 and Xbox Originals. I want to start by saying this isn't a decision we made lightly, but after careful consideration, it is clear this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox LIVE community.

Seven years ago we laid out our vision for the connected console when we launched Xbox LIVE. We believed then that the power of the Internet to connect people would revolutionize living room entertainment. It started with amazing multiplayer games, and we've since seen that bet pay off again and again with the launches of Xbox 360, Marketplace, Netflix and powerful social features like Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. None of this would have been possible without the success of LIVE as a multiplayer gaming network.

Whitten acknowledged the "amazing run" that Halo 2 has had on Live, claiming the game's dedicated community has "fundamentally changed the way we play video games." But he made it clear that, to do more with Live, this was a necessary action. "[A]s we look down the road, we'll continue to evolve the service with features and experiences that harness the full power of Xbox 360," he explained. "To reach our aspiration, we need to make changes to the service that are incompatible with our original Xbox v1 games."

Large-scale game development might have a certain structure to it, but at the Game Developers Conference, you often hear stories about a game progressing along just fine until some jackass comes in towards the end and pushes for some neat feature to be put in, which steals everyone's focus. Peter Molyneux admits he's one of those people, and as the founder of Lionhead, that was a particularly big problem in their first game, Black & White. When a journalist was interviewing him about the game, Molyneux got the idea to put in a realistic weather system. He got it into the game, but the game itself wasn't being worked on during that time; everybody was pitching in trying to get the weather right.

So, to combat his bad habit, and prevent other possible derailments of game projects, Molyneux instituted an "experiments" program within the company, that would invite any and all of its employees to pitch ideas on game design elements, visual techniques, or anything else that would be good in a game. At his presentation at GDC, Molyneux went over the internal program, as well as showing off a few experiments from the past.

Those who like fun might remember a PS2/Xbox/GameCube shooter called Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. It was an impressive debut from then-startup developer Swingin' Ape Studios, but it didn't sell very well, and when Blizzard ended up purchasing Swingin' Ape a couple of years later, it seemed like we'd seen the end of the Metal Arms franchise.

As it turns out, that might not be true. Don't get your hopes up too high, because it still looks like an extreme long shot, but in an interview with 1UP earlier this week, former Swingin' Ape head (and current president of Specular Interactive, a new developer working on a Hydro Thunder spiritual sequel called H2Overdrive) mentioned that he was interested in acquiring the rights to the series and would "absolutely" be interested in making a sequel if he had the opportunity.

So it's about as far as these things can be from being confirmed, but fun to think about!

The Xbox 360 currently has a pretty good list of originals, among them Crimson Skies, Ninja Gaiden Black and Psychonauts. Now they're reaching into the bargain bin for the latest addition.

Shacknews is reporting that the next Xbox Original will be BlowOut, which debuted on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2003 for $20. Now, for 75 percent of the original Xbox price (it was cheaper on the GameCube), BlowOut can be yours starting January 19.

The game itself is a 2.5d side-scroller in the vein of Contra and Metal Slug. Nothing really to see here from what we can tell, which is a shame. It would be awfully nice to see Jet Set Radio Future or Panzer Dragoon Orta on that list instead.

If you're planning to dust off your original Xbox and trade it in to GameStop, you'd better hurry. They won't be accepting them much longer.

Destructoid is reporting that GameStop will officially stop accepting trade-ins of original Xbox games, systems and accessories on February 9. The information comes from an internal memo that was sent out earlier this week. For those who aren't keen on hunting up original Xboxes on eBay, GameStop will continue selling until their stocks of games and systems are depleted.

So it looks like the curtain has truly fallen on Microsoft's first foray into the gaming industry. If you have any fond memories of the Xbox, feel free to hold a candle for it in the comments below.

Publishers are increasingly paying attention to videogame reviews and aggregate scores, but Ubisoft CEO Alain Martinez feels the importance of them is sometimes overrated. Gamasutra reports that at the UBS Annual Global Media Conference, Martinez remarked that historically, ratings haven't correlated with sales numbers for the company. "When Assassin's Creed launched and got 82 percent, we were desperate, and we thought we were going to die," he said. Now in hindsight, we know the game has seen financial success both during launch and in the long term. "If you look at our first Prince of Persia [The Sands of Time], we thought it was going to do great, [but] it only did two million, so we were kind of disappointed." Sands of Time, of course, was a critical darling but failed to catch a wide market.

Regarding more recent releases, he commented that he hopes the new Prince of Persia will hit about three million, saying four or five million would be ideal to have a strong hit. The company was also hoping for a stronger debut of Far Cry 2, and is now counting on it becoming a slow burn through the next several months to reach about three million units.

Both the new Prince of Persia and Far Cry 2 have scored in the mid-to-high eighties on Metacritic, which is only slightly higher than Assassin's Creed. Reviews and rankings may be less of an issue than publishers sometimes think, but Far Cry 2 didn't have the explosive opening month the company hoped for. We'll have to wait for next month's NPD data to see if the Prince achieves the success of his little brother, Altair.

Faithful 1UP FM listeners will know that we had unfinished business with our last Backlog for Indigo Prophecy. With this new bonus episode of 1UP FM, that business can be considered concluded. We've invited Sega director of development Constantine Hantzopoulos onto the show to talk about his previous work as a producer on Indigo Prophecy, and it's quite a talk indeed.

In this 45-minute discussion, Hantzopoulos covers all of our biggest questions about the game that has given us the most mixed feelings of any Backlog play-through so far. Why did the name get changed in North America? Why were the sex scenes censored here? And what the hell happened in the last third of the game? We don't pull any punches, and Hantzopoulos gives us all the answers we want.

You can tune in to the full interview right here or subscribe to our podcast feed via iTunes to keep up with the Backlog every week. Also stay tuned for the upcoming launch of a Backlog stand-alone podcast in case you just want to hear about old games and not all this bothersome new stuff.