Halo Combat Evolved

Two more aging, yet still massively popular, multiplayer games are confirmed to be surviving the incoming Gamespy shutdown on May 31.

Halo: Combat Evolved has been available on PCs for eleven years now, but it is still going strong enough to be considered worth saving. Australia-based service GameRanger has stepped in to take up the responsibility of keeping the multiplayer up and running, and Halo will join the likes of other tossed aside games like Need for Speed: Most Wanted and GRID that GameRanger has "saved" over the years. Altogether, it has over 700 other games under its banner.

GameRanger has confirmed that the game, the demo, and the mod based Custom Edition will all be running through its service.

It's a nice gesture to keep one of the most influential games of all time up-and-running after all this time, even if it wasn't the best version out there. It's a much nicer gesture than Halo 2 got when Microsoft dropped the ax on it once  Xbox Live support was pulled from the original Xbox.

Joining Halo is also one of the best selling Star Wars game of all time, Star Wars: Battlefront 2. GameRanger already supports the game, and a simple download of its free client will allow for easy online play.

Fans have been petitioning for a sequel to Battlefront 2 for many years, and while one is finally in the works at DICE, there is no other way to participate in such huge scale Star Wars battles than through this game.

Great news for fans of online gaming who still like going back through their old library of classics. You guys get a much more raw deal than those of us who grew up with physical discs and lengthy single player campaigns. Better just hope that GameRanger sticks around for quite some time while we figure out a solid way to counter this massive video game extinction event.