Only for three days mind, but that’s enough time.

If you’re like me and you don’t want/can’t afford to pay £40 for a subscription fee to access the Xbox Live service, you will find yourself missing out on the online multiplayer components of every Xbox 360 game. Thankfully Bungie are giving Silver members a chance to play the Halo: Reach beta for free. From 5PM GMT on the 14th May until 5PM GMT on the 17th May anyone and everyone with an Xbox 360 and an internet connection will be able to play the beta.

Bungie are also, as an added bonus, throwing in free online access to Halo 3 and ODST too during the three days.

The beta ends for Gold members on the 19th May.

EDIT: Thanks to ScottyGraySkull who has pointed out that you need Halo: ODST to play the Reach beta. The beta is on disc though, so it would be great if you could buy a pre-owned copy or even rent a copy for the weekend.

Via: CVG

150 dollars. That’s what I paid for the Halo 3 Legendary Edition on the day it came out. I did so because I was super excited for the game and liked the idea of having the helmet on my shelf. Some people called me crazy. “You could buy two and a half games for that much money” they would say. But on release day I walked out of Gamestop 150 dollars poorer but very happy.

Fast forward to two months later and I was angry. 37 dollars for a brand new legendary edition of Halo 3? Surely, you are joking. That was a fifth of what I had paid for it. Now I don’t necessarily regret the purchase these few years later, but I learned my lesson. Not every special edition is going to be special and not every limited edition is going to be limited. No harm no foul Bungie, enjoy my money.

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Bungie, best known for loving their consumers and community, and Activision, best know for being dicks, have announced today a new partnership. Activision have bought the rights to publish all the games associated with Bungie’s unannounced new IP for the next decade. 

The statement also revealed that the deal will see these games coming to “multiple platforms and devices”. News that should bring a smile to Playstation 3 gamers who until now have had to sit outside when the Halo Bros come round.

Whilst our first reaction may be of dismay, after all this is Activision we’re dealing with, things may not all be lost. Bungie will be keeping ownership of their IP and claim they will remain an independent company. Where hope begins to fade is with (President of Bungie) Harold Ryan’s comments on the deal: “Activision supports our commitment to giving our fans the best possible gaming experiences.” A statement rather contradictory to the last big franchise we saw Activision publish.

Still, Bungie do have a fairly good track record, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how ugly their fall from grace is.

In an interview with the Seattle Times Brian Jarrard stated that over 3 million people are expected to participate in the upcoming Halo: Reach beta, which would make it the biggest beta ever on a console. Although the game is pretty close to being done they assured the Times that they would be taking data from the beta and making changes to the game.

Bungie believes Reach will be their best Halo game ever and that Microsoft is going to market it in a major way. They say the marketing will be bigger than ODST so hopefully we will see some even better live action commercials.

If this is going to be the last Halo game, at least directly from Bungie, it’s good to hear that they will be going all out in making Reach the definitive Halo experience. All the ViDocs for reach, particularly the newest one, look awesome and I am much more interested in this game already than I ever was in ODST.

It’s good to see that not only are they taking their “final” Halo game seriously as far as the story but they’re also really interested in making the multiplayer the best it’s ever been. It looks like they’re adding new features that will hopefully give the game more staying power against the Modern Warfares and the Battlefields of today.

Via: CVG

Bungie’s in-house composer Marty O’Donnell today debunked traditional internet clamour over the legitimacy of Halo: Reach’s apparently engine-rendered trailer, claiming that its “actually from the game”. In carefully constructed delivery, O’Donnell closed out his quote, adding “for all intents and purposes” with the subtle mastery of The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker.

“I mean, we’ll obviously probably adjust it” O’Donnell continued, cautiously allowing release leeway to avoid short-hand libel and a repeat of Halo 3′s similar trailer furore. “There’s some text and graphics that won’t be in the game, but this is the way the game plays right at the beginning”.

Eurogamer’s excellent Digital Foundry recently ran an article delving into technical analysis of the recently unveiled trailer. The piece concluded that while the graphical step-up between ODST and Reach was indeed marked, the video, while rendered honestly by Bungie’s engine-in-progress, exhibited ramped post-processing and resolution scaling impossible to comment on honestly without comparison footage from the title’s eventual release.

Trailers and pre-release assets are becoming gradually further from the living room truth, with anti-aliasing, refresh rate and resolution frequently upped, tweaked and expanded to showcase clarity simply unfair to peg as in-game. Marty O’Donnell’s words, although seemingly encouraging, do little to actually answer hordes of forum questions as to the real graphical shift between Master Chief’s previous sub-HD outing and Halo: Reach’s turn of the decade promises.

Via: CVG

Kotaku recently ran an article about the touchy issue of review days; where publishers pay for journalists to stay at a hotel, give them all the food they could want and let them play their game in time for publication. The writer mentions the fact that he was recently invited and attended a review day for Activison’s Modern Warfare 2.

These review events are designed to give reviewers a chance to play through the game as the ‘œdevelopers intended’, with huge TVs, 5.1 surround sound and a, err: ‘œswimming pool and hot tub’. It talks about how a increasingly large amount of writers attend these review days with game publishers not sending out review copies, in favour of using these events to show-off their games.

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Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Master Chief any more. We must be over the rainbow! At least, that’s the only explanation I can see for all these bright colours. We are indeed not in MC any more, possibly a good thing as he was starting to smell. ODST may take the Halo 3 name, and nearly all of the weapons, enemies, objects and inability to tell a story, but it has managed to add something a little bit extra. Something that really does make it feel like a different, if subtly different, experience; more bloom and hiding.

In OSDT you walk around a bit of a city looking for clues as to where all your cliché space marine buddies are. Dotted around the place are objects, which when interacted with take us into the eyes of said cliché space marine buddies and into a level of Halo.

The game also comes shipped with a new, survival based multiplayer mode; Firefight. The goal here is to survive through as many waves of increasingly difficult enemies as possible. You also get a second disc with a copy of the original Halo 3 multiplayer, only bundled with all the DLC you couldn’t be bothered to pay for.

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My eyes! Too much bloom!
Shallow, dickish characters.
Needs more Master Chief.

The past ‘face of Bungie’ Frank O’Connor, now the creative director of 343 Industries (the people responsible for all things Halo), told USA Today that “We do have a plan that goes out at least six years [...] eventually, it will become very apparent that there is a plan for the way the canon all ties together and the way the comic books and the novels all tie together.”

I have something of a place in my heart for the Halo universe (the Haloverse, if you will). Halo 2 was my first ‘proper’ online game and with it ushered in my first ‘proper’ online community. Much of my XBL friends list still consists of gamers reamed from honour-rule games of zombies on foundation. However, it’s blatantly apparent that Halo is no longer a console-launcher success. It’s a cash cow.

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Well that didn’t take long. One of the most hyped games in months is already reportedly suffering from game-breaking issues on some players machines a mere two days after its release.

According to various Bungie.net forum-goers, the game displays disc read errors during cutscenes, freezing the game. Seemingly this occurs on older Xbox 360s more often than newer ones due to older DVD drives. Victims of the error report that saving the game to the hard drive alleviates the problem for some users (which is handy, especially for those of us with 20GB drives.) But, makes the problem worse for others.

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It was a very serious worry that we would soon be running out of Halo related games to play; after all, there are only two games confirmed for the future. These worries came after comments made by Lars Bakken, a senior designer at Bungie, to CVG in which he said, ‘œin terms of Bungie-produced Halo games, ODST and then Reach is probably all you’re going to get.’

Thus steps in Brian Jarrard, director of PR and the Bungie community, to quickly backtrack on Bakken’s comments, telling Videogamer a very definitive ‘œwe just don’t know at this point’. He went on to say, ‘œI wouldn’t confirm or deny at this point’, and, ‘œwe’re going to keep looking at making the games we want to make. Maybe that’s Halo, maybe it’s not; we’ll just have to wait and see’

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Hurray! A new Halo 3 expansion has been announced at TGS. Putting you in the role of an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) guy who looks surprisingly similar to Mr. Chief. You will play a story “that takes place during the terrifying events leading up to the Master Chief’s return to New Mombasa”.

Good news right? New campaign, new maps, all new community options. Nobody could possibly talk ill of this can they? Sadly, it’s all but inevitable.

The hype that Bungie and Microsoft can create is crazy; as is the sheer number of people who enjoy playing Halo. The game is simple, fun and continually providing new experiences to entice the player to play on. But this generates a strong knee-jerk reaction.

“Hardcore” gamers often seem inclined to dismiss Halo as being too mainstream. Gaming has always been a subculture, and when a game becomes so popular or so over-hyped to the point where it breaks that and falls into the mainstream, some gamers don’t like it. This is why for nearly every popular game out there, you find there are a few very vocal people who hate it.

Halo 3 is probably the clearest example of this. The Halo franchise has gained a reputation for attracting the scum of the gaming world. Hop onto any online multiplayer Halo match and you will quickly see why. Combine this reputation with hype so big you can’t avoid it, and you get the hate.

So when will the negativity start for the new Halo expansion? Check the comments of any of the big sites which reported it and you can see, it already has.

Over recent years, the second-hand market has been under heavy criticism from game studios and publishers and has seen a rise in DRM and digital-distribution designed to combat it.

The latest criticism comes from Marty O’Donnell, Bungie Studio’s audio director, who says that the second hand market is unfair.

Complaining about sales when you have a multi-million seller is somewhat difficult to justify, but it seems to me that the folks who create and publish a game shouldn’t stop receiving income from further sales.

It will be harder for smaller titles to be successful in the future if they can’t fully realise a return on investment,

It’s something we have heard time and time again, and is wrong. If I pay £44 for Halo 3, then the game has been deemed worth £44 by those selling it. This is where the studio makes its profit. To then suggest that if I want to sell that game on, after already paying the amount of money wanted, that the publisher should be paid again is ridiculous. Where did the extra worth of the game come from?

If I sell the game on, there are still the same number of people playing that copy of the game. Continuing their argument that they should make a profit each time, what about when somebody else wants to play my copy on my console? Should we pay for each user? What about those enjoying it for longer, should they pay more? Perhaps game companies would be happier with a charge for every man-hour of fun had?

Eventually, digital distribution is probably going to be the way most people purchase content and hopefully developers, publishers, and retailers will figure out a system that is good and fair for both the consumer and the creators of that content.

That’s called renting. It’s what happens with downloadable content on consoles, or DRM-ridden PC games. If you can’t sell the title on, then you are effectively renting the title for as long as you want it.

You simply can not charge the full price of a game, and expect to not give the individual the entire thing, this includes the ability to sell the game on to recoup some of the original price. If I buy a sandwich, eat half of it and then give the rest to a friend in exchange for a small cookie (for sake of argument, it’s chocolate chip). If I then gave some of the cookie to the person I bought the sandwich from, it would be daft.

Modern game companies just can’t seem to understand the idea that when you sell something, it doesn’t belong to you any more. Just because a studio or publisher isn’t making money from one aspect of gaming, doesn’t mean they should.