#clips
Deliver Hope, the live action commercial for Halo: Reach, was the highlight for the Bungie shooter's marketing, giving us a short glimpse of what all of that upcoming gameplay might look like in real life. More »
Now that the NPD has decreed our mere mortal minds are unfit to handle hardware sales figures, we're tasked with finding information from alternative sources -- wait, what's this? Aaron Greenberg just tweeted that the Xbox 360 bested the competition for the fourth month in a row? Search: complete.
Consider it the Halo: Reach bump. Previously, the Xbox 360 enjoyed three months of strong sales thanks to a hardware refresh, but Bungie's 343 Industries' franchise has been known to move consoles, so it's no surprise Microsoft dominated September. Greenberg elaborated in his following tweet that Microsoft sold 483,989 hardware units in September, "a 37% increase over last year." He also claimed the console is the only system with higher sales year-over-year.
So help us settle a bet: how many of you picked up the special edition Reach console?
True story: Just yesterday we were saying, "Huh, not as many people seem to be talking about Halo Reach lately." Then, this morning we wake up to find that Bungie will be stoking the flames on November 30 with the downloadable Noble Map Pack. Get out of our heads, creeps!
Ten bucks gets you access to three new environments. The first is Tempest, an abandoned shoreline facility featuring two symmetrical bases for 8 - 16 player fights. Anchor 9, an orbital dry-dock controlled by the UNSC, is a more intimate 2-8 player affair. Finally, there's Breakpoint, a series of frozen, modular archaeological labs for 8-16 players fracases. Oh, and there are 250 more Achievement Points to be had, which we know is all you really care about. Monster.
If that's still not enough new Halo, Bungie's challenging fans to make some of their own with the "Forgetacular Map Design Contest," the full details of which are right here. We'd love to participate, but we'll be too busy making foil hats to protect our precious thought waves.
As part of its line of RC Halo toys, NKOK will soon release a new RC Warthog. The hog sports a rocket turret -- though regrettably not night vision -- and includes figures of Noble 6 and Carter from Halo: Reach. The diminutive ride will retail for $25, but can you really put a price on childhood?
Halo: Cryptum, the first Halo novel in a planned trilogy exploring the Forerunners, will be published in January 2011. Announced in April of 2009, the novel will be written by acclaimed, hard science fiction author Greg Bear, who is best known for his novels Eon, Darwin's Radio and The Forge of God.
Bear's trilogy will be the first major work to take on the story of the Forerunners, the species responsible for the Halos and controlled galactic genocide. An unabridged audio book will also be available at the same time as the novel, so go ahead and play Reach while your ears read the book. The full cover of Halo: Cryptum can be found after the break.
During a panel last night at the New York Comic Con, transmedia company Starlight Runner -- a business that helps plan cross-media campaigns for various properties, including Microsoft's Halo franchise -- gave a presentation on its work. Among the slides shown, company president and CEO Jeff Gomez previewed one that gave the audience a look at the future of Halo: two new trilogies starting in 2012/2013 with a major motion picture set for release by 2014.
Microsoft and Starlight Runner have yet to issue any official comment on the news, though we have to imagine that Master Chief is rolling in his ... uh ... sleep capsule. Either that, or he's already working on motion capture -- one of the two.
#halo
Campaign matchmaking playlists will come to Halo: Reach on Oct. 19, and the game's rank cap should get raised sometime in the month or so, Bungie said yesterday in its weekly update. More »
Awesome Reach, brought to you by the creator of the evergreen Metal Gear Awesome, may be the most disturbing piece of animation since Tetsuo's transformation in Akira. Definitely not safe for work or for those barely hanging on to sanity.
We're no Bussinessologists or whatever, but we're pretty sure the best way to keep your fans coming back for more is to portray them as hideous, ill-mannered freaks who bathe with their Xbox 360 headset on. It just makes sense, right? It's the only way we can explain Apt. 117, a real thing that's apparently coming to Halo Waypoint "soon."
Developed by Powerhouse Animation Studios in collaboration with 343 Industries, the animated series follows "a boring average guy who lives with a Halo-obsessed idiot." Head past the break for the announcement trailer.
The success of Halo: Reach has spurred interest in a Halo film again, apparently -- this time with Dreamworks. As you all know, the idea of a Halo movie has been batted around for quite a while. Spielberg was rumored to be interested and Neill Blomkamp of District 9 even spent five months working on the film.
Now it's in limbo, though a piece by Vulture offers fans hope. Dreamworks is apparently looking at novelizations of the game as source material, thus avoiding the quagmire of troubles Universal and Fox ran into sinking resources into developing a video game adaptation for the big screen. The Vulture piece says Fox and Universal resolved their issues out of court.
So by focusing on the books, Dreamworks can claim that its project is something entirely different, allowing it to bypass the hefty costs the original project accrued. Oh, and before you get your hopes up, know that even if the movie is an honest possibility, it's still a long way out: as of now, there's been no writer hired, nor has a script been produced.
#xbox360
Developer Bungie has deployed the first playlist update for Halo: Reach, bringing with it a long, long list of changes and tweaks to multiplayer maps, game types and playlists, with the promise of more updates to come. More »
If you've started to lose that lovin' feeling for Halo: Reach's online multiplayer component, you may want to dip back in to check out the broad changes applied to the shooter's Matchmaking playlists in an update launched earlier today. The update also makes some minor adjustments to a handful of multiplayer maps and game modes -- the full list of which can be found just after the jump.
Bungie has also announced that it plans to fulfill its promise to add Campaign Matchmaking to Reach in a smaller update, due out either Oct. 12 or Oct. 19, depending on how long it takes for the developer to finalize the patch. We'll let you know once Bungie's settled on one of the two.
On top of announcing an earlier than expected playlist update (coming this Tuesday), Bungie revealed last night that it has reset the credits and ranks of "approximately" 15,000 Halo: Reach accounts. The studio also applied a one day credit earning ban on affected players, less for punishment than to "ensure that recipients receive an in-game notification of the action taken."
The resets were handled last evening and specifically targeted folks who employed "an exploit that allowed players to complete a Challenge 20+ times via itentional network manipulation (i.e., disconnects.)." Bungie will also be completing a "more comprehensive pass" later this week, after the studio is confident enough in its automated banning system. We're taking this move as further proof of the age old adage -- cheaters never win.
#haloreach
Slowly but surely the Halo: Reach community has been filling in the ranks and credit requirements in the game's single- and multiplayer progessions. They've all been uncovered now. More »
#screengrab
Reader Dan S. noticed that the MacFarlane Toys' Halo: Reach Warthog perfectly matched the chassis of one of his R/C vehicles. "The wheels started turning in my head," Dan says, "pardon the pun." More »
If you've held off on purchasing Halo: Reach alongside all your friends because you knew that it would get a decent discount within a few weeks, your prediction's paid off: GoGamer's got the shooter on sale for $45.
#clips
This guy says he's found a wash-rinse-repeat way to rack up 20,000 credits in Halo: Reach inside of 10 minutes. I promise, I promise, I promise Naughty Bear is not going to jump out and say boo. More »
#clips
This guy says he's found a wash-rinse-repeat way to rack up 20,000 credits in Halo: Reach inside of 10 minutes. I promise, I promise, I promise Naughty Bear is not going to jump out and say boo. More »
#dlc
The achievement set for Halo: Reach lists 49 achievements for a total Gamerscore of 1,000. That there screen, in the latest Bungie Weekly Update, adds 10 cheevs and 250 Gamerscore. DLC inbound? More »
This week's Bungie.net news update brought with it more than just info about Halo: Reach's Xbox Live stats -- it also featured a couple of screens showing an extra 10 Achievements and 250 Gamerscore for the just released title. In a segment explaining how to install the game to the 360's hard drive, two screens can be clearly seen with the adjusted Gamerscore and 'Cheevo count (1250 up from 1000 Gamerscore and 59 up from 49 Achievements).
Bungie doesn't directly address the changes in its update, instead hinting at "some new stuff" being added in a "potential second October update." Unfortunately, this hint is dropped right after talk of the regular housekeeping performed on Halo multiplayer, so it's unclear what's being hinted at directly. Halo 3 was eventually lavished with an astonishing 1750 Gamerscore when all was said and done, so the idea of an extra 250 doesn't seem like much of a reach if you ask us.
It should come as no surprise that we possess a strong affinity for Halo's official multiplayer minigame, Grifball. Though we never thought the time-tested formula of beating the snot out of bomb carriers with gigantic hammers could be improved upon, the new mechanics introduced in Halo: Reach have officially been introduced into the sport's ruleset, giving the proceedings a certain ... je ne saisquoi. Which we believe is French for "jetpacks."
Check out a video of the recently evolved sport after the jump, or keep an eye on the official Grifball forums for your opportunity to get in on a game.
This is not the line for Halo: Reach's Japanese launch. In fact, it's just a minuscule sampling of the reported 2.6-million-and-then-some strong who picked up Pokémon Black and White in Japan last weekend. Reach debuted several days before, on September 15, selling a respectable 44,413 units through Sunday, which ranked fourth on the weekly Japanese sales chart, according to Media Create.
While Reach is hardly Japan's "Cabela of the Week," it would seem that a new Pokémon diverted some sales away from Bungie's encore effort. Recall that in September 2007, Halo 3 launched in the #1 spot in Japan, recording about 59,000 units sold in its first week (though combined sales of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Toki and Yami reached 101,000 units that week, the games' third week at retail). Still, Reach's Japanese launch week sales easily trumped those of ODST (about 30,000 units), which was -- this is getting predictable! -- buried under sustained sales of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver a year ago.
#soundtracks
Per its name, The Billboard 200 is a weekly list of the 200 highest-selling albums in the U.S. The official soundtrack for Halo: Reach debuted at No. 157 for the past week, the best mark ever for the franchise. More »
#numbers
It wouldn't be a big surprise if Halo: Reach was the No. 1 title on Xbox Live during its launch week. It's a big ass game after all. But that was not the case, as some corrected numbers show. More »
