E3 Madness

New Halo Game!

In a recent interview with MTV News, Don Mattrick of Microsoft confirmed that Bungie was indeed working on a new Halo game for Microsoft, that isn’t Halo Wars, or the Halo game in progress with Peter Jackson. This also supports the Wal-Mart intranet database having a new game listed as “Halo Blue”.

Bungie was about to announce some details about the new at E3 but was quickly stopped by their publisher at the last second. Funny how Bungie splits from Microsoft to be independent and look away from the Halo franchise, to be slapped in the face by an annoying old contract they probably wish would disappear.

Gears of War 2

One game that will make lots of heads turn this November will be GoW 2. The release date is November 7, 2008. Now being I’m very excited about this game I’m going to list the new weapons/features in GoW 2. They upped the 4v4 to 5v5 for more action but not too much. No host advantage and chainsaw duels are also a big plus. Co-op on live is going to be fun, especially since each individual player can play their own difficulty. All other juicy features I’m going to list because there is so many:

- New weapon called The Scorcher (Flamethrower)

- New gametype 'Wingman' in which 10 players split into teams of two.

- New gametype 'Meatflag' kinda like CTF but with an awesome twist. The flag will instead be AI character wandering around the centre of the map. He has his own weapons and surprisingly a place on the leaderboard. To capture him you will need to down him and pick him up as a meatshield and take him back, slowly, to your base. If you shoot the meatflag enough times while he's being dragged back to base, his captor will loose him and he'll go crazy on everyone around him.

- Stopping power which means if your running towards an enemy but he is firing straight into your chest, you will slow down. This means NO MORE ANNOYING GRENADE TAGGING FROM A RUNNING JERK.

- Big metal shield that stops you from getting hit. Can be planted into the ground to make a new cover. Enemies can kick it down though if they get close enough.

Multiplayer Gameplay:

Halo Wars

Well it’s been known for a while that with the help and guidance of Bungie, Ensemble Studios has been hard at work on a halo RTS. More details were revealed regarding release dates and such. The game will be released in spring 2009, which isn’t that specific but better than nothing, also they just revealed what I hoped for: Covenant will be playable! As for console RTS haters, I got Command and Conquer 3 from the discount bin and let me tell you first hand console RTS games work well! As long as Halo Wars has a control scheme similar to Command and Conquer 3, then all skeptics will feel relieved.

Gameplay Demo: