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Here's some news for those of you who are still playing Halo 3: 1up reports that Bungie is readying a new, free map, called Cold Storage, for release on July 7.

Bungie has noted that Cold Storage "will be implemented in regular rotation in playlists that require the Legendary Maps." To help out anyone who has yet to purchase the Legendary Maps, they will be dropping the price down to 600 Microsoft Points on July 7. They'll also be releasing a one-day-only deal of a free theme and some gamerpics on the same day.

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Just in time to render the new Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition outdated, the Guinness people have announced that Grand Theft Auto IV has practically destroyed currently held records for fastest-selling game and most-profitable entertainment product.

In the first 24 hours, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies and earned $310 million dollars.

Prior to GTA IV's record-setting releases, the record-holder for the most-selling game was Halo 3 with $170 million in 24 hours. Compare that to the record-holding movie and book with Spider-Man 3 making $60 million and the latest Harry Potter book making $220 million in 24 hours.

Consider how ubiquitous Halo 3's advertising was compared the the relatively tame promotion for GTA IV. Halo 3 had its own soda and viral videos and ARGs and commercial coverage on practically every network. Then there's GTA IV, with just a few simple commercials and lots of talking heads on the news hallooing about dead hookers and it nearly doubles Halo 3's first-day earnings.

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The Game Developers Conference 2008, which is currently scheduled for February 18-11 in San Francisco, has published a list of featured speakers and topics under discussion for each. Here are some big names for the curious:

Peter Molyneux (Head of Studios, Lionhead Studios), on (surprise!) Fable 2 - The Big Three Features Revealed.

• Peter Molyneux's stated ambition as a designer is to make FABLE 2 a landmark game. In order to achieve this three big design features have been added. The inspiration and rational behind these features will be discussed along with their evolution throughout the development process. The wider context of their impact and influence on the RPG genre with also be examined as the ambition is also to evolve the genre itself. The talk will be supported by retrospective videos as well as live game examples.

Ken Levine (President/Creative Director, 2K Boston) on (bigger surprise!) Storytelling in Bioshock: Empowering Players to Care about Your Stupid Story (sign me up).

• Game stories can matter, even in first person shooters. But first we're going to have to give up a lot of our preconceptions about what people care about when playing a game. For too long, games (especially first person shooters) have been stuck in a "game sequence followed by story sequence" mentality. Ken Levine will tell the tale of how the BIOSHOCK took a pointy-headed idea about a pseudo-objectivist utopia and turned it into one of the most compelling and succesful game worlds in recent history. What were the tools used? What compromises had to be made? Where did the shooter end and the story begin? How did we make people give a crap? How did we use story and narrative to become perhaps the most talked about game at the super-crowded E3 2006? What does this all mean for stories in games? And must of all, what hell does "Mise En Scene" mean?

Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead, Microsoft/Bungie) on E Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in Halo 3.

• The online multiplayer mode of HALO 3 features an automatic matchmaking system to place players into games. Players may join individually or with parties of friends, and are quickly matched into groups. This presentation describes the algorithms behind the peer-to-peer matchmaking model, and its implementation over Xbox Live. It examines the impact of matchmaking on the HALO online community, and provides techniques for shaping the player experience and discouraging cheaters. The tradeoffs of an automatic matchmaking system compared to traditional multiplayer game browsers will be discussed, and illustrated by some results from the first months of HALO 3's operation.

Cevat Yerli (Managing Director, Crytek) on Crysis in the Making.

• This session will offer a look into key areas of CRYSIS development that markedly depart from Crytek's first project, FAR CRY. Main topics include Nanosuit design and gameplay, creating a rich, destructible/non-linear world, and peopling it with dynamic, believable AI enemies that challenge and entertain the player.

You can view the full list of featured speakers here. If you're interested in the keynotes, however, you can find that here.

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This industry is one that deals mainly in the indirect re-shoveling of hype. Publishers dump the hype on us, we shovel it onto to masses, the masses ask for more, we shovel some more. By the time a game releases, it's rare for anticipations to be met, and even after all these years we're not immune. We still fall for it. We let our hopes dictate the quality of an unreleased game in our over-stimulated little brains.

These are two games that had legendary levels of hype and were destined for record-breaking sales sight-unseen but did not match the hype.

While not a terrible game, and in some aspects almost revolutionary, Assassin's Creed is not the game we thought it was going to be. The brazen, well-crafted executions we expected weren't there, instead we got to tediously repeat the same set of actions over and over to reach a series of uninteresting kills. The rich and dynamic story we were expecting was also alarmingly absent. The advertisements that seemed to show the fringes of a very deep story turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the game, and one of the most interesting periods of history was, as I said in my "What I Hate About Assassin's Creed" feature, used as the backdrop for a Dan Brown novel. A bad Dan Brown novel, with a completely indiscernible plot and atrocious voice acting.

Halo 3 was burgeoning with hype the second Halo 2 hit the shelves. The epitome of an inevitable sequel, Halo 3 rampaged through its development cycle with a cyclone of marketing and hype (two words: "Gamer Fuel"). This game had so much hype that it had to have swept up many people who haven't played a Halo game before, and what did those people get? Confusion. And a mediocre product. If you set aside the multiplayer mode, the single player campaign is not what you expect from a mega-ultra-blockbuster. If you aren't intimately versed in the Halo universe, the story will make no sense whatsoever. If you've played games such as Gears of War and had your idea about what a "next gen" shooter can be, you'd probably find Halo 3 an almost mundane experience.


Lesson Learned: Gaming journalists have been slapping themselves on the wrist for years now for being part of the hype machine, and it seems that we'll never learn our lesson. If these two disappointments get us a bit closer to that (hopefully) eventual realization, all the better. We've got to stop elevating games in our minds into shrines of amazement before we actually see a product on the shelves and in our hands. Some of the best games of 2007 were the ones that not a lot of people were so anxious about, like Call of Duty 4 and The Orange Box. Perhaps these are games where the money was put into development instead of marketing.

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While I have no idea why you'd want to stick a candle next to your Xbox 360, MyGEN has discovered that the unit has surpassed its baby-killing predecessor and moved into the realm of candle devastation. See above.

As if to bask in its latest evil accomplishment, Microsoft has confirmed that it has sold 17.7 million Xbox 360 units since launch; Halo 3 has sold more than 8.1 million copies, followed by BioWare's Mass Effect at 1.6 million units.

Keep your candles away from you videogame consoles, kiddies.

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Just in case you missed this posting over at Larry Hyrb's blog or at Xbox.com, Microsoft has confirmed that Live's poor holiday service was indeed due to a record-setting number of gamers online simultaneously and that the company will be offering compensation for all Live members (that be silver and gold) in the form of a free Live arcade game.

While it's not a couple hundred Marketplace points or a free week of service, at least it's proper acknowledgment of the issue that includes some kind of compensation. Here's the full message from Microsoft's Marc Whitten, General Manager of Live:

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Regarding those nasty Xbox Live issues that gold members have been experiencing since Christmas,Torrent Davis over at The Bitbag recently confirmed that he'd been in contact with a source at Microsoft who stated that "we [Microsoft] will definitely be doing something for our Gold memebers that weren't able to get online over the last week."

This is interesting in that it would mark the first time Microsoft has compensated members for Live "issues".

Sounds spiffy considering that 360 owners have been complaining that they have basically been paying Microsoft in order to beta test their Xbox Live service. Of course, gamers who were frustrated in their attempts to play Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 online could have just played other games, but why pay for a service if you don't even get to use it for the games you want?

The good news is that Live seems to have stabilized some.

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Just on the off-chance that any of you are Xbox 360 gamers eager to relax over the holiday break with a nice match on Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, better be prepared for some "intermittent issues." According to Microsoft's support page as of 7:30p.m. CST:


In other words, players are reporting issues with forming parties, hosting/finding matches, gamertag recovery, and just about any feature that a person paying $50 a year for would want - though the chat function is still operating superbly.

You can check on the status of the "issue" at Microsoft's support page or check on some forum posts (1; 2) if you're in the mood for some quality entertainment provided by Xbox fanboys who seem to share the opinion that we should all get down on our knees and thank Microsoft for allowing us to give them money.

We'll keep you updated on Live's status as Microsoft addresses the issue; current word has it that the problems should be resolved by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.

As an aside, I imagine that Xbox 360's Live issues combined with Nintendo's Wii shortage have made Sony very happy recently...

Update: As of 9:30p.m. CST the Live status now reads:


Read: everything is still screwy and players are still having problems with Live, finding/joining games, staying connected, and so on. However some gamers are able to play other online titles, like Gears of War, while they wait on Microsoft to fix the issue, so if you're bored out of your mind during your break it's a possible option.

Update Update: It seems that things have stabilized at least a smidgen on Live since yesterday, but don't be shocked when you encounter various Live problems. As of 2:40p.m. CST , 12/30, the status now reads:


Apparently Microsoft is still searching for whatever is causing the problem so they can fix the issue. Normally this is when I'd head over to Larry Hyrb's blog for an insider view on the chaos, but unfortunately Major Nelson's site is down...

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Why It Won: Call of Duty was already an established series by the time Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came around. After Treyarch's Call of Duty 3, many had thought the series had caught the "sequel syndrome" that plagues almost any big studio franchise that gets a new installment each year, each game becoming just another iteration of the previous with one or two features interesting enough to be mentioned on the back of the game's box. Boy were we ever wrong.

Call of Duty 4 isn't a greatly ambitious game. It didn't have the mega-millions advertising budget of Halo 3, it didn't have the Ayn Rand-ian objectivist overtones of BioShock, and it didn't really require that you go out and buy a new $4,000 computer to run it like Crysis. The scale of the game itself is somewhat large but it's no Earth-vs-Aliens. What the game lacks in scope, however, it makes up for in pure quality. Call of Duty 4 is a fun game, a well-made game, and a rewarding game. From the first mission you're sucked into the world of modern Special Forces and you're never let go.

Continue reading...

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So tomorrow is the big day for Halo 3 fans. The "Heroic Map Pack" comes out tomorrow (December 11) on Xbox Marketplace at 2am PST, 5am EST. To get a little sneak peak at these maps, The Red vs. Blue guys did a video and it is now available on Xbox Live Marketplace.

In order to find it, flip to the Xbox Live Marketplace blade and then go to the Video Store. Scroll down to "Game Videos," then click "New Arrivals" and scroll down to Halo 3. The video is called "Red vs. Blue: D.I.Y. "

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