Artless Gamer

Halo Legends

For those of you that didn’t know yet, Microsoft in cooperation with the rest of the Halo gang and globally renowned artists, are making an animated series based on the Halo Saga, Halo: Legends. The first episode was aired today.

Well, today is Saturday and the first episode “The Babysitter” was launched today over the Halo Waypoint on Xbox Live. I am enthralled. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screen shots but if you are a Halo fan then you most likely have an Xbox 360. Assuming that you have a Gold account, just download Halo Waypoint and watch the episode while it’s still available.

Here a quote from Wikipedia:

Microsoft announced at Comic-Con 2009 that it was overseeing production of a series of seven short anime films, together called Halo Legends. Financed by 343 Industries, the animation was created by five Japanese production houses: Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio 4°C, and Toei Animation. Shinji Aramaki, creator and director of Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina, serves as the project’s creative director. Warner Bros. will distribute Legends on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2010,^[70] Six of the stories are officially part of the Halo canon, with the seventh, made by Toei, is intended to be a parody of the universe.

I wonder which direction this series will take once it starts to depart from the known and accepted canon of the Halo saga. Let’s just hope that they stick to it for long enough. After all, Bungie is still working on Halo: Reach.

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Halo Reach Menu

Over on the MLG message boards a user, Tom Morello, has leaked some images of what looks to be the next and final episode of the Halo game saga, Halo: Reach. The images are quite blurry and were presumably taken with a low quality cellphone camera (iPhone?).

Some new weaponry, entirely new environments and a blurry hint at much improved graphics can be gleaned from the images. At least this time around it would be a pretty safe bet to say that they are going to use a new engine. I’d send you to the original post on MLG to see the entire original thread, but the MLG Forum is one of those places that won’t let you read unless you are registered.

Descriptions made by Tom in the thread suggest that Halo: Reach will be featuring “perks” and other additions to the old multiplayer modes we know from Halo 3.

Here the images:

New Assault Rifle?

New HUD with perks?

A Needler Rifle?

Bee Eff Gee

Shortly after the release of the images and some comments on the forum, some arguments started breaking out over the real source of these images. Microsoft remains silent on all this. For some more information on the issue, a few more screen shots and a few silly forum post exchanges, just go here.

Either way, these screen shots are really exciting. I  just wonder how long we will have to wait until Halo: Reach actually reaches us.

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ZOMG. So much memory.

As many have already heard, Microsoft is going to ban the use of unauthorized memory cards with the release of the upcoming Dashboard update. This update will introduce some features such as Twitter, Facebook and LastFM support amongst some other useless addons that will keep me from playing games and instead lurking on Twitter.

I can understand the general panic about this change as even myself have had some issues with save game backups and the lack of readily available official memory units. I have opted not to use any unauthorized hardware and have simply abandoned my old save games that were on my RRoDed Xbox 360.

I can deal with it. At least it gives me a good reason to play all these wonderful games again. What worried me most, though was whether I would be able to still plug in a regular HDD to watch movies.

Good news, then. People in the update preview program have already reported that hacked USB HDDs are still working after the update. To me this means that regular USB drives are still accepted by the Xbox and I can still watch my movies. I hate streaming.

TLDR?

USB HDDs still work after the new XBL update that will ban all unauthorized storage devices.

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A few updates ago Microsoft added the Games on Demand option to the Xbox360 Dashboard. On top of that, if you have an Xbox Live account, you can also add games to your download queue straight from the Xbox.com Marketplace. Good going, Microsoft. We love the feature and it makes downloading new titles, add-ons or other things much easier when we can’t be in front of our consoles.

However, not all titles are available in all regions. Some titles are region blocked and won’t allow you to download the selected content. If you try to download such a title you may get a message looking something like this “The game’s region does not match this console” or some variation of it. Besides Major Nelson’s blog, which gives a small hint as to which region can download a certain piece of content, there is very little indication as to the availability of a title.

The other day, Streifenhecht decides to download Assassin’s Creed from Games on Demand on his Xbox 360. No luck. Didn’t work. The same thing happened to me when I first tried to download Mass Effect. A few days later I decided to try again – I have no clue why I tried it again but this time around the download started and I was able to download Mass Effect without any issues. The same counted for Fable II. When I told Streifenhecht about this at work, he went to Xbox.com because he knew he could download games from the web based marketplace, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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