Halo

Halo 2 and Halo 5: Guardians have a lot in common. Both have split narrative campaigns. Halo 2’s boasted the return of Master Chief and gave fresh perspective by allowing players to play as the Arbiter, previously a Covenant enemy. Halo 5 has players playing as Master Chief and his Blue Team, while following the path of Spartan Locke and Fireteam Osiris who’ve been tasked to track him down. Both games feature strong player versus player arena multiplayer modes, which went on to shape the future of the series in the case of 2, and is certain to do so again in the case of 5.

Standing in the crowd before the expo halls open, you can feel the anticipation.  It’s contagious, and its hard not to get as equally stoked when waiting to enter PAX.  The wait is certainly worth it.  With so many games to play, it’s hard to be disappointed in PAX Prime 2015.  And yet, as soon …

As regular listeners to our gaming podcast Open Source will attest, the ongoing rivalry between Sony and Microsoft is oft-discussed. John perhaps said it best in last week’s episode – competition is good for the industry; without it, companies become complacent and lazy, and innovation dries up. As consumers, there’s nothing worse than one side …

Not since 2001 with the release of the original Xbox has any console launched with a game so revered by fans and critics alike as Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved. The original game was a bold adventure, brimming with new ideas, an alien world and a killer soundtrack. Following it’s huge success, the sequel Halo 2 …

In his not-quite seminal but still very good 1998 essay “F/X Porn,” David Foster Wallace dissects the lasting legacy of James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Well, more accurately, he examines the enduring stain left by Cameron’s film on the modern action movie, but whatever.) The essay doesn’t offer much in the way of …

The premise seems familiar enough: it’s the not-too-distant future and Earth is under attack by aliens. The “Mimics” arrived by an errant asteroid and now they have taken over half of continental Europe. To help combat these hyper-intelligent aliens, humans wear armored combat suits fitted with rocket launchers and side-guns. One might even confuse the …

For almost three weeks guardians have been hazarding “The Dark Below” in Destiny’s long-awaited first expansion (some might find the term “expansion” misleading, as it does not expand the map or playable areas much). Three new areas have been opened up to players, two beneath the Earth and one beneath the Moon, on two of the three newly added story missions and on the strike. The rest of the expansion, with the exception of the raid, will take you to the same places your journey as a guardian has already taken you. With several new hurdles to overcome, a series of new bounties, new weapons and gear to unlock and upgrade, and new objectives called “quests,” the DLC actually does freshen up Destiny quite a bit, almost in spite of itself.

There’s a well-known (and rather hilarious) bug doing the rounds right now in Assassin’s Creed: Unity, whereby the faces of characters fail to load, revealing the gaping void that lies beneath. It’s made far, far worse by the addition of a perfectly normal pair of eyes and a sadistic, Joker-style grin.

It has been over a month since the release of Destiny and much has changed since Bungie’s latest released. Several events have come and gone, particular weapons have risen to fame and faded into oblivion, and the Crucible has been tailored and balanced several times over. Now seems as ideal a time as ever to reevaluate the new title from the developers of Halo.

Alongside Halos 1 through 4 in the upcoming Master Chief Collection, fans will also have access to the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta, starting December 27 and ending January 22, 2015. Not much else is known, but it will go beyond server stress tests unlike most modern betas, analyzing and incorporating user feedback to create a more balanced, refined experience. This makes sense considering the beta begins almost one year before Guardians is expected to ship in the winter of 2015.

At long last, 343 Industries has revealed the next, new entry in the Halo franchise, Halo 5: Guardians. Last Friday, Bonnie Ross, the general manager at 343, took to xbox.com to unleash in blog post the first news of the next “Halo journey” coming to Xbox One. Ross took some time detailing what 343 is trying to achieve with a next-gen Halo entry. “‘Halo 5: Guardians’ is a bigger effort than ‘Halo 4.'” She continues to claim, “That applies to the content and scope of the game,” as well as the technology the game is being produced on and for. Ross clarifies that the game “runs at 60 frames per second, on dedicated servers, with the scope, features and scale we’ve been dreaming of for more than a decade.” November 2015 is the only date given for the anticipated release of the game.

The past week saw two rather interesting pieces of news. The first was the financial report of publishing giant Square Enix for the fiscal year ending March 31 2014. Happily, they posted profits to the tune of $65 million; a huge step up from last year’s disastrous $134 million net loss. Crediting the turnaround to …

Rarely, if ever, is a game so exceedingly great it warrants a remake only a year after release.  This is, however, the case with The Last of Us, the late PS3 entry from Naughty Dog (the Uncharted series) that is coming to the PS4 in the way of The Last of Us: Remastered.  Perhaps this is merely an effort …

I don’t know a lot about Quantum Break. I know it’s a next-gen game for the Xbox One that will be twinned with a TV series, and I know it’s being developed by Remedy Entertainment, the studio responsible for Max Payne and Alan Wake. It was announced at E3, but its reveal wasn’t accompanied by …

Last weeks release of Halo 4 by Microsoft’s 343 Industries was a huge deal for videogame fans. A trailer released for the game a few weeks earlier was an equally huge deal for completely different reasons. The two-minute and twenty-one second launch trailer, titled “Scanned,” made its debut on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” on …