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'Halo 2: Anniversary' comes to PC on May 12th
'Halo 2: Anniversary' joins 'Reach' and 'Combat Evolved' on the PC Master Chief Collection.
Facebook donates £4.5 million to help train UK newspaper reporters
Facebook is extending another olive branch to the news industry in the form of a £4.5 million ($5.8 million) donation to subsidize 80 trainee journalists at local newspapers in the UK. It's the first time Facebook has offered such a pledge, which it's making as part of its new Community News Project.
Lenovo Reach cloud service opens in beta, official launch coming 'later this year'
Lenovo's getting into the cloud storage game, but rather than dive straight in, the company's taking a tiptoe approach. Starting today, curious consumers can sign up to preview the company's cloud service, dubbed Reach, which offers exactly what you'd expect: remote access to 5GB worth of stored files and applications from any device, be it Android, iOS or Windows. The actual beta won't be open until June 22nd, at which point only a select few will be able to test drive the new service and provide Lenovo with feedback. Depending on how smoothly things go, an official launch for all comers should be announced sometime "later this year." But with so many other free cloud storage options already available and so many consumers already tethered to those clouds, Reach could find itself overextended.
Visualized: world's most trafficked websites and their favicons
We knew Google Search was an iconic service (we had to), but seeing it dwarf the rest of the web like this is pretty humbling. This here map of the internets uses Alexa data from earlier this year to assign the favicon dimensions of each of the top 288,945 sites around the world. Oh, and if you don't have an icon sidled up next to your URL, tough luck, you're not on here. See how many you can spot before your eyes start bleeding, then hit up the source to look up your favorite sites. As to your absolute favoritest site of them all, you can spot us somewhere in the space between vBulletin and Wikipedia.
New Xbox 360 250GB Limited Edition Halo: Reach bundle revealed
The Halo series is no stranger to special edition Xbox 360 hardware, so it should come as no surprise that the latest entry, Halo: Reach, is also privy to such treatment. What makes it special, however, is that it's the first special edition based on the new model -- 250GB HDD, built-in 802.11n WiFi, a silver (presumably matte, based on the picture) finish, and custom, Halo-inspired sounds. The $399 price tag also nets you two special edition wireless controllers and, naturally, a copy of the game itself. Look for this September 14th, and really, if you're not into glossy black (and we feel ya, brother), this might be in your best interest to pick up. %Gallery-98042%
Bungie releases Halo: Reach screens, concept art and bios
Click image to Spartan-size We hope you wanted to see a bunch of screens from Halo: Reach today. Bungie has uploaded a ton of new images, showing off environments and gameplay, as well as an extensive collection of concept art (all compiled in the gallery below). You'll also find some character bios on Bungie's site, if you plan on getting to know your squad of Spartans a little better. The images are generally full of the things you'd expect at this point: Spartans; Covenant; and general Halo-y goodness, but one image in particular is very curious to us. Not only is the reticle not in the center of the screen, but there's also a HUD item scrubbed out. Whatever could it be? We know the internet has had way more experience than us in putting Halo stuff under the microscope, so we leave the guesstimating up to you. Best one wins our undying love and admiration forever! %Gallery-64713% [Thanks, Omer]
VGA 2009: Bungie's Marty O'Donnell talks moody soundtracks
This past Saturday brought us the Spike TV Video Game Awards and – before experiencing the litany of world exclusives that awaited us inside – we spent some time outside cruising the red carpet and talking (briefly!) to many of the game developers and talent. We squeezed them for information as fast as we could while simultaneously wishing them holiday cheer and good tidings. Yes, it was as awkward as it sounds. HHere's what we learned from Bungie's Halo-matic composer, Marty O'Donnell. Why was the music such a departure for Halo 3: ODST? It was just a completely different story with different characters, it was a small scale, it took place in a lonely city where it was raining. It was a detective sort of story where one lone ODST was looking for his buddies. From the very beginning Joe Staten, the writer, wanted to create an atmosphere that felt very film noir, very detective story. I'm the main composer, but my partner Mike Salvatore in Chicago and a couple of other guys in Seattle, Stan Laparte and C. Paul Johnson contributed stuff. I tried to keep all of the themes in that noir, jazz, dark area. There's a few times where we're in the rooftops or doing some high-action regular old Halo stuff in vehicles and we went back to that big, bombastic, epic stuff, but I always wanted to bring it back to that noir feel. Were there any musical references to classic Halo during those moments? I didn't do any actual thematic callbacks. I still wanted to do .... well, number one was no monks. But I still thought the big orchestral epic sound had a place. With some other stuff, you know. Piano, guitar, etc. It's like three hours of music, and you can't narrow yourself down to a small palette, you have to really be as expansive as possible. So now you're working on Reach? Yes, we're premiering the first look at the opening section of Reach. It's right out of the game. I'm really excited about it. It has a really different feel.
Bungie explains 'series of stumbles' in ODST marketing
From the initial talk of a lower price to a renaming, Bungie's ever-changing plans for Halo 3: ODST left a lot of people confused as to what the final product would be. "I'm no PR expert, but it's pretty obvious the game had a series of stumbles; from the naming, to the initial E3 2008 countdown reveal failure, and finally pricing ... it would definitely be nice to have a do-over for the game introduction," senior designer Lars Bakken told G4TV in a recent interview. "The big takeaway for us is just to never comment on matters that are outside of our control," added community manager Brian Jarrard. The subject of ODST becoming an "expansion pack," however, was never an arguable point to executive producer Curtis Creamer. "Though ODST was built from the Halo 3 engine, there were enough changes made to the engine that we could not have released it as an expansion in the way that you might equate with a PC game expansion pack ... the ODST executable is not compatible with Halo 3." The crew of Bungie devs also reconfirmed that "there are currently no plans for any ODST DLC," with all of the studio's resources tied up with Halo: Reach. Hopefully, our thirst for more Firefight maps will be quenched by the inclusion of the mode in future Halo games -- a prospect to which the developers responded, "Only time will tell." Do it for us, Bungie! Please? %Gallery-72961%
Bungie reveals new Halo 3: ODST campaign level, 'Kizingo Boulevard'
Save for the one story mission we saw at E3 2009 and the character introduction trailer, Halo 3:ODST's single-player campaign hasn't seen heavy exposure from developer Bungie. That all changed last night, when GTTV got a hold of design director Paul Bertone, who revealed "Kizingo Boulevard," a tank-based level that follows an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper from "kind of in the middle of the story." Later in the episode, Bungie's creative director, Joe Staten, teased a bit of info regarding next year's Halo: Reach, saying, "We're really excited about telling a story with more Spartans in it." Host Geoff Keighley pushes Staten on squad-based Halo rumors and receives an interesting answer: "Without any of the baggage of sort of squad-based combat, I think that would be a safe assumption." Maybe we'll finally find out what happened to Linda, Fred, and Kelly! ... we did not just write that. %Gallery-64703%
Report: Sales data undersells true reach of games
There seems to be a slight obsession with measuring the size of the video game market recently. First TV ratings experts Nielsen Media Research estimated nearly 46 million U.S. households have a game console. Then Scarborough Research ranked major U.S. cities based on console ownership. Now, Gameasure has issued a report saying simple sales metrics might be under-reporting the true reach of video games.The research group noted in a recent press release that video game sales don't take into account the true number of players created by "social game play, rental, used sales and pass-around." For example, while NPD estimates 2 million people bought Call of Duty 2 in North America, Gameasure estimates that 9 million North Americans have actually played the game. Such data is key to evaluating the effectiveness of in-game advertising, which cares more about individual eyeballs than game sales.While it's hard to know how reliable Gameasure's estimates are, it's nice to see somebody attempting to go past the sales numbers to estimate the true size of the game market.
