Did we get your attention? We hope so. Hopefully before its too late too. Because if you were already interested in picking up Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden II, if you pre-order the game at Circuit City, you can score the Halo 3 Legendary Map pack for FREE. While the process isn’t instantaneous, Circuit City will email you a “redemption” code within a week of your order.

And seeing as our super series Halo doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in the near future, it could be a good way to save yourself 800 Microsoft Points.

Ninja Gaiden II at Circuit City

The $300 million question: When gamers think “Halo,” do they think of Microsoft, Xbox 360 or Bungie? That’s the question Bungie faces going into the future with its umbilical cord severed from the big Microsoft machine. ‘Specially when accounting for the millions of dollars sunk into branding that tied the Halo franchise so closely to entities other than Bungie. Bungie Community Lead Brian Jarrard voiced such concerns to Edge recently:

Not everyone that buys Halo knows what Bungie is… We want to convert Halo fans into Bungie fans and so we’ll take them with us when we do the next game.

So what do you think? How many of our loyal halo fans are actually Bungie fans too?

“We want to convert Halo fans into Bungie fans”

At the MI6 marketing conference earlier this week, various Microsoft staffers presented a talk outlining how they successfully marketed Halo 3 to the masses. They explained how their main goal in expanding the audience for the third installment of Bungie’s saga was to put a more human face on Master Chief.

“The marketing statement was really based around Master Chief. We did some research, and found out that people thought of Master Chief the same way they think of Robocop and the Terminator, a killing machine… we had to humanize him to reach a broader audience.”

To this end they created the ‘A Starry Night’ advertisement, which gave us a rather heart-wrenching look at MC as a child, as well as the famous diorama commercials, which showcased his heroism. They talk also covered the Crackdown beta, which invested players in the game. Hit up Gamasutra for a full writeup of the talk. You’d have thought all the marketing strategy they needed was calling the game Halo 3.

Analysis: Microsoft On The Secrets Of Marketing Halo 3