Halo Wars Strategic Options DLC

Players looking to add a little more substance to their Halo Wars experience now can look to Xbox Live Marketplace, where the Strategic options downloadable content is now available for purchase.

Announced earlier, the Strategic Options pack introduces 3 new single and multiplayer skirmish game types to help players play out the war between humanity and the Covenant. Keepaway Mode is a Capture the Flag like mode with a free-roaming Forerunner Sentinel in place of a flag; Tug of War Mode has players trying to see who can build the biggest army; and Reinforcement Mode pits players against successive waves of enemies with an ever-changing set of units at their disposal.

All of this new gameplay comes at a price, of 800 Microsoft points, which seems a little bit on the pricey side for just 3 game modes. Still, if you love your Halo Wars and are looking to get a little more out of it, Strategic Options is your downloadable content.

Halo Sniper Video

Are you guys as frustrated that you can’t share your in-game Halo 3 movies without a video capture setup as I am? Well good news for us is that Bungie is beta-testing a service that will let you share your clips to the world, for a price.

Have you ever noticed that a recorded video in Halo 3 doesn’t take up much hard drive space? This is because the video is encoded in game date instead of actual media. So when you playback the video, the game renders it in real-time, instead of playing a movie. This is great for sharing your favorite moments with your Xbox Live buddies, but not so good for those wishing to broadcast these moments to the world. Well enter Bungie’s render-to-video service. First announced in October 2208, the render-to-video service does just what it says. It takes the game data and creates an actual, downloadable video from it. Bungie has wired together a number of rendering systems, referred to as the Hydra Contraption, which are dedicated to creating such videos for paying customers of their Bungie Pro storage service.
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Bruckheimer, Veevaert, and Cohen

The future of gaming is now in the hands of super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and they will be original and tell great stories, according to the new men running Jerry Bruckheimer Games.

The grand collaboration between Pirates of the Caribbean and CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Rock Band creator MTV Games took another step forward with the announcement today that Bruckheimer Games will be led by 2 gaming industry veterans.

Jim Veevaert, a Microsoft veteran who was executive producer of Halo 3 and worked with gaming giants Bungie, Epic and Rare during his tenure at the company will be Bruckheimer’s president of production. Jay Cohen, former senior vice president of publishing at Ubisoft, credited with helping land the Tom Clancy franchises as well as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed, will be Bruckheimer’s director of development.

These 2 titans of industry will enable the new company to “create content that challenges the way things are done and the experiences gamers have today,” Bruckheimer said in a press release announcing the hires.
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