Halo

CheapyD at CheapAssGamer.com scours both the online and offline world for the best deals on video games, and to help out your wallets, we're bringing his weekly recap to you!

Not a stellar week, but Kmart again provides the most bang for the buck. Not officially part of the Kmart ad, this week's standout is KmartGamer.com's $25 gift card with the purchase of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West promotion.

Also at Kmart, NBA 2k11 and Castlevania Lords of Shadow both include a $20 gaming coupon while NBA Jam and Wii Party each provide $15 in gaming coupons. Also, those who buy the Def Jam Rapstar bundle will receive 1600 Microsoft points or $20 in PSN credit.

Target is including a $20 gift card with new Wii Console bundles. Halo Reach commands a $10 gift card bonus.

Toys R Us is offering a $25 gift card with any PlayStation Move game or accessory purchase of $125 or more.

Visit CAG for more details and the rest of this week's Sunday ad deals.

Best of the Rest

• Mass Effect 2 (360) $19.99 at Amazon
• Modern Warfare 2 Maps 50% off on Xbox Live Marketplace and Steam
• GoGamer Madness sale

For more game deals, please visit CheapAssGamer.com and follow us on Twitter at videogamedeals and ukgamedeals.

Shocking but true: I've never drank a Mountain Dew before in my life. My mom never approved of neon yellow soda, and though I'm a full fledged adult now, the rule still applies...unless it's got the Halo: Reach logo plastered all over it.

Yesterday, we received a mysterious Halo: Reach Honor the Code kit courtesy of Mountain Dew and Doritos holding just that: six different flavors of the go-to drink for gamers attempting to pull an all-nighter of Firefight and two bags of chips to round up a healthy, nutritious meal. If that wasn't enough to make us feel special, the kit also included special "Honor the Code" cards of each new Halo: Reach character, describing their positions, background and birth date. (Did you know Commander Carter was a Leo? That means he's super charismatic and positive thinking!)

As fans of Halo: Reach, we thought it appropriate to don our Mark V helmets, reload the assault rifles and take these drinks out for a taste test ride on the company Warthog. We met back at base camp to compile our thoughts and here's what we found.

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Bungie announced as of its first week spinning in Xbox 360’s, over 70 million games of Halo: Reach have been played.  A number which undoubtedly has grown exponentially since then.  So it’s safe to say there are at least a few of you out there enjoying the adventures of Noble Team.  Many of you are also listening to the music composed for Reach and have bought the game’s soundtrack.  As of press time, it holds the #1 spot on Amazon’s MP3 Soundtracks chart and the #3 position on iTunes.  Since you have set your controllers down long enough to read this far, we’ve got some sounds for you to sample as part of The Feed’s review of the Halo: Reach soundtrack.  Hit the jump, Spartan!

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The Feed got to chat with Bungie’s Audio Director, Marty O’Donnell via subspace relay (the telephone) recently, and we asked him about everything from what went into creating the music for Halo: Reach, putting together the game’s soundtrack album and what he is working on next with Bungie.  We even let a few of our readers ask some questions. Hit the plasma-blue link below for the full interview.

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What can I say? As a kid, I really liked Steven Seagal. He was the king of bad action movies, with classics like Steven Seagal returns from a 7 year coma to kick ass in Hard To Kill, or Steven Seagal is ex-Navy SEAL / chef who fights mercenaries on a battleship in Under Siege, or Steven Seagal takes on Jamaican drug dealers in Marked For Death. Today, Steven Seagal is dealing with Jamaicans again, only this time he's singing some of the worst reggae ever recorded with them. Check it out along with some awesome Halo: Reach kills and more on this week's links.

• Steven Seagal tries his hand at Reggae. Jah? [FilmDrunk]

• Find out what happens when an Ed Hardy shirt comes to life. [CollegeHumor]

• Video of some of the most impressive and ridiculous kills in Halo: Reach so far. [UnrealityMag]

• The Mapleton Taxidermy and Cheese Store and 19 other ridiculous store combinations. [SuperTremendous]
   

According to statistics released yesterday by Microsoft's Major Nelson, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still the most-played online game on Xbox Live, beating Halo: Reach, but the statistics only cover the dates between September 13 and 19. Reach came out on September 14, so next week will be the true test of whether MW2 will be toppled from its spot on the top of the "charts" it's held for nearly a year.

Interestingly, online platform Raptr has released its own statistics that show that Halo: Reach has beaten MW 2, and that Modern Warfare 2's playtime has dropped by 50 percent since Reach was released. Raptr's numbers reflect Raptr users as opposed to the general population of Live users, though.

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Welcome, one and all to another glorious edition of your favorite weekly video game web show Feedback. Tokyo Game Show 2010 is now officially behind us, and, most importantly, everyone made the flight home (except of course for Randy, the intern I just made up. Poor guy.) Anywho, on this week’s show, Kevin "Back from the Land of the Rising Sun" Kelly, sun stabber Abbie Heppe, the always sunny Nikole Zivalich,  and son of a sabertoothed rock demon and fiery orc maiden J.P. Shub to discuss the week’s biggest news, TGS, and, officially, Halo: Reach.

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Halo: Reach came out a year after Halo 3: ODST, and there was even less of a gap between Halo: Wars and ODST. Look for this trend to continue.

According to Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer, "There's no explicit strategy that says we're to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years -- which was kind of our old cadence – is probably not frequent enough."

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I'm terrible at Halo. Like, really, really horrendous. I'm bad at the campaign mode, but my suckiness really shines in multiplayer. I'm perpetually at the bottom of the player list, and get called noob by 10 year-olds more often than I care to admit; however, I vowed that when Halo: Reach was released, I would end my noobness and get good. Really good. I imagined myself pwning and murdering scores of others in a death-orgy of epic proportions. But, sadly, as soon as I fired the game up a week ago, I was still Steve The Bullet Magnet, always hitting the melee button a second too late, or getting  picked off from across the map by a camper I couldn't even see. In short: still terrible and still a noob.

The conventional advice about getting better at multiplayer boils down to this: Play more and learn the maps. The problem is, I don't have the time or the inclination to do either. I'm that terrible combination of lazy and busy, and playing Halo in order to get better at playing Halo feels like work, and I don't like work, so screw that. I wasn't looking for a shortcut, just to avoid work, so in my quest for Halo: Reach power I turned to the dark side.

I scoured libraries full of eldritch tomes and called upon the esoteric power of obscure philosophies to improve my game. I even looked on the Internet.

From the mystical East, I called on the counsel of Zen Master Caitriona Reed. From deep in the realms of the sub-conscious (and the movie Inception), I tried lucid dreaming, which I learned about from Craig Sim Webb. And from Hell itself, I spoke to Magus Peter Gilmore -- the High Priest of the Church of Satan -- for tips on how to call on the Dark Lord Lucifer himself to lend his power to my Halo: Reach playing. This post is a documentation of my unholy experiments.

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According to users of Bungie's Halo: Reach message board, and G4 readers contacting our news tip line, some gamers  are having disc errors and freezing when trying to load Reach, rendering the game unplayable. Judging from the comments on the message board, the machines most affected by the glitches and problems appear to be launch 360s, specifically, those with 20GB hard-drives, although some Elite owners and others are reporting problems as well.

Microsoft's official word on the problem: "We are aware of a very small number of customers reporting that their copy of Halo: Reach is causing a 'disc read' error. Those affected should contact Microsoft customer support at 1-800-4MY-XBOX for troubleshooting assistance."

A quick survey of G4's email list revealed that all the Halo: Reach errors we've noticed have been smaller glitches (disappearing avatars, dropped multiplayer games, inexplicable checkpoint placement etc.) as opposed to game-killing errors. How about you guys? Have you noticed anything going wrong with Reach? If so, let us know in the comment section.

CheapyD at CheapAssGamer.com scours both the online and offline world for the best deals on video games, and to help out your wallets, we're bringing his weekly recap to you!

Most of this week's deals revolve around the launch of the Playstation Move, and Kmart has the most aggressive deals, providing gaming coupons with many Move related items:

• PS3 320GB Move Bundle - $40 gaming coupon
• Move Bundle - $25 gaming coupon
• Move Accessories (Move controller, Navigation controller, Charging Station) - $10 gaming coupon
• Move Games (Toy Story 3, Start the Party, Eye Pet, Kung Fu Rider, Sports Champion) - $10 gaming coupon

Also at Kmart, buy Civilization V (PC), get a $20 gaming coupon.

Toys R Us brings us some good offers too, including buy 2, get 1 free on all video games priced $19.99 and less and buy 1, get 1 40% off all PS3 games.

Best Buy discounts the PS3 Move compatible Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition to $29.99.

Visit CAG for more details and the rest of this week's Sunday ad deals.

Best of the Rest

• Borderlands (PC) $9.99 at Amazon
• Bioshock 2 (PC) $9.99 at Amazon
• Halo Reach (360) $49.99 at Newegg
• Rock Band DLC Sale (PS3) 9/21 to 10/4

The guys at Defend the House are back, and ready to bust some myths related to Halo: Reach.

Find out whether you can be killed by the rotating blades of a falcon, whether holograms are bulletproof, whether drop shields can float in mid air, and a lot more in the Halo: Reach Mythbusters video below:

Bungie plans to release the first Halo: Reach patch in October. It will add some game types and Forge maps, and will also squash bugs in the game and fix some of the balance issues in the game.

"The first matchmaking update for Reach will occur in early October and consist primarily of fixes for bugs and balance issues," Bungie posted. "We're not done testing them all yet, but when they're ready we'll fill you in on all of the little details. We'll also be adding some game types and Forge maps. Co-op campaign will be going live in October as well."

More details on the patch will be coming, and we'll share them with you as soon as we get them.

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 Even if you haven’t finished Halo: Reach yet, you know, generally, how the story is going to end. Despite all the insistence that iconic Halo protagonist Master Chief is not in Reach, he seems to make a rather interesting appearance of sorts right at the end of the game. But what’s particularly great about this brief, Easter Egg-y moment is how it gains added significance when you go back and watch how the original Halo begins. In fact, both games end and start with the same line of dialogue. Nicely done, Bungie. Nicely done, indeed.

It's Friday, at last, people. Let's talk games. What are you planning on playing this weekend? I'm all about Halo: Reach. I hope I see each of you in Team Slayer-- in spite of my meager skills at multiplayer, I'm spending the whole weekend hunkered down in Reach.