The story ends with your squad members fly out of the city in a captured Phantom and have took an engineer aboard. Eventually Sergeant Johnson arrives and tells the engineer that he intends to ask questions regarding its knowledge of the Covenant.

ODST plays very different from any other Halo game from the way the story is told to the underlying game mechanics. ODST doesn’t feel like a complete game but more like an expansion which allows Bungie to experiment and try new things. There are only a few new weapon variants, 1 new alien race and everything you shoot comes from Halo 3. The health system works a bit different, the more you get shot the more you stamina goes down that leads to your health going down. Low on health? Find a health pack to regain your health.  The other big addition is your visor, see the streets of New Mombasa are very dark and in order to find your way you need to turn your visor on. This is a catch 22 as it allows the enemies to find where you are. Marty O’Donnell does a fantastic job with the soundtrack which really does set the mood for each level.

Another new mode in Halo ODST 3 is Firefight which allows you and up to 3 other friends take on waves of Covenant troops.  Out of the box it comes with 10 maps and each map has an achievement for amassing 200,000 in points on a map. This should keep things fun and exciting for a period of time before Bungie will need to release new maps to play on. The one negative about the firefight was that as a team you share 4 lives. So if you one douche on your team that is constantly dying, you will get annoyed very quickly.

There is a second disc included with both standard and limited editions that features Halo 3’s Multiplayer. There aren’t any real big updates from Halo 3’s Mutliplayer. The second disk comes with all 21 Halo 3 maps plus 3 new maps which are only available if you buy Halo ODST. The new maps are Hetertic a remake of the Halo 2 Midship map, Citadel and Longshore.

Overall Halo ODST is a solid game and will provide you with a great story and Halo combat we all love. Overall the game’s length is could be compared to as expansion pack. It really is short but packs in a load of fun either single player or co-op. The real winner in the Halo ODST package is firefight, fighting off wave after wave of Covenant with a limited number of lives is a blast with a group of friends. I really wish that ODST came out as a downloadable expansion instead of a full retail release. The retail price of $69.99 Canadian is a bit overpriced but if you a diehard Halo fan and need your fix Halo ODST is for you.

The Facebook application is also launched from the Xbox live Dashboard and once you opt in you will you will be connected to your news feed, profile and allow you to update your status. Another cool thing is you are able to search your facebook friends and see if any of them are connected to Xbox live. It will be interesting to see how developers integrate facebook into their games.

Zune Marketplace is going to replace the current Xbox Video Marketplace and will provide consumers with streaming 1080p movies and television shows. During the demonstration, I was asked what movie I wanted to see and I picked one of the Harry Potter movies. After you select your movie, the service automatically runs tests to determine whether to stream in Standard Definition or High Definition, which is based on the speed of your internet connection. Within seconds we were watching Mr. Potter causing havoc with his cousins. One thing that was not discussed was the pricing structure of the movies, I’m curious to see if the price will remain the same or if they get increased.

I am a Twitter junkie and when Microsoft announced Twitter was coming to the Xbox live service I was generally excited. After seeing the demonstration, I have to say that it very easy to use and well designed. What you get is an application which you launch from the dashboard in which you can view tweets, retweet, search and view trending topics all of which are current twitter features. Once you close the application no more twitter updates. This is where I would have wanted some sort of background application were if someone’s @ replies me or sends me a direct message a little pop notification would appear.

Overall I was generally impressed with I had to see and I think if Microsoft is on their way to making the connected console. However there still is 100 friend limit issue… if you truly want to be connected to all social platforms, should there really be a friends limit?.

First of all I hope all of you had a safe and happy holiday season.

As I mentioned before the break we’ve been working on a major title update for Gears of War 2. This update will address bugs and exploits as well as add some new achievements related to downloadable content. We don’t have an exact date for it but all indicators are it will go live within January. If that changes we’ll let you know.

We’re fixing a whole bunch of online exploits. For example we’ve fixed the ability to wield an invisible shield, melee through some walls, gain infinite Lancer ammo and equip a shield and a two-handed weapon simultaneously plus many more.

We’re also making several small changes to improve the overall online gameplay experience. A few of the ones that might interest you are; increased penalties for quitting matches early, adding additional spawn protection against planted grenades and chainsaw attacks, and adding the ability to see the Submission flag carrier destination by using Tac/Com.

We know you folks love achievements so on the achievement side we’re adding achievement progress numbers to the War Journal, increasing the frequency of in-game Achievement progression notifications and adding some new Achievements for DLC.

This is just a very small list of some of the things that will be in the next title update but one more item which has been talked about a lot in our forums deserves a special call out…

About that shotgun…

We fixed the client side hit detection on the shotgun so that in a high-latency (i.e. “laggy”) match, the shotgun will be more reliable. We’ve also fixed another bug whereby shotgun and boomshot rounds could strike the ground when firing from the hip.

So there’s a brief status report on the next title update. At some point I expect we’ll post a more detailed list but I assure you we’re working hard to get this out the door and once it’s done we’ll start working on the next update. We’ll try to do a better job keeping you informed of our progress on future updates and we’ll try to be a little more active in the forums once this update is released.

Source Epic Games – More information can be found here.