Forza 3 Drive Your Dreams Event – Toronto
Saturday October 24th I had a chance to attend Drive Your Dreams with Forza Motorsport 3 and Xbox 360! Event located in Toronto on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. The event consisted of checking a lot of cars, playing some Forza 3, getting your picture taken in A Ferrari F430 and going for a ride on the auto cross track.
There isn’t much more to say but check out the photos
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read moreHalo Waypoint’s Content and Career Mode Screens
Halo Waypoint will offer Halo fan’s the latest news, activities and content ranging from interviews, trailers, screenshots and community content all in one place.
Halo Waypoint will also provide a new challenge for Halo gamers with a career system tied to in-game accomplishments across multiple Halo games. At launch, career tracking will include Halo 3: ODST, Halo 3, Halo Wars and all Game Add-on content for those titles. Available exclusively on Xbox LIVE, Halo Waypoint will provide a dynamic experience that will continue to grow and expand with new content updated regularly.
Previews of the highly anticipated anime anthology Halo Legends, will be available exclusively on Halo Waypoint starting Nov. 7. Halo Legends is just one of the Halo exclusives that won’t be found anywhere outside of Halo Waypoint.
Check out these screen shots of Halo Waypoint
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read moreMass Effect 2 Coming January 26, 2010
Commander Sheppard will be making his highly anticipated return to the Xbox 360 and PC on January 26,2010
read moreHalo 3 ODST Review
This is the latest Halo title developed by Bungie Studios and it doesn’t star the famous Master Chief. Halo 3 ODST actually takes place before Halo 3. The UNSC are at war with the Covenant, and during the Convenant discover Earth and launch an assault on New Mombasa which is located in Africa. You play as the Rookie an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST) during the drop down to Earth your pod collides with another pod and you then you crash on Earth. Six hours later you wake and go through the basic Halo tutorial level. You now must make your way through the Streets of New Mombasa to find clues in order to piece together what happened to your follow squad members Dutch, Romero, Mickey, and Dare while you were unconscious. So essentially you start as the Rookie and once you find the clue that links you to a squad member you go ahead and play as your squad member and you live through what happened to them. Very interesting concept and Bungie totally pulled it off. The cut scenes tell a very interesting story.
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.
read morePreview of the new social networking applications and Zune Marketplace
This fall, Microsoft will be rolling a fall update to the dashboard that will include Facebook, Twitter and Zune Marketplace. I recently got to check out these new features coming to the dashboard courteously of Xbox Canada’s Glenn Purkis.
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?.
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