XBox.com has news that some of the Game Developers from High Moon Studios will be online tonight (7/29) from 9PM EST until Midnight, playing mutliplayer matches on War for Cybertron. Dev Gamertags will be
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so send an invite or friend request to one of these gamertags to get in on the action!

This weekend will also play host to the second double XP multiplayer weekend for the game. This will last from Friday at 9PM EST through Monday at 3AM EST. Play any matches during this time and earn double the experience points. This is sure to help any players having trouble racking up those multiplayer achievements based on levels.

A few words on screen, no dialog and a little peek of action, all set to new music from Marty O’Donnell.

Noble Team’s last stand on the doomed planet Reach begins September 14.

Bungie has posted their weekly update in advance of ComiCon. Its a pretty big info dump, reasoning they’d rather get out ahead of the players taking cell phone pics and just let people see the real deal. One of the images they posted is the “Initial Armory Inventory” and it represents the custom options for Multiplayer and Firefight game modes. Bungie has been championing the options for custom characters since day one, but this image shows a few people you didn’t expect.

Well, you wouldn’t expect them if you didn’t see the banner image on this post. From left to right thats Buck, Sgt Johnson, Cortana, and Spartan 117 himself: Master Chief. Allowing those hardened Marines to drop into Firefight is one thing, but Cortana comes out of nowhere. Will we have a playable glowing blue AI skin? Its that too weird?

How do we know this isn’t just a dump of artwork accidentally left in with new elements? Steve Downes, who provided the voice of Master Chief over 3 Halo games, has said he’ll be back in Reach.

Dragon Age 2 is real, Poweteers, just as real as Santa Claus, only REALER. And given hints in GameInformer’s website, it seems that a few of my well-placed hunches about any potential sequels may yet pan out! Come with us as we analyze the news coming from BioWare.

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Look, we all miss Conan. Its OK. Lets move on.

Late Night With Jimmy Fallon is probably the most geek friendly network TV show on the air, and they tested the limits. This week was “Video Game Week” since Jimmy couldn’t go to E3, he brought on a game demo every night. Last night for the finale he had Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Amie show of Donkey Kong Country Returns. Jimmy mentions the last DK game he played was on N64, and then Reggie tried to correct him by saying it was a Super NES game. Nintendo’s revisionist history at work.

Hit the jump for demos for Jimmy playing Killzone 3, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, Kinect, and Call Of Duty Black Ops. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Over the course of E3, Halo: Reach developer Bungie did mention in interviews that the Firefight game mode would return. They even said matchmaking would be part of the experience and there would be lots of customization options.
What they didn’t show us was the game in action, so here you go. Grunts, Jackyls, Brutes, and Elites.

Also: the “BlackEye” Skull is gone. Hoorah!

Since the days of the NES, consoles have been known to receive redesigns mid-way or later in their cycle. The NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, PSone, PS2 and the rival PS3 have all received smaller, redesigns in their cycles. Given how brief the original Xbox’s life-span was, most didn’t mind that the Xbox360 was a tad smaller than the original system. However, given Microsoft’s rush to deliver the console to the market, they company seemingly cut corners in terms of design (a much discussed topic for another place and another time) to get their next-gen machine that was ahead of its time on store shelves first.

Sony and Nintendo both delivered more technically stable systems, spending an extra year to work out most of their kinks. Since release many fans wondered if Microsoft would ever re-design the Xbox360. Technically they did make many internal revisions, as the system receive HDMI standard in mid-2007 as they introduced their Elite systems as well as several revisions to disc drives and motherboards over that span. Flash forward to E3 2010, Microsoft reveals one of their best-kept secrets, their newly designed, smaller, sleeker (albeit more angular), system simply called “Xbox 360 S Console” and it was very well worth the wait..
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Its the last day of E3, and all the publishers, studios, businessmen, designers, and artists have played their best hand of the year. There is no comparison in any other industry. Imagine if Hollywood showed a trailer for every movie of the next year on the same weekend. Thats crazy! And yet its E3.

In that spirit, those of us who follow at home don’t get hands on impressions, we just get 2 minute snippets of the games we’ll be playing from now until next E3. Who had the best?
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