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Radioactive IT E3 08: Microsoft: Gears of War 2 but no Halo?
Radioactive IT E3 08: Microsoft: Gears of War 2 but no Halo? | E3 08: Microsoft: Gears of War 2 but no Halo? |
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| by Mike Bantick | |
| Tuesday, 15 July 2008 | |
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Microsoft is determined to shake off the First Person Shooter only tag the Xbox platform currently has. To this end we also saw party games such as the 85 track strong Guitar Hero World Tour as well as 84 tracks of Rock Band 2 featuring the almost mythical Guns and Roses “Chinese Democracy” album content. The karaoke/SingStar competitor, Lips also made it on stage, featuring the motion-sensitive microphone controller (is that the extent of motion control Microsoft is planning? I doubt it) Grand Theft Auto IV exclusive download content is still on the cards for a release before the end of the year. Gears of War 2 and Fable 2, highly anticipated sequels to magnificent originals also flagged mentions during the keynote. Peter Molyneux gave the assurance that “Fable 2 is done” and features an online co-op mode enabling players to jump in and out of each others adventures from child hood to adult in the fantasy world. And it is inevitable that the charismatic front man of Epic’s Gears of War, Cliff Bleszinski, would take to the stage and illustrate the backs-to-the-wall action movie style of the sequel. Due for release on November 7th this year, get ready to turn up the Brown and Red settings of your TV for Gears of War 2. Microsoft’s Don Mattick rolled out some numbers on stage along with a bold statement; "I'm willing to declare here today that Xbox 360 will sell more consoles worldwide this generation than PS3." U.S sales of Xbox 360 have now reached 10.3 million putting it 5 million ahead of PS3 Other stats rolled out by Mattick included: *Xbox 360 software had accounted for over 2.7 billion software sales in the past 12 months. *Third-party game revenue on 360 "outpaced the Wii and PS3 combined" in the last 12 months. *A new member joins Xbox live every 5 seconds, which now has over 12 million members. *XBL members have spent more than one billion dollars on Xbox Live. Apparently over a million downloads of the XNA software have also occurred. Hopefully this means many are busy building garage generated games for publishing on XBLA. The surprising thing was, no mention of any upcoming Halo branded products – including Halo Wars (the Halo universe RTS game). Perhaps Bungie is running an independent path at this years summit. Now it is hold-your-breath time to see what tomorrow’s back-to-back Sony and Nintendo presentations will bring. |
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