Video Games Today

The Halo Wars demo has hit the XBL Marketplace and we have our demo impressions for you. Halo Wars was developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The game is a Xbox 360 exclusive title and releases March 3rd in North America. Hit the jump for my impressions.



The demo gives you the opportunity to play 2 missions in the human campaign, and play unlimited amounts of 1v1 skirmish matches versus the computer. I'll start off with the campaign. Your army is on the UNSC ship the Spirit of Fire orbiting the planet Harvest. Your first mission is a basic tutorial on how to move around and fight. You are then given a hero unit and you set off on the missions. The missions are nothing to scream about, the main part of this demo is the skirmish mode.

Skirmish mode allows you to play as both the covenant and the UNSC, but you must use the preselected leader. For the covenant you can be the Prophet of Regret and for the UNSC you can be the Captain of the Spirit of Fire. Each leader (Six total in retail game; 3 UNSC/ 3 Covenant) has unique units, bonuses, powers, upgrades, perks, etc. to help define their play style. The Captain can use an orbital "sniper bomb" known as the MAC Bomb. With the MAC bomb you pinpoint an area and deal major damage in that small Area of Effect. The Prophet of Regret can use his power to destroy enemies quickly. The prophet, who is a decent fighter/defender early game, can call down a "holy beam" for 10 resources a second to nearly "insta-kill" and units found under it. He also has the unique Honor Elite Guards. These are basically Elites equipped with only energy swords and can cloak to sneak around. From what I tested they are only good to make an early rush with or defend from an early rush. Once the opposing side has middle tier units they are useless, except to be canon fodder.

The demo does not include all units or all of the tech tree so it is hard to estimate how deep this game will be, but from the demo it looks deep enough to keep you interested but will look like a flat experience to hardened PC RTS fans. Another issue is the controls. Many sites have critically acclaimed the controls, but I beg to differ. Sure, the controls work for a console, but there are many useless things maped to buttons that could be used better off. For example, you can use the right trigger to jump between bases and when you pass one and want to go back, you'd click the left trigger...right? Wrong. The left trigger is used to increase scroll speed accross the map. Sure, the increased speed is nice, but could have been implemented much better. They could have just made the scoll speed gradually increase as you scroll, for larger maps.

Overall, Halo Wars looks like a step in the right direction for a console RTS, but it is not the final step. Future console RTS should use Halo Wars as a model, but expand on it. Think of Halo Wars as the skeleton, we just need to add the muscle to it now. Also, after playing EndWar, lack of voice commands seems like a step backwards for a console RTS. I would have really liked to see Ensemble add an option for voice commands for tedious controls, that would free up the controller even more for a deeper experience.

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew

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The Halo Wars Demo is now available to the public. We will have full impression of the demo up later this week/weekend. Tell us what you think about the demo in the comments section!

Download Link: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/offers/0ddf000a-0000-4000-8000-00004d5388ba?cid=SLink

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew

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After watching this I am now interested in playing this game. At first glance it looked like a simple Rock-Paper-Scissors with Halo skins and a RTS on console (not a good resume'). This video now have me pumped for February 5th, and see if I will be buying the game, or just renting it for the story. I am not a big fan of Halo, and definitely not a fan of console RTS, but I think this could revolutionize console RTS. Do not keep this off your radar.

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew

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Planet Xbox 360 and MLG are giving away free Halo Wars Demo Codes to a few lucky people to get the demo early, before it's February 5th demo release date. Hurry and quickly enter to get that rare code!

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew

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Epic Game's latest blockbuster release Gears of War 2 only held it's grip on the number one seat of the xbox live charts for a short while. It has now fallen down to the number four seat. Halo 3 is back to the number one, followed by CoD:WaW and CoD4...then Gears 2. This also means even slower matchmaking for the Gears folks. Hopefully those Christmas Sales will boost Cliffy B's confidence again, and ours!

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew

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No, not yet. But soon.

That's right. When Halo3:Recon comes out it will be possible to unlock the once exclusive recon armor. Below are what's need to do the crouch jump in your new armor.

• 1.) The three Vidmaster Achievements (Annual, Lightswitch, 7 on 7) - From Halo 3
• 2.) The Brainpan Achievement -From Halo 3
• 3.) Three unknown achievements form Halo3:Recon.

So, it's NOT possible to unlock the Recon armor before Halo3:Recon comes out, but you can place your feet in the water by unlocking some of the achievements from Halo 3.

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Now playing: Radiohead - 15 Step

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Welcome to my new blog. I have been in the "blogging business" for awhile now, and have blogs on Affiliate Marketing, and a blog on just general things I want to rant about. I closed those down so I could open up my own blog here and focus primarily on it.

This blog will contain reviews, previews, interviews (Hopefully!), editorials, and much more. I hope you will stick around and bare with me as I get some blogs up to start me off. I'd appreciate to have you subscribe to the blog, and/or even "follow" me, if you are a Blogger.com user.

That is it for my opening post, hope to write more soon. Until then,
Lava~

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