Gears Bonus Content Released Two brand new maps, a video and a game update are now available for Gears of War - just press X at the main menu screen! More >
Interview & Weapon Guide Don't forget to check out our Gears weapon guide, as well as our interview with Mark & Cliff of Epic. More >
Lotro Stres Test Experience Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. [European Only]
Manifesto Answer Poenas_Dare looks at how Gears answers David Wong's Gamers' Manifesto.
Gears Bonus Maps & Patch: The Good, the Bad & the Upscaled 480p We've posted our thoughts on the recently-released Gears of War game update and bonus maps.
In our latest poll, let us know if you've managed take all that single-player Gears of War can throw at you. Have you beaten General Raam on Insane mode?
Thanks to everyone who voted in last week's poll. Turns out that most of you were looking forward to bonus content for Gears in 2007... and now we have it. How about that.
Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour."
Slightly off-topic, but it does at least look like the COG armor from Gears of War :).
Friday, 12 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Gears Tops December Games Charts 14:13 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Gears of War was the most-purchased game in the United States last month for the second month in a row, according to NPD statistics released today. Following Gears was Madden 2007 in second place and Guitar Hero 2 in third.
In the next Gears of War update users running 1280x1024 monitors will get true 1280x720 (720p) image letterboxed within 1280x1024. This should give the full HD experience.
Many users spoke up and said they favored playing the game at higher resolution in a letterbox rather than playing it in full-screen mode. To achieve the proper aspect ratio in full screen mode we had to render at 900x720 (the next usable 5:4 resolution below our maximum of 1280x720) and then let the Xbox 360 scale to fit.
As a temporary measure one of our programmers suggested that between now and the next update that users of 1280x1024 monitors might find the picture more pleasing if they set their Xbox to 1024x768 - the aspect ratio is pretty close but the actual resolution is about 45% higher.
We apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused. I'll try to get an estimated date for the next update and post it here in the forum as soon as I can. We appreciate everyones' patience with this issue.
Gears Sells 3 Million 8:01 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Apparently, as I doubt anyone is surprised, Gears has reached the outstanding mark of 3 million units sold (the last report, just four days ago was around 2.7 million) since the end of December. Check out Major Nelson for a little additional info on Xbox 360 popularity if you have continued interest.
Patch Comments By Mark 12:27 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Mark Rein continues to respond to forum posts regarding the recent patch. In particular he has explained why fewer Xbox Live! servers are being reported now (from 25 to 10) and asserts that any continued VGA issues are being addressed. Here’s a quote:
At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of Gears of War servers. We used to return a list of 25 but in this patch we only return 10. What we found is that when we were querying XBL for 25 servers it takes just long enough to get the query back that many of them are likely to be full by the make your decision and select one - so people were getting a lot of server full connect errors because of this. By reducing to query to just 10 we get the query back twice as fast and the likelihood you can join a game (before it fills up) increases dramatically.
The trailer weighs in at 108MB, the map pack itself is 98MB. There's also a dashboard theme included.
Enjoy!
Tuesday, 9 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Mark Explains nVidia Drivers 19:45 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Mark Rein has created a forum post debunking the latest Gears to PC rumors. In his post Mark explains that nVidia drivers contain references to Gears because Epic was involved with nVidia in optimizing drivers for the purpose of development (for both Gears and Unreal Engine 3). Here are excerpts from the original post:
You know console games are developed on PCs, right? Even if we never release Gears of War on PC we still need to run the game on PC to develop and test content for it.
[...]
We gave NVIDIA a copy of wargame.exe (along with some sample content from Gears) so they could help us tweak Unreal Engine 3 performance and reliability on NVIDIA graphics chips. That was necessary to make the development tools perform well and ensure that their drivers would support UE3 going forward.
[...]
So in reality the only thing this supposed "leak" demonstrates is that we work closely with NVIDIA to ensure the best possible performance for our engine on their platforms. Ditto for ATI and other graphics vendors as well.
The official position on Gears on PC has always been that it is possible, and that Epic are open to the possibility of a PC port, however Gears has been designed around the 360, and remains a 360 exclusive in the meantime.
Quoth the Joystiq:
"There have been other signs that point to Gears of War eventually being released on the PC, and we're here with another Indiana Jones-like piece to the puzzle. Some Nvidia ForceWare drivers have been turning up with references to Gears of War in them. Now, before the rumor-mill gets into full swing, we'd like to caveat this news by saying the drivers were downloaded from The Guru of 3D, a site where you can download tweaked and modded drivers. They're also in beta-form, so we're not sure if this sign leads to the Ark of the Covenant or not. It's entirely possible these beta drivers include code for an as-yet-unreleased game or, and perhaps more likely, a precocious gamer decided to have a little fun with everyone's expectations. Both Microsoft and Epic have stated that there are no plans to bring Gears of War to the PC in the near future, but perhaps they just meant during the next five minutes, who knows."
"Games for Windows will be hitting full swing with the release of Vista, but is this Gears of War rumor the real deal? It took Halo: Combat Evolved two years to make it from the consoles to the desktops, so, following that timeframe, we're already overdue for Halo 2 on PC, which is due with the similarly delayed launch of Vista. So, with a two year gap between console and PC versions, does it make sense to see Epic's shiny crown jewel appear under the Games for Windows brand? If you really want to kickstart this new initiative with a double-dose of Halo 2 and GoW, then it sure does. Two best-selling Xbox games would be a nice reason for folks to upgrade to Vista."
It's important to note in relation to this last point that Epic VP Mark Rein explicitly said in our recent interview that Gears would NOT be a Vista exclusive if it did eventually come to the PC.
As ever, take this speculation with a pinch of salt until any official announcement is made.
"That title is now a Halo-like franchise that continues to drive hardware in a very positive way," Bach said. "We think it's an evergreen property that we're going to be able to leverage for a long time."
Map - Raven Down: A Raven Helicopter has gone down in the middle of a large scale battle with the omnipresent Locust Horde. Gears have taken out the Seeder and gamers join Delta Forces moving into the crash site from all angles to search for survivors.
Map - Old Bones: In an attempt to eradicate any traces of human history and culture, the Locust Horde has emerged under Sera's Capitaline Museums and has begun to destroy them brick by brick. Each gamer's mission is to help the Delta Force recapture the museums before all remnants of humankind's existence are obliterated.
Video: An introductory video by Mr. CliffyB himself.
Patch: According to Joystiq, Mark Rein has confirmed that a patch for the game will be rolled out ahead of the bonus content. A list of changes and fixes can be found over here.
Of course, all of this is free - no need to break into that stash of Microsoft points.
This time we're not making you wait around for the most exciting category. What most gamers want to know when they plunk down about half a grand for a system is whether it looks better than the console they scorned. This category is an easy call. Gears of War is the best looking game ever made. Even though the characters are generic meat heads the architecture and the detail put into the environments is astounding. Not that Resistance is ugly and on a technical level it puts a lot more action on the screen at once with no hiccups.
Jon Miller, IGN Xbox 360: Graphics has to go Gears. In fact, Resistance has a very average look to it in my opinion, especially after looking at both games side by side. Makes you wonder just what the hell Sony was talking about with all that "next-gen starts when we say it does" talk.
On the other hand, Gears is possibly the best-looking console game to date.
Ever wonder why Microsoft hasn't released an HDMI cable for the Xbox 360, or whether the AV port was really capable of digital out? Well, here's your answer: we landed pictures of what appears to be the second Xbox 360 -- the Xbox 360 v2, if you will -- codenamed Zephyr. (The original Xbox 360, if you recall, was codenamed Xenon.) The long rumored about and awaited update to the console won't just feature a new, cooler 65nm processor, it's also finally added an HDMI port for full digital 1080p pleasure, as well as a 120GB drive, just what the doctor ordered. The 120GB drive may or may not come bundled with the kit, we don't yet know, just as we also don't yet know how much a Zephyr 360 is going to run (we imagine it'll go for the same price as currently so they can keep up a little on their expanding margin). But our very kind Xbox insider seemed happy to let us know we'd be able to get them "soon."
