Gears of War Realm

Not to be outdone by the Boston Aqua Teen movie fiasco, Microsoft has decided to up the virtal marketing ante by opening an emergence hole in South America.
Just kidding, this is a true story and not caused by Microsoft or Gears of War.

This is actually a story from a few months ago, but I just ran across the story again today. This is just an amazing story where a sinkhole opened in Guatemala City, Guatemala. It resembles almost perfectly the Locust Emergence Holes in Gears of War.

I attached a few smaller photos here, but check out the story for some much better high-resolution photos.

TrendPimp has put together an article series of 10 videos that protray what they feel are the “Top 10″ glitches in Gears of War. Here is one just for a taste of what they have to offer.

They are very interesting, so I suggest everyone go check them out. Hopefully future updates will make most of these obsolete.

I found this great news on digg.com today, it appears Gears of War is selling great over in Japan.

“This week’s Japanese sales charts are frightening! I can’t understand what’s going on! There’s an Xbox 360 game on the list, meaning this report must have come from the Bizarro World Branch of Media Create or that the Japanese are starting to come around on this Xbox 360 thing….”

So here’s a shout out to all of our Japanese readers out there!

[From Kotaku and digg.com ]

Today a minor patch was issued for Gears of War over Xbox Live. According to Mark Rein the patch only addresses “It is a minor compatibility update. No gameplay or functionality changes at this time.”

This doesn’t fix the VGA display issues that have yet to be resolved since the first update. Hopefully you VGA users will see a fix to that soon!

In case you forgot to download CliffyB’s video walkthrough of the new Gears of War Map Pack on the Xbox Live Marketplace, we’re here to help. Thanks to Microsoft, we have a 720p HD quality copies of the video for you to download and view. We also have put together an easy to watch streaming format below as well, as well as two copies of the video for the Apple iPod with Video and Sony PSP. We are also putting up a 420p copy, but having problems creating it properly right now.

Also, here is the long list of changes that came in the last patch. The list was posted by Mark Rein on the Epic Games Forums.

• Fixed aspect ratio distortion when using VGA cable with 4:3 displays at resolutions higher than 640×480
• Fixed voice issue with new players joining Player Match games in progress
• Players can now get the Achievement for “Dish Best Served Cold” when using Troika turret to kill RAAM
• Fixed rare situation where host could loop countdown and never start match
• Fixed rare situation where players could get stuck after chainsawing in multiplayer
• Reduced Grenade Tag melee distance
• Enabled “Strict” NAT check on host to prevent possible connection issues
• Optimized server browser queries to return results more quickly and prevent scroll bars from hiding quality of service icons
• Reduced number of possible revives in Execution to match Warzone
• Removed host name from Ranked match server browser
• Disabled security cameras in Ranked matches
• Ranked matches now require balanced teams (3v3 or 4v4)
• Increased penalty for quitting a Ranked match to -50 points
• Added additional cheat detection code
• Additional housekeeping updates

With all these changes I can say that the game seems to play much better because it feels more balanced than before. I still miss some form of “party” system for Ranked Matches so I can play with friends easily. Otherwise I wont be playing many ranked games, and instead favoring Unranked so I can play with friends.

The new maps are a lot of fun, and seem to be making most fans happy. I hope they have more up their sleeves over at Epic Games for us.

Today Microsoft and Epic Games has revealed that there will be new maps for Gears of War available later this week on Wednesday, Jan. 10.

The new maps, brought to you free thanks to the Discovery Channel, are called Raven Down and Old Bones. Here is a description of these new levels courtesy the press release from Microsoft. Also I attached some photos of the new levels, click on the thumbnails to see the full sized images.

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.

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.

The Discovery Channel is also giving away 2 MILLION free Microsoft Points in a contest to promote the season premier of their “Future Weapons” TV series. Contest details can be found at www.readyaimfuture.com. I know I’ll be entering, you can never have enough Microsoft Points!

Also according to Epic’s President, Mark Rein, there will be a multiplayer patch released on Tuesday, January 9th, the day before the maps. I expect this to fix the VGA display issue, matched multiplayer connection bugs and probably a few more surprises.

Update 1:00pm CST
I have updated the story with the correct Discovery Channel contest link, it should have been www.readyaimfuture.com. I also added images of the maps to the story above. Also added notes about the game update to come down on 1/9/2007.

According to gamer news site Gamasutra, Microsoft has issued an announcement that Gears of War has sold over 2 million copies worldwide in the past month, making it the fastest selling Xbox title yet.

Here’s a list of sales stats that Microsoft stated for Gears of War.

• Over two million sales world wide.
• Over one million copies sold in the US alone.
• Fastest selling Xbox title in history, beating Halo 2’s old record.
• 94.2% Average Rating on GameRankings
• 7 Million Achievements Unlocked in six weeks
• Gold Xbox Live membership has grown 50% since launch
• One million unique players online
• Ten million online games

Congrats to the people at Epic Games and Microsoft for this great achievement. I’m sure the allocades are not over yet!

[From Gamasutra]

Back during the Chicago Match Made in Hell event I talked with Epic’s Mike Capps about downloadable content. He said the team was working on some stuff, new maps for sure, but was unaware of the pricing structure since that is up to Microsoft.

Well now two months later it seems it’s still in the works, and if Epic gets their way it’ll be free to us gamers. According to an interview at the Spike Video Game Awards, Mike Capps again stated they are working on it and that they want it to be free. Here’s the quote:

“We started long before the game ever came out; we started on the next stuff. We always take care of our customers, we always give them stuff for free and we’re going to keep doing that forever.” - Dr. Mike Capps - President of Epic Games

I hope Epic gets their way and continues their efforts to give away free content to the fans of their games. This is a huge thing they do with the Unreal series, and to continue with the Gears of War series would be a positive influence on the game and the community as well. But this time around Microsoft is the publisher, so they get final word on the downloadable content. There is hope though, because Microsoft gave away Halo 2 add-on maps for free when they were sponsored by Mountain Dew who is activily trying to capture the gamer market for their line of sodas. Maybe they can get chainsaw maker Stihl to sponsor the free addons.

[From Xbox 360 Fanboy and Team Xbox]

So there is a lot of talk around the community since Emergence Day that Gears of War doesn’t play properly on some user’s Xbox 360 consoles. If you too have this problem, you are not alone it seems.

Some bloggers over at Xbox 360 Fanboy and IGN have put up some information (and video) of the issue, along with ways they prevented or solved the problem. There are also lots of user comments on both sites telling of similar issues. It seems you either need to replace the Gears of War disc or theXbox 360 itself to solve the problem. Sadly it seems Microsoft isn’t being incredibly helpful with the issue, while Epic Games (who is not at fault) is trying to keep passing the issues back to Microsoft who are pushing it off on them.

Here is what Mark Rein, Epic Game’s VP had to say about the issue in the Epic Games Forums.

Guys — we don’t make the discs, Microsoft does that. Microsoft is also the publisher of the game which means they do all the support and testing. If some Microsoft support person is telling you to call Epic please ask them for their name and phone number and we’ll pass that along to Microsoft to handle because that absolutely should not be happening. We have no facilities for end-user support other than this forum and even then all we can do is listen and pass you back to Microsoft.

We especially can’t help you with hardware problems like scratches on your disc or unreadable discs. We don’t make the disc drives either

Lets hope Microsoft can start handling this issue properly so all of you getting copies of Gears of War under the tree this holiday season can get right to playing without issues.

Last month, to celebrate the launch of Gears of War we held an Emergence Month Contest. We offered up a Collectors Edition copy of Gears of War along with two Limited Edition faceplates from E3 2006 and a bunch of t-shirts that we collected from the Match Made in Hell event.

Those who wanted to enter the contest had to put a banner advertising the game and our website to generate an entry for the contest. Here are the winners, along with the number of unique visitors they got.

Vicken J. from Glendale, CA took first place with 232 hits.

Nick D. from Toronto, Canada took second with 210 hits.

Adrian J. from Bishop, TX took third place with 143 hits.

Geoff G. from Fairport, NY took fourth place with 112 hits.

and

William N. from Salem, OR took home fifth place with 83 hits.

Congrats to the winners! I hope you enjoy your prizes, they should be arriving shortly!

Stay tuned for a few new contests that we’re going to start up here soon for some extra GoW T-Shirts we have laying around. The contests will be for contributions to the Gears of War Realm Wiki. Details on that will be forth coming.