The New Xbox Experience's ability to load games from the hard drive is intended to help games load more quickly or even make them look better, but Bungie's Halo 3 is an exception--it actually loads more slowly than without installing the game.

To explain the phenomenon, Bungie tapped engineer and "Chief Caching Officer" Mat Noguchi to give both a technical explanation and the "short answer." The short answer is in essence that the game has always used the Xbox 360's hard drive to shorten load times: Read more »

Publisher Microsoft today revealed the Limited Collector's Edition version of Halo Wars (360), the final strategy game from the soon-to-be-closed Ensemble Studios.

Arriving in February and priced at $79.99--$20 more than the $59.99 standard edition--the Halo Wars LCE will sport a snazzy metal case and the following bonuses: Read more »

Here now is the official Halo 3 Recon announcement trailer, fresh from TGS. The video builds on Bungie's original teaser, offering a few glimpses of the game's reconnoitering premise.

The prequel is slated for a fall 2009 release, bringing a new Halo 3 campaign and an unspecified number of multiplayer maps. It is unknown whether Halo 3 Recon will be a standalone expansion, downloadable content, or both. Read more »

Microsoft has announced that the recently-teased Halo 3 campaign will be released in fall 2009.

The Halo 3 Recon campaign will serve as a prequel to the original Halo 3, featuring an USNC recon soldier as the hero, according to Kotaku. The expansion will also bring new multiplayer maps.

It now appears that Halo 3 Recon may receive a full retail release. Check back later for more details.

Former Gears of War film screenwriter Stuart Beattie is back at it with a Halo script, and this time he has the support of Microsoft and Bungie, the publisher and developer of the hit shooter.

"The Halo movie in its initial incarnation is dead. No one is pursuing it any more," said Beattie to GameDaily. Beattie's script, written during the Hollywood writers' strike, got Bungie's attention and the writer is now in talks with Microsoft. "I'm just a fan and I desperately want to see a Halo movie out there," he added. Read more »

After months of teasing, speculation and delayed announcements for its next project, Halo creator Bungie continues the mystery with the below teaser trailer.

Though the video isn't explicitly clear as to what it is teasing, the Xbox Live Marketplace offers the following clarification: "High action and deep mystery await players in this new Halo 3 campaign experience. Prepare to drop!" Read more »

Fueling the next round of Internet Detective work, Bungie has posted on its website another scrambled transcript of something related to its upcoming project.

Such tidbits have contributed in the past to alternate reality games (ARGs) promoting the last two releases in the studio's popular Halo series of shooters. Games such as "i love bees" used websites that were made to look hacked, among other tactics, to fill in minor story gaps in the Halo universe. Read more »

Developer Bungie has confirmed the rumors that it plans to add new achievements to Halo 3's campaign and multiplayer modes, though it warns that the information "will be blown out of context, misread and misunderstood."

The new achievements come as part of the second Title Update for the Xbox 360 shooter, which launched last September. The update will also pack several "under-the-hood changes," a new type of ban for multiplayer troublemakers, and a per-playlist ranking of player skill when it arrives later this month. Read more »

A new campaign for Bungie's Xbox 360 shooter Halo 3 may be on the way this month, according to various pictures taken at PAX last weekend.

A member on the Ascendant Justice forums posted copies of pictures taken of a screen showing new Halo 3 Xbox 360 achievements. The originals, which resided in a web folder entitled "pax08," are now offline. Read more »

Despite Microsoft's past efforts to prevent Xbox Live account hijacking, the theft of Halo 3 multiplayer producer Joe Tung's account has pulled the issue back to the forefront.

The hijacking was not the result of sophisticated computer wizardry, but rather "social engineering," the act of creatively lying to customer service representatives to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Xbox Live stores credit card information, and while hackers are unable to steal that information for their own use, they can make unauthorized purchases from a stolen account Read more »

Bungie recently shot down its own rumors that bots--artificial intelligence opponents--would be added to its hit Xbox 360 shooter Halo 3.

The studio behind Halo had created the bot buzz in a video acceptance speech for an EDGE Magazine award.

In denying the rumors, community manager Luke Smith blasted select members of Bungie's famously devout community as "overly zealous, froth-filled fans bathed in excitement, undoubtedly quivering at things they are looking at with a far-too strong microscope." Read more »