Cheats-Area.com

   Speaking of popular Xbox 360 games, those "few" of you waiting for Halo 3 can finally breathe more easily, because Microsoft announced today the first solid (and hopefully definitive) release date for Bungie's upcoming shooter. And it looks like those "September" rumours were right: if all goes well, Halo 3 will launch on September 25, 2007 in North America, and just one day later in Europe, already promising to "shatter day-one entertainment sales records". There's not much we can argue about that.

   The news conveniently coincides with the beginning of the game's over-hyped mutliplayer beta testing phase today, which offers lucky participants the chance to frag around several levels, with some new weapons, vehicles and game types. You can still enter the beta, by the way, if you're willing to buy one of those "specially marked copies of Crackdown". The fun will be short-lived, however, as the beta will already come to an end three weeks from now, on June 7.

   Microsoft's Peter Moore (corporate vice president) believes that Halo 3 will mark not only the most important game release of the year, but also "the biggest entertainment event of the year":
"At launch we intend to deliver a finale that will go down in entertainment history and leave people around the world with an experience that will be shared and enjoyed for years to come."    Again, not much we can argue about that (yet), so we'll just let the marketing do the talking, for the time being.

UPDATE: Halo 2 for the PC is getting pwned as we speak. Aaand again, not much we can argue about that either. That's what you get for releasing expired games.

UPDATE #2: The Halo 3 beta kicked off to a bad start yesterday, at least for those who bought Crackdown and found they couldn't download the damn thing. After some understandable commotion around the community (fans freaking out, stuff like that), Microsoft issued a statement claiming to have fixed the problem. But here's the best part: as an extra apology, they are extending the Halo 3 beta closure date from June 6 to June 10, 11:59 PM PDT. That's... super. [17.05.2007, 16:04]