Xbox Living

Oh, the wit. The wit of that headline. Superb.

Anyways, on September 14, 2010, Halo: Reach will be released everywhere except Japan, where the game will be released on September 15.

Chances are, it’ll sell well. In the 18 days that the Halo: Reach beta was live, 2.7 million players logged in and spent 16 million hours playing the game. People who bought Halo 3: ODST were invited to participate in the beta.

Halo: Reach is Bungie’s last Halo game, as the company is moving on to work on a new series with Activision. More on Reach as it comes.

Microsoft has announced that Crackdown 2 will be out this June.

Crackdown 2 again has you working for the Agency, hunting down criminals and forcing order back upon Pacific City. This time, though, the city is being overrun by mutants in addition to the regular breed of criminals, offering a greater challenge to the super-powered Agents.

Better customization and even more augmented powers for the Agent are promised in the sequel.  The co-op is back in Crackdown 2, but has been extended to allow four players. Additionally, a multiplayer mode allows up to sixteen players to compete together.

Crackdown 2 is being developed by Ruffian Games and will be published by Microsoft in June.

EA and DICE have given a timeline for their new Medal of Honor game, indicating that we should be expecting the game in 2010.

Medal of Honor will reboot the franchise, bringing into modern-day Afghanistan. The game will follow the story of a special forces soldier deployed by the U.S. National Command Authority.

EA believes that Medal of Honor, coupled with developments in the Battlefield series, also developed by DICE, can help it reclaim the top spot in the FPS market from Activision, which is currently leading with the Call of Duty series. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 comes out next March, while Medal of Honor is likely to surface later in the year.

Frank O’Connor, former Bungie content manager and current Microsoft “Halo guy”, has stated that Microsoft has plans to keep the Halo franchise very much alive for years to come.

O’Connor heads up 343 Industries, the Microsoft division responsible for the Halo franchise.  He says that his division has plans for at least six more years of Halo content, meaning that we’ll see Halo titles appearing into 2015. He has also stated that Halo will continue to branch out into other media.

“Eventually, it will become very apparent that there is a plan for the way the canon all ties together and the way the comic books and the novels all tie together.”

For instance, the Marvel Comics series Halo: Helljumper is currently active, with another series, Halo: Blood Line, set to debut in December.  The anime series Halo Legends will start up next year, distributed on DVD and via Xbox Live.  More novels and a line of toys are also in the works.

With Halo rapidly expanding, speculations about the possibility of a Halo film.  One incarnation of the film was set up to be directed by Peter Jackson, but has been placed on hold.

“We’re being very careful to pick the right time and the right partner,” O’Connor explains.

Halo 3: ODST, which made its appearance late last month, has already sold 2.5 million copies, raking in over 27 million in revenue. O’Connor says that all of the titles in the Halo universe are going to converge at some point in the six-year plan, making the tie-ins between stories more obvious.

If you’re not a Beatles fan you may not be too excited about The Beatles: Rock Band next month.  Then there’s LEGO Rock Band in November, which is bound to be a good party game, but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

But Harmonix has confirmed that another mainstream Rock Band game is in the works:

“The Harmonix development team are working on what is effectively the next game, or ‘Rock Band 3′. We arent standing still we will keep moving into new areas and look at new technologies that our platform holder partners are also developing, such as Project Natal from Microsoft. We’re working with them to pull some things together.”

The company also said that they’re considering doing another Rock Band title focused on a specific artist, like the Beatles title due out September 9.  Rock on!

Bungie treated us today to a peek at the new multiplayer maps that will ship with Halo 3: ODST this fall.

The first map, Herectic, is a recreation of the Halo 2 map ‘Midship’, once again aboard the Covenant vessel Pious Inquisitor.

Citadel will be a smaller map, which means fast reflexes will be the key to victory.

Finally, Longshore will be a costal large-scale, complex map with a bigger emphasis on strategy.

In addition to these three maps, Halo 3: ODST includes all of the original Halo 3 maps, as well as all maps released for it since.  That includes the Heroic, Legendary, Cold Storage and Mythic map packs, brining the total number of maps in Halo 3: ODST to 24.

Halo 3: ODST will be released on September 22.  The game is a standalone expansion to Halo 3, and doesn’t require a Halo 3 disc to play the multiplayer content from the original game.