Hi all it has been a long time since i have written a proper post on my blog but i am aiming to get back into the full swing of things again. My fist post is about the pending release of the greatly anticipated release of the Halo 3 Beta on the Xbox 360. I have been an average Halo fan of the past 2 iteration and now am egerly awaiting the release of the third version. I like a majority of people who will be participating in the beta testing have gained our entry into the beta by purchasing a copy of the Xbox 360 title Crackdown. From what i have read the people who won their entry via the via the competitions may already have their beta copies (but this may be totally false as i did not win my place and it may have been just a media contingent who saw/ received theirs on Friday). At the time of writing this it is just over a half an hour until midnight on the east coast of the US which i am hoping is when it will be made available to down load if not then i will keep checking throughout the day and night here until i can get it. I will post an initial post of my first impressions soon after i get it. I will also be writing a review for each map of how they play one each day and i will cronicle any other changes that are made throughout the beta.
UPDATE
I after waiting for the last few hours for the beta to be posted on Xbox Live i thought i would do a little bit of research to see if there was a reason why i could not see it yet. I eventually we to http://www.bungie.net/ where i found that they had a counter that at the time of writing was standing at 5 hours until it is released. I also found that Rooster teeth Productions have released a special red versus Blue free video on Xbox live which has been made in the Halo 3 beta and sows off a few new features that will be in the final game.
UPDATE 2
It is now about 3 hours after the beta was released to the world well sort of. All who won their place into the beta are able to download and play the beta fine but all who are trying to download it through Cracktown are as yet unable to do so. The official word from Bungie is “Folks are reporting problems downloading the Halo 3 Beta via Crackdown this morning. We have alerted the appropriate Live authorities and they are taking care of the problem as we speak. More news as it comes in.” that was posted 20 mins after the official release time and as yet there has not been any update on the situation. I have been reading the forum thread on bungie.net which at the time of writing was up to 62 pages long full of other poeple with Cracktown who also can’t download the beta. I think i will keep trying for the next hour and if i can’t get it going the i will go to bed and try again when i get up.
FINAL UPDATE
After waiting for over 12 hours an update had finally been released to Crackdown to fix the problem that was making it impossible to download the beta. From reading some posts in the bungie.net forums some people were suggesting the the reason why it would not work was the one of the previous updates to Crackdown had a bug in it that made downloading the beta impossible. As i am downloading my copy now we will see how quickly it comes down and if Xbox live can cope with so many people downloading at once.