Gears Bonus Content Released Two brand new maps, a video and a game update are now available for Gears of War - just press X at the main menu screen! Why not read our thoughts on the update and bonus content too. More >
Interview & Weapon Guide Don't forget to check out our Gears weapon guide, as well as our interview with Mark & Cliff of Epic. More >
World of Wacraft Patch Burning Crusade is HERE: v2.0.5 is the most recent World of Warcraft patch.
January Mailbag Here it is - the January edition of the award-winning Planet Gears mailbag.
Gears Bonus Maps & Patch: The Good, the Bad & the Upscaled 480p We've posted our thoughts on the recently-released Gears of War game update and bonus maps.
Saturday, 20 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Sticky: January Mailbag Posted 14:26 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Slightly later than planned due to technical difficulties (thank you Foxconn) - you can now read responses to your Gears-related questions for the month of January 2007 (which also happens to be the current month) over here.
Enjoy!
Paste Interviews CliffyB 14:26 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Paste magazine has interviewed the half-man, half assault rifle that is Gears Lead Designer Cliff Bleszinski on the development and reception of Gears of War.
Bleszinski cut his design teeth on a PC game called Jazz Jackrabbit. It was 1994 and he was in his last year of high school. “There were three guys working on that game,” he says. “It was me doing the majority of the artwork, the design and 90 percent of the levels. Gears of War is more of a collaborative process.” He’s not kidding. Development teams for modern games tap the talents of hundreds of programmers and artists. The sheer scale of an undertaking like Gears of War has transformed Cliff’s job from nuts-and-bolts designer to something more managerial. “I don’t have the time every day to completely micromanage every last bit of the game,” he admits.
Gears Goes Triple-Platinum 14:19 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Microsoft has confirmed what we reported via Major Nelson a few weeks ago - Gears of War has sold three million copies since its November release. And with the game just hitting the shelves in Japan, it ain't over yet.
Wednesday, 17 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Gears LAN Party Report 15:59 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Reader Rapture sent over word that he recently held a Gears of War LAN Party at his home, and has written an article about it up on his site.
Overall, the mini-LAN was a good time. It provided our first GoW LAN experience, educated us on some nuances of the 360 display settings, and showcased the difference of standard and high definition. I really enjoyed the competition of the New Schoolers. They are some battle-hardened COGs. I also enjoyed introducing Disavowed to GoW for the first time. Perhaps we hooked him. A GoW LAN with separate 360s and displays for each player would be awesome, albeit difficult to coordinate. However, I did notice that at high resolutions a 22" monitor is more than adequate for a single player. Oculus regularly plays on a 24" Dell 2407 running at 1080p, and we know how he pwns. I am unsure of the relative value of LANing Gears of War versus Xbox Live (XBL), but it's fun for a change even if it's not our staple mode of GoW multiplayer.
Is there something that has surprised you from the feedback, whether critical or praise?
CliffyB: To be perfectly honest I'm amazed at how good players became at sticking grenades to one another. We played the game locally for thousands of hours and found tagging to be a useful tactic but not quite the mega attack it became online. We ultimately wound up reducing the distance in a recent update and players seem far happier with it now.
Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour."
Slightly off-topic, but it does at least look like the COG armor from Gears of War :).
In our latest poll, let us know if you've managed take all that single-player Gears of War can throw at you. Have you beaten General Raam on Insane mode?
Thanks to everyone who voted in last week's poll. Turns out that most of you were looking forward to bonus content for Gears in 2007... and now we have it. How about that.
Friday, 12 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Gears Tops December Games Charts 14:13 PST | RaptoR | Print News | Mail News Gears of War was the most-purchased game in the United States last month for the second month in a row, according to NPD statistics released today. Following Gears was Madden 2007 in second place and Guitar Hero 2 in third.
In the next Gears of War update users running 1280x1024 monitors will get true 1280x720 (720p) image letterboxed within 1280x1024. This should give the full HD experience.
Many users spoke up and said they favored playing the game at higher resolution in a letterbox rather than playing it in full-screen mode. To achieve the proper aspect ratio in full screen mode we had to render at 900x720 (the next usable 5:4 resolution below our maximum of 1280x720) and then let the Xbox 360 scale to fit.
As a temporary measure one of our programmers suggested that between now and the next update that users of 1280x1024 monitors might find the picture more pleasing if they set their Xbox to 1024x768 - the aspect ratio is pretty close but the actual resolution is about 45% higher.
We apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused. I'll try to get an estimated date for the next update and post it here in the forum as soon as I can. We appreciate everyones' patience with this issue.
Gears Sells 3 Million 8:01 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Apparently, as I doubt anyone is surprised, Gears has reached the outstanding mark of 3 million units sold (the last report, just four days ago was around 2.7 million) since the end of December. Check out Major Nelson for a little additional info on Xbox 360 popularity if you have continued interest.
Patch Comments By Mark 12:27 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Mark Rein continues to respond to forum posts regarding the recent patch. In particular he has explained why fewer Xbox Live! servers are being reported now (from 25 to 10) and asserts that any continued VGA issues are being addressed. Here’s a quote:
At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of Gears of War servers. We used to return a list of 25 but in this patch we only return 10. What we found is that when we were querying XBL for 25 servers it takes just long enough to get the query back that many of them are likely to be full by the make your decision and select one - so people were getting a lot of server full connect errors because of this. By reducing to query to just 10 we get the query back twice as fast and the likelihood you can join a game (before it fills up) increases dramatically.
The trailer weighs in at 108MB, the map pack itself is 98MB. There's also a dashboard theme included.
Enjoy!
Tuesday, 9 January, 2007 – Gears of War News
Mark Explains nVidia Drivers 19:45 PST | redef | Print News | Mail News Mark Rein has created a forum post debunking the latest Gears to PC rumors. In his post Mark explains that nVidia drivers contain references to Gears because Epic was involved with nVidia in optimizing drivers for the purpose of development (for both Gears and Unreal Engine 3). Here are excerpts from the original post:
You know console games are developed on PCs, right? Even if we never release Gears of War on PC we still need to run the game on PC to develop and test content for it.
[...]
We gave NVIDIA a copy of wargame.exe (along with some sample content from Gears) so they could help us tweak Unreal Engine 3 performance and reliability on NVIDIA graphics chips. That was necessary to make the development tools perform well and ensure that their drivers would support UE3 going forward.
[...]
So in reality the only thing this supposed "leak" demonstrates is that we work closely with NVIDIA to ensure the best possible performance for our engine on their platforms. Ditto for ATI and other graphics vendors as well.
