The best things in life ARE free.

For those who skipped out on the Hidden Fronts map pack for Gears of War when it was released earlier this year, your stubbornness has paid off. This Monday morning you'll be able to download the pack at the ever more attractive price point of Zero Microsoft Points. In addition to four new maps, Hidden Fronts also adds an extra 250 points worth of new achievements.

With nearly 500,000 downloads at $10 a pop, it's pretty clear why free content is becoming less and less common. I'll be more interested to see how many downloads they get following the elimination of cost.

Now Epic, stop making excuses and get the new single player content ported over to 360 too. I'll even pay for it and not wait for it to become free six months later. I promise.

[via xbox.com]

Beta sign-ups, take two, starting shortly.

If you tried to sign up for the Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta this afternoon you were likely unsuccessful in securing a token. You're not alone. CharlieOscarDelta.com crashed before the registration even got underway leaving fans repeatedly hitting their F5 keys (or savvy Firefox users enabling their ReloadEvery extension) for over an hour.

If you were lucky enough to actually get through, you would've seen a screen declaring that all tokens had been distributed, better luck next time, have a nice day.

While it's not clear at the moment if any tokens were actually distributed, InfinityWard blogger fourzerotwo has announced that they will now be distributing the tokens lottery style. You'll have 24 hours to register once CharlieOscarDelta is back up and running, so everyone will have an equal chance of receiving a token.

The beta will be expanded to accommodate more and more players as time goes on, so if you're still left out in the cold after this round, you'll still have more opportunities to be disappointed.

[via fourzerotwo] 

Achievement unlocked.

Virtual carrot on a stick, now appearing on Wii. 

The demo of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, now playable at finer gaming retailers across the USA, has brought to light a heretofore unknown feature: achievements.

As you progress through the game, tokens of various colors will be awarded based on scanning enemies, items, and lore, as well as for completing certain objectives and defeating bosses on various difficulties. These can then be redeemed in-game to unlock content. You can also receive "friend vouchers" which, when sent to friends, will award them special tokens.

While this is unlikely to become a feature of every Wii title and is probably just something Retro cooked up themselves, it is still very cool and hopefully other developers will follow suit. I'm a big fan of good achievements, especially when they are tied to unlocking in-game content. In 360 games, too often the achievement is the reward. Unlockables have slowly gone the way of the dodo with the advent of microtransactions. Most games are unlikely to give up more than a harder difficulty nowadays and sometimes even those are offered as downloads.

[via GoNintendo]

Taking the sequel into unexpected territory.

The original Condemned was a great game with a story that was more than a little vague. At the end of the game you were probably left scratching your head. The recent announcement of the movie based on the Condemned universe, The Unforgettable, may shed some light on the direction of the game's sequel.

The movie was actually first announced as Species X (no relation to the Natasha Henstridge films) before Condemned even hit the shelves and was always planned as a tie-in to the series, to be released alongside "a planned sequel to the game that will expand the universe of the original."

The weird thing is that the movie is apparently about a "war between good and evil aliens" which the first game certainly was not. Since they are still billing the film as a tie-in to the games it's looking like this alien war may feature prominently in Condemned 2: Bloodshot. While introducing aliens into a storyline that seemed to be more supernatural or psychological seems odd, at the very least this has been their plan all along.

Condemned 2 is currently scheduled to be released in February 2008 so a summer release for The Unforgettable isn't out of the question.

[Hollywood Reporter via Kotaku]

If only this were an officially licensed product.

Now you too can play Halo 2 with your WiiRemote. All you need is a 360, a PS2 to 360 adapter, a microcontroller emulating a PS2 controller running custom firmware, and a PC running a custom Wii remote firmware. In other words, the closest you're gonna get is watching this video…

Playing Halo 2 (Xbox 360) with a Wiimote

With how much people jump around in Halo, having to jerk the nunchuk to jump would likely lead to shoulder injury right quick…

[Via GoNintendo]