Ensemble Studios, the developers of Halo Wars and known for the Age of Empires games have announced that they will be shutting down after the release of Halo Wars. Not only that but today they announced that they are giving the axe to all non-essential employees as well as employees not directly related to the Halo Wars project. All the members that will stay onboard are being offered incentives to stay with the studio until the game is complete. More after the jump. What on earth is going on at Ensemble? Why would the studio be shut down so suddenly and why would a studio of this caliber need to be shut down anyway? These are things I don't know and maybe there is a good reason, but we don't know it because there have not been any other official statements or comments released by Microsoft or Ensemble yet. Halo Wars is due for release in the first half of 2009.

When browsing the net this morning I noticed the unfortunate placing of two article on N4G. We could go into a deep social analysis of interpreting why people are still looking for the year of the PS3 (We are looking at you Dynamo) and why, no matter how hard they try, they will never truly find the peace that they …

Yes my favourite topic is back. I have managed to ignore it recently but when I saw a news article this morning stating that Bioshock is going to have a mandatory 5 GB, 10 minute install I had to write about it. Now the only PS3 that has been available locally so far (for a while) has been the 40Gb …

One of the big cheeses over at Midway has been chatting to Gamesindustry about the state of gaming in Europe and has come up with an interesting point. He mentions that Europe was under developed (compared to the US) when he started and since then the Midway business has more than doubled it’s market size. However he goes on to …

Oddworld creator Lorne (Lawn) Lanning has been speaking about why he thinks that consoles are a step backwards and not what he was excited about years ago. Lanning has the following to say: "Personally, I think the consoles are a problem. Years ago I was excited about consoles, but anything that makes development more expensive rather than better, faster, cheaper, I think is a step backwards. When I look at what's happening, it's a bit disappointing because the consoles are running into a place where affordable games are having a rough time getting out there." I guess that all the big money and schedules are starting to add more and more pressure to a lot of smaller developers that aren't graced with huge budgets. Is he right though? A lot of us are all gaming fanboys, we love it all but we also love to see technology progress and get better. The main reason that I turned to consoles was because I was tired of having to keep my PC up to date so that I can play the latest games. Now I get home with my shiny new game, pop it in and run it the way that the developers intended. It seems that Lanning is targeting a market that is more interested in customisation and a lot of sharing options, saying: "PC games also allow people to build their game as they chose. There's a big difference between spending $50 or $60 on a game and hoping I love it and buying a game for $5 and then buying additional content for that game, so by the time I have invested $50 in it I really love it and I've personalized it a lot more to what I'm interested in." Hello. Hello. Follow me. Ok. [Who knows where that comes from?]

At the moment Sony are having problems with the Beta and the servers crashing but that hasn’t stopped this video from being leaked. It a ten minute long video that shows the majority of the customisation options open to the player as well as a couple gunfights which gives a fairly comprehensive view of what you will be getting when …

Nothing that 360 owners wouldn’t have seen before but it does help build the anticipation. It really is a game that everybody has to play at least once. Now, would you kindly watch the trailer. (See what I did there) source: Kotaku Last Updated: September 9, 2008

GamerChip.com has put together a list of the games that they think will be hits this christmas as well as all the games that will fail miserably alongside the hotly anticipated titles coming out at the end of this year. While a decent portion of this list seems spot on I have to say that I disagree with a whole bunch of titles on their list.... So here is the list that they have put up I have highlighted the titles that I think are a little out of place or just plain strange. HITS: Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway LittleBigPlanet Fracture Fallout 3 Fable 2 Dead Space Guitar Hero: World Tour Mortal Kombat vs DC Resistance 2 Gears Of War 2 Warhammer Online Left 4 Dead FAILURES: Spore Too Human S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky Mercenaries 2 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Crysis Warhead Silent Hill Saints Row 2 Bioshock (PS3) Rock Band (Aus release) Mirrors Edge Red Faction: Guerrilla Firstly, I find it quite strange that the creator of this list has decided to use him amazing powers of foresight to predict that games such as Too Human and Mercenaries 2 are not going to be hits after their low review scores have already come out. In fact the games are already out so I wouldn't even have them in the list, unless he expects some of these games to sell well into the holidays. In the hits list I don't fully agree with some of those titles. While Brothers in Arms is looking very decent, I still think that it is going to have a tough time getting its name in front of the new Call of Duty title (strangely not even in the list). Mortal Kombat vs DC is the type of game that we all want to root for, but deep down we know that the possibility of it being a good game and a great success is not very likely.... Even though there are many Warhammer fans out there and even though the game could be looking good, I still don't see any MMO being able to dethrone the King of the MMO genre, World of Warcraft. As far as the fail list is concerned I don't think I could ever agree with titles like Bioshock for PS3 being there. Bioshock was an amazing game and a fantastic experience and I think that any PS3 owner would be more the right to feel a good amount of anticipation for their own version of this creepy, yet incredibly engrossing experience. While Crysis was very popular it did suffer very badly from Piracy, the only reason this game would fail was if all of that nonsense had to happen again. Hopefully this time around the fans will realise that they are damaging the developer and will go out and actually buy it.... Sure its a bit different and a little strange and if you have to choose between it, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet or the new Resistance then I could see it having some issues. I do however think that its new take on the first person genre is something quite fresh and different in an industry heavily flooded with mindless shooters.