News HaloCustoms Weekly Roundup - 19th Feb '17

front-page-halo-news-png.16504
Hello, and welcome to a new segment, the HaloCustoms Weekly™ Roundup!

I'm your wonderful host, ♥ Sky, and I'll be talking you through this weeks news in the Halo world and a few bits from beyond.

In our main headline tonight, Halo Wars 2 was released! Everyone's favourite RTS from the 26th Century is back with a bang, pitting Atriox and his hairy mates against the wiley old Cutter and the crew of his venerable ship, the Spirit of Fire. The release live stream aired last Thursday and gave everyone a glimpse of the full game, including some live blitz games between some of the 343i staff and community members, including our own lovable Psychoduck playing for the 343i team. If you missed the live stream, here's the VOD from the Xbox YouTube channel.


Be sure to keep an eye out for Mister Duck, he even gets some good screen time, taking part in the first Blitz game played, starting at 11:00 mins.

Duck also managed to get a few images from the launch party and all the cool stuff that you can see in the background of the stream:

fH4Wn7E.jpg


aGXFqAP.jpg

Here are the rest of the images, courtesy of Duck for your browsing pleasure.



battlegolf-small-jpg.17625

In local news, the Battle Golf "Par for the Course" map Forging contest has had the deadline extended to "TBA", while a new set of more exciting prizes are organised. Check the full announcement thread for more details here.



Moving onto the esports news, the London round of the Halo World Championship Qualifiers was also on this weekend, streamed live on Twitch from Wembley Arena in the UK. There were some epic matches going down between some big names, with some close games going right down to the wire, and some ridiculous kills that were dirtier than a [redacted]. If you missed the stream and don't want the results spoiled, skip to the next paragraph, otherwise click below for the dirty details. Hopefully the teams that progressed will do well in the Finals in Los Angeles on the 24th of March, I'll certainly be rooting for the teams from my home Continent to give you pesky Freedomers a good kicking and bagging.

FabE beat Supremacy 4-1 in the Grand Finals, with both teams Qualifying for the main event in Los Angeles. After losing their first game of Strongholds on Eden 100-41, FabE came back to take the next 4 games of Rig Slayer (50-40), Coliseum CTF (3-0), Plaza Strongholds (100-71) and Regret Slayer (50-37). Prior to this, FabE had beaten Infused 3-2 in the Winner's final, with Supremacy beating Infused again 4-3 in the Losers final to progress to the HWC finals.



In international news, Deals with Gold and Games with Gold are currently offering some pretty sweet deals on games for both Xbox One and Xbox 360. For the free games this month, we have Killer Instinct Season 2: Ultra Edition, the fighting game featuring a wide range of Characters including Halo's very own Arbiter. There's also Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, a cute couch coop adventure game for up to 4 players to take on the evil Anti-Love forces. Finally, we have Project Cars Digital Edition, a sim racer for all you racing nerds (like me!) who love racing around in anything from Go Karts to Open Wheel Formula 1 cars. There's also a host of games on sale with Deals with Gold, including GTA V (50% off), Overwatch Origins Edition (17% off) and Rocket League (25% off). I would personally recommend Rocket League for some quick football (the real version, soccer to you Americans reading) action in some epic looking Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, the Xbox version even includes two exclusive battle cars, the Halo Warthog and the Gears of War Armadillo. Check out the full list of games available and on sale below.

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/deals-with-gold
http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/games-with-gold
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/deals-with-gold
http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/games-with-gold



Finally, for our clip of the week, we have both myself and everyone's favourite™ loopy waterfowl, Psychoduck showcasing our leet Halo skills.



If you want your clip to be featured on the HaloCustoms weekly™ Roundup, send them to me in a private message and I'll be choosing a couple each week to be featured!

That's all your news for this week, I've been ♥ Sky, thank you for reading. Until next time, goodbye.