What’s a games journalist but somebody who asks you to flat-out disbelieve the evidence of your own senses? What’s a games journalist but somebody who insists that not only is black white, but black was white long before white ever signed its first publishing contract? What’s a games journalist but somebody who tells you that the man you caught trying on mother’s knickers had just popped over to borrow a cup of sugar? What’s a games journalist but somebody who declares that the game you should be buying today isn’t the all-conquering Xbox 360 prequel to some iconic shooter or other, but a dog-tired multiplatform dog-fighter?

As you may have noticed, VGD hasn’t published a Halo: Reach review yet. This is a source of some displeasure to me, and rest assured the people responsible are being roasted over a pyre of bricked 360s, controllers in hand. But don’t fret, kids, because Reach isn’t the title you should be scraping together those pennies for! Oh, ‘they’ will probably tell you it is, but don’t forget – they’re the ones who told you that Sony would come first place this generation. Just how much of a sucker are you, exactly? Because if you’re that much of a sucker, I have some magic beans for sale.

Let us now turn to HAWX 2. It has an ‘X’ in the title – a breakthrough feature – and is unencumbered by a colon. Read on for other unanswerable truths.

Don't stare. It doesn't like it when you stare.

1. Has real weapons

OK, so in Reach they’ve got Gravity Hammers, Focus Rifles, sticky grenades and camo cloaks, but you know what? Say hello to the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’. Actually you’d better say ‘goodbye’, because the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ wants to say hello too, and when the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ says ‘hello’ it says it with 12 underslung radar-guided missiles, and when the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ says hello with its 12 underslung radar-guided missiles you say goodbye with your arse.

2. Better helmets

Despite being set twenty squillion years in the future, Halo has yet to get its head round (or behind) the concept of sliding face visors. Score one for HAWX 2, whose Irn-Bru-flavoured wraparounds slip up and out of sight at a mere button’s touch, thus helping to cut down carbon dioxide emissions. What’s more, they’re orangier. A good 50 per cent orangier, according to studies conducted by the giant-chested Anglo-Asian med students who exist purely IN MY BRAIN.

3. No unnecessary excitement

A SPARTAN’s life is full of care and bullets, but an aviator’s life is full of pretty cloud shapes, long leisurely trips from carrier to target, long leisurely landing sequences, long leisurely waits in the multiplayer lobby till you realise that nobody else is playing this POS game online and you should probably trade it in for Halo: Reach.

Having a sliding visor also makes it much easier to wash out the puke.

4. Has politics

HAWX 2 contains many important political lessons. It teaches us that all insurgents come from a special country called Insurgencia, where they spend all day posing for undercover cameras, smoking their own opium crops and coming up with uncrackable military strategies, like ‘just hang around till the bollocksy arbitrary mission timer winds down and then we win by default’. It also teaches us that the United States and Russia, despite having enough nuclear missiles between them to powderise Neptune, are doomed to downfall and servitude if black marketeers should ever get their hands on just one. And what does Halo teach us? It teaches us that the best way to not die when you’re shot at is to jump.

5. Stealth punctuation

‘HAWX’ is an abbreviation – or is it? Are you sure it isn’t in capitals for effect? Some reviewers write the word with all four full stops in place, and some reviewers don’t – which is the correct version? You’ll never know, just like you’ll never know whether your girlfriend’s lying to you when she says that it was just a mistake, and we haven’t spoken since, and you’re the only one for me, sweetie.

We also write proper articles, like this Mirror’s Edge 2 feature and this RUSE (R.U.S.E.?) review. So don’t judge us.

Among the big numbers at Spike TV’s Video Game Awards last night was the first Halo: Reach trailer. It’s silly, gritty and melancholy all at once. Classic Halo, in short.

That skull-face helmet is very Army of Two, don’t you think?

The game’s out in 2010.

Last week’s spicy news nuggets laced with the bittersweet herbage of half-arsed cynicism.

Cast a leisurely eye over the last seven days and you could be forgiven for thinking that all consoles and PC were designed exclusively to run Modern Warfare 2, all retailers founded in order to sell it, and all of human life ejected from the womb in order to play it.

Yep, Infinity Ward’s megaload of a gigaton of a killer app is responsible for most of the headlines, with Gamestop labelling the game’s 11th November release the biggest entertainment launch of all time. Not all news is good news, though – digital download operators Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamerGate are refusing to stock the title over the mandatory inclusion of Valve’s Steamworks software. Infinity Ward was also obliged to pull its controversial “F.A.G.S.” trailer on Monday after much anti-homophobic uproar over the weekend, and to top things off the first pirate copies found their way internet-wards on Tuesday.

Outside the Call of Duty bubble, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford won this week’s trash talk trophy by labeling Valve’s antipathy to the PS3 “childish and narrow-minded”, and Bungie’s launch of the Halo Waypoint Xbox Live hub was comprehensively overshadowed by the maybe-possibly leaking of Halo: Reach screens.

DICE followed up its popular adherence to the dedicated server model by announcing a PS3-only multiplayer beta for Bad Company 2 (fortunate news indeed for those of us who evidently can’t play it for shit), and Epic declared open season on Unreal Engine 3 dev kits.

The financial news desk is awash in doom and gloom, with Ubisoft, THQ, Konami and – yes – even Nintendo coughing up negative statistics of one kind or another. Still more upsettingly, Rockstar wants pictures of your facial hair for its rootin’-tootin’ open-worlder Red Dead Redemption. Form an orderly queue.

Enjoy the weekend.

"Can you smell burning?"

As the title pretty bloody obviously implies, Weapon Drops are short, sharp homilies to new, old and upcoming FPS weapons. If it blows shit away plenty good (and sometimes even if it doesn’t), you’ll find a corresponding entry here.

Halo is remembered for a lot of reasons. FPS Gamer history buff Kristan Reed has been known to gibber about its “groundbreaking AI and dynamic combat system”, while others might talk fondly of upwardly curving vistas, chunky physics-enabled vehicles or the way Covenant buildings shatter like lumps of purple meringue when you fire a rocket at them.

For my part, it was all about the Covenant plasma grenade, or “sticky grenade”.

The sticky grenade’s triumphs are twofold. First off, this cloying variety of handheld explosive threw open the process of grenade-throwing to the unwashed masses. No longer would amateur grenadiers have to worry about accidentally lobbing the device straight between the victim’s legs, or glancing it off his shoulder, or bouncing it off the wall behind and straight back into their faces. By dousing the grenade in glowing alien glue, Bungie had “democratised” it, transforming the weapon from holy tool of the moderately autistic elite to something any damn fool could use if he was capable of leading a target.

Secondly and most importantly, the sticky grenade is designed to encourage sadism.

Think of the many times you, dear reader, have been plugged by one. Worlds live and die in the second or two between contact and detonation. There’s the shock of the gaseous blue ball hurtling towards your torso, the frenzied instant of self-scrutiny, the horrible realisation that the other player is back-pedalling like mad, the desperate attempt to salvage a little honour by suicide-bombing the bastard, and the gloomy sight of your own corpse doing its very best Superman impression.

Now swap roles, and recall the satisfaction of seeing exactly this torturous thought process running through the eyes of another.

Good old Covenant know-how. Here’s some footage of a sticky grenade specialist in action.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX315pexy4o[/youtube]

Got an implement of warfare you’d like featured? Let us know.

Whilst it hasn’t generated the buzz of LittleBigPlanet, or the barrage of impressive statistics that filled the Spore universe, Halo 3 can still hold its own as a champion of user-generated multiplayer content. As we’ve seen with other titles, however, the more popular and accessible your creative toolset, the less easy it is to filter out the dross. Bungie’s community files section, though a fantastic tool in the past, is struggling under the weight.

So that’s where the following list comes in. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to the very best that Forge has to offer, but we’ve compiled from long experience, cherry-picking the maps and game variants that have earned a permanent spot in the FPSG multiplayer hopper. It’s a connoisseur’s selection of carnage. And so, without further ado…

Sky Castle

Sky Castle – SandTrap – CTF, Slayer, Infection

Sky Castle is among the crème of the many Forge architectural oddities by virtue of being both aesthetically interesting and functional. The huge tower that dominates an otherwise untouched SandTrap provides a great sniper’s outlook, a less-than-impenetrable fortress for CTF or Tower of Power, and an approachable last-man-standing hideout for Infected. As with all the best Forge creations, crafting your own experience around Sky Castle’s geometry is half the fun. This design rises far above the competition.

Shenlong Dragon

Shenlong Dragon – Standoff – Slayer

In contrast to the utilitarian appeal of the previous entry, Shenlong Dragon is almost entirely fanciful. Painstakingly perched on top of the Standoff valley, this is an impressive structure to navigate. With multiple routes to the top, its curved body and Chopper-laden mouth provide some picturesque and occasionally useful scenery for slayer matches. Dismayingly popular amongst the juvenile machinima crowd, we urge you to put the Dragon to good use elsewhere.

When Bungie invited us to “finish the fight” back in the winter of 2007, only a madman would have believed that we had seen the last of the Covenant. You simply don’t take the biggest triple A single-format series of the decade outback and shoot the cash-cow in the head. Tasking itself with creating a follow-up to “the biggest entertainment launch of all time” Bungie have sidestepped a full-blown sequel along with the weighty expectations and budgetary requirements that come with it, instead focusing on a leaner, more focused view of Halo’s grand narrative.

As the title implies, this is an expansion of Halo 3, and as such the focus will be on the new. There can be very few Xbox 360 owners who aren’t intimately familiar with Master Chief’s antics, but the titular ODSTs (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers or Helljumpers to give them their punchier nick-name) have been given little screen time in the Halo series so far. What do they bring to the table?

The Rookie inspects his fellow ODST's handy-work.

Much has been made of their inferior abilities when stacked up against the Chief, but in reality they barely alter the battle-tested Halo formula one bit. Yes, they may not be able to jump as far or move as fast, but the game’s design accommodates this. Yes, the recharging shields that Halo turned into a near industry standard have gone, but the stamina gauge works so similarly that players will rarely stress over having to grab one of the many medikits dotted around the environment.

Perhaps the ODST’s greatest addition is the VISR (Visual Intelligence System Reconnaissance) HUD that not only changes the way the game is played, but really defines ODSTs distinct visual presentation. Essentially night vision goggles of the future, one touch of the X button draws beautifully stylised colour-coded outlines around everything onscreen, allowing enemies to be targeted effectively in the dark, drawing attention to important story-driving items, and most strikingly, adding an amazing depth of field to the game’s beautifully war-torn environments. While clearly not as progressive or well executed as Metroid Prime’s array of gameplay driven visors, it gives ODST a stunningly abstract visual quality that clearly separates it from its prequels. The VISR is introduced subtly, with early uses limited to exploring the game’s night time central hub, with each flashback pulling you further and further into the night where its application becomes essential.