So you’ve grappled with the installation problems in Halo 2 Vista and got your ass handed over to you in the Halo 3 beta, and you start to wonder how much more Halo you can get in your life. Well, if you are anything like us (by which I mean me), then you start pulling a Lester Burnham and see Halo-related stuff fall slowly from the sky, as the American Beauty theme tinkles away in the sad recesses of your brain.

First off, if you have the dough and fancy yourself a true Halo-geek, you can ditch that iPod you’re all carrying for the Halo 3 Special Edition Zune. It’s the regular Zune, with the all-you-can-eat music store, the wonderfully envisioned yet woefully executed music sharing options, 3″ of sexy screen-space and oh yeah, did I mention the complete Halo and Halo 2 OSTs, trailers of Halo 2 and Halo 3, “Making of” documentary videos, the first 6 episodes of Red vs. Blue Season 1, tons of Halo-related images and a special, Halo: Zune edition of Red vs. Blue! All this, in a sleek Halo-themed shell, can be yours for a measly $249! Get yours today!

More on the Special Edition Halo Zune 

And if that didn’t fix you, there’s even more information straight from Bungie and IGN on the upcoming Halo: Uprising, a four-part mini-series by Marvel and Halo: Contact Harvest, the next Halo novel, which is being penned by Bungie man/Grunt voice Joseph Staten and will chronicle hard-ass UNSC Sergeant Avery J.Johnson’s first contact with the Covenant forces.

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We’ve all heard about how “convergence” is what will drive future technology. And it looks like we may be closer to that idea than most imagined. A new Xbox could be coming our way as a patent reveals (rather complicatedly) some of the features that could be available on the next generation of a Microsoft console. Although it cites Xbox as an example of how the patent describes a “gaming device”, it’s not completely clear if that is what the patent is for:

“A gaming system including handheld devices and console devices has variable functionality and processing performance as determined by the number of components in the system. Gaming components can be combined wirelessly, by wired connections (e.g., via a docking station), or a combination thereof. The processing capabilities and functionality of each gaming component in a combination are augmented by the processing capabilities and functionality of other gaming components in the combination. To take advantage of another gaming components processing capabilities and memory capacity, each gaming component is capable of utilizing another gaming component to process gaming applications. Further, each gaming component is capable of rendering audio and/or video information provided by another gaming component.”

The rise of the ultimate home entertainment device is here! Expect to see errors across all your Windows devices, from phones, to consoles, your MP3 players, PCs and even your car, if it will tie in to the system! Looks like Microsoft is already hard at work creating the successor to the Xbox 360, considering it’s market life of about five years! One thing’s for sure though, that patent’s probably got the largest use of the word “gaming” in all that have ever been filed. I wonder whether the next generation of the Microsoft console could “lend” its processing power to an Xbox Portable Gaming device, at least that would somehow allow me to play Fable on a handheld. Boy, how I would like something like that…

via [UnwiredView]