Merry Christmas.

One year of chainsaw dueling -- that's what Epic Games is celebrating this holiday season, and a nice Gears of War 2 playlist changeup is rolling out for your enjoyment.

Starting right now, players can rack up triple XP in Horde Mode and multiplayer. Plus, all public Horde matches are automatically bumped to Hardcore difficulty, and playlists are being tweaked so that you can find your favorite game more easily. To top it all off, "tactical mode" is available in all game modes, limiting ammo and increasing damage.

The special event lasts until November 16th, so get your Horde on asap!

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Survival or Waves modes seem to be all the rage these days with co-op games.  And while we all love a good cooperative experience bolstered by solid exposition, it's hard not to love the arcade like nature of survival challenges.

Microsoft launched their latest social media player yesterday with the ZuneHD.  In 16GB and 32GB varieties, the system packs an OLED multi-touch screen, accelerometer, HD Radio as well as sleek design.  Soon the system will be sync'd up to your Xbox 360 for a host of other features.  

Right now the ZuneHD store is offering custom versions of the player engraved with some great co-op game graphics like Halo 3: ODST, Fable II, Crackdown 2, Gears of War 2, Lips and Halo Wars.  The engraving is free, and it'll come with a unique wallpaper for the device as well.  

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Online retailer Amazon.com is listing a September 1st ship date for Gears of War 2: Game of the Year Edition.  Retailing for $40, and available for $37, the game packs Gear 2 and all of the DLC content onto one fine disc.  

That gets you a two player co-op campaign, 19 maps for 5 player co-op Horde mode, and the additional Dark Corners 2 player co-op campaign chapter.  Suckers, er, I mean early adopters, paid almost $100 for all of that content.  If you've waited on Gears 2, now is your chance to hop on the Cole train!

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Sure...it looks peaceful now.  That's because we killed everything that moved.

With the recent release of the Gears of War 2 All Fronts Collection, we saw a title update which added numerous cooperative achievements to the game. Not only were there three available for the story based content, but an additional dozen for Horde mode on the new maps. Me, being the gamerpoint loving son-of-a-bitch I am...well I just had to have these.

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Tonight we had our Gears of War 2 Co-Op night featuring the brand new maps in the Dark Corners set.  To celebrate, and to help promote tomorrow night's Game with Developers event we have three codes to give away for the All Fronts Collection.

That'll net you 19 multiplayer maps and the cut scene single player co-op content.  All yours for the low low price of free.  Just leave a comment in this thread and we'll choose the winners by 12:01AM August 1st!

As we previewed last week, the Gears of War DLC  is now available to download.  The content comes in two flavors.  

The first is called All Fronts, and is a 1600  pack that contains all previous map packs and content as well as new 7 new multiplayer maps including favorites from Gears of War 1 and Gears of War for Windows.  That means in total you'll have 19 new maps for use in Horde mode and multiplayer.  There's also the addition of the "Road to Ruin" story based content which is playable in two player co-op.

The second flavor is called Dark Corners, a 1200  pack that contains only the 7 new maps and the "Road to Ruin" content.

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Next week Epic Games will be releasing a few pieces of Gears of War 2 content.  Included in with a package of multiplayer maps called Dark Corners, Road to Ruin is a brand new single player chapter that was cut from the original game.  What makes the content unique is the fact that there's two different ways to play through it.

"It's a 90-minute section that was actually snipped out of Gears of War 2, where Marcus and Dom are actually going to the Locust homeworld and they're basically suited up in Locust armor and have a choice - they can go in guns-blazing as they always do, Rambo-style, or they can go with a more stealth approach,"  the game's producer, Cliff Bleszinski,  told Major Nelson's podcast.

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Fresh new things have been taking place over at Epic games with the Title Update #4 content announcement for Gears of War 2. Epic Games programmer Joe Graf hopped on their forums to give us a few confirmations for the Title Update, including some great news when asked about the availability of experience points in Horde Mode.
 

"Yes. Glad that's out there, because I've wanted to talk about it for a while. It's not done the same way as versus mp, but you will get XP for playing horde"

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