News Blips: Bungie and Halo, Man Beats Bejeweled, Games on Mac Updates, and More

Bungie and Halo splitting is like some kind of weird video-game-industry divorce. Too bad they couldn't try to stay together for the kids.

News Blips:

Bungie plans to have Halo: Reach be the last game they make in the series. Speaking with Industry Gamers, Brian Jarrard of Bungie elaborated on what their recent 10-year partnership with Activision means for the Halo series. He stressed that they want the entire studio working on whatever their current project is and that they'd "be really hard pressed to find a world where Bungie has multiple teams making multiple disparate projects." Essentially, they'll be strictly developing their next next big thing for Activision, which, Jarrard told Edge-Online, they won't be debuting at this June's E3 game-industry trade show. If anyone requires counseling, we'll have the Bitmob therapists on hand.

Developer PopCap declares that Mike Leyde of Riverside, California "conquered" Bejeweled 2. Back in March of 2009, Leyde finished his (presumably off and on) 2,200-hour play session, clocking in at 2.147 billion points -- the highest score ever -- which also maxed out the game. It appears that PopCap is just announcing this now as part of their continuing celebration of the series' 10-year anniversary. If only he could have lasted one more year, everything would be conveniently and quite suspiciously timed. [Bejeweled]

Update for patient Mac gamers: Blizzard releases the Starcraft 2 beta for the Mac platform today (players still need a beta key to play), while Valve sets its sights on May 12 to launch its digital distribution platform Steam. PC users might be thinking "so what?" but for Apple fans, who have traditionally gotten the short end of the computer-gaming stick, this is all kind of a big deal. [GamePro]

Sony shifts its PlayStation Store Updates from Thursday to Tuesday. The company plans to release the Modern Warfare 2: Stimulus Package downloadable content and Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake for its first round pre-hump-day releases on May 4. How perfect of a salsa this is for the always awesome Taco Tuesdays. [PlayStation Blog]

Got any hot news tips? Send 'em over to tips@bitmob.com

(2)