For a while we’ve been hinting that we had a new project we’ve been working on. At last, it’s online and ready to go! Introducing The Gaming Rx, your source for all gaming on all platforms! Why did we create The Gaming Rx? Well, it’s easy to get burnt out on a game, now we have every game…including of course Gears of War / Gears of War 2. This site will remain up so anyone can access the wealth of information that is already here but in the future we’ll be spending most of our time posting in the new The Gaming Rx Forums.

Head over to The Gaming Rx and become a member!

Epic and Microsoft have teamed up to give gamers the chance to earn double experience points in Gears of War 2 this Labor Day weekend. There’s also the chance to play against Epic devs in a “Game with Developer” event taking place on Friday.

The event will run from Friday morning, Sept 4th till Tuesday morning, Sept 8th (Eastern time)

• Double experience for all Horde games and Public multiplayer games
• Winning team gets a 500 xp bonus in Public multiplayer
• Public Horde will default to Hardcore difficulty instead of Normal
•  Horde will be infected with Sires, just like the Ticker attack of July 4th
•  Hardcore Horde (Public or Private) will receive an extra experience boost (essentially double Hardcore will be the same as double Insane)
• The Game with Developer event will take place on Friday, Sept. 4th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (Eastern Time). Look for the following Gamertags and send off an invite:

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Not enough sugar, caffeine and vitamin B12 in your life? Check out Boston America’s new licensed Imusion energy drink, inspired by the glowing goop from Gears of War. Unlike the yellowish fuel from the game, Imulsion does not turn drinkers into Lambent drones, instead giving them “a new form of tasty energy”.

Imulsion sells for $3 per 250ml can.

Microsoft announced that Gears of War 2, one of the most critically acclaimed action games of 2008, will be getting its own Game of the Year edition

Set for release on September 1 for $39.99, this new edition includes the All Fronts Collection (including all 19 extra multiplayer maps), the Road to Ruin campaign chapter, and every achievement totaling 1750 Gamerscore points.

In a recent conference speech, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney revealed the development cost of Gears of War 2, putting it somewhere around the $12 million mark – a surprisingly modest sum for a current-gen blockbuster.

Tim also revealed that Gears of War 2 took 15 programmers and 45 artists over two years to create.

“All-Time Greatest Game Hero (ATG) is GameSpot’s new interactive editorial feature that gives you the opportunity to determine, once and for all, who the greatest video game hero is. You will also have a chance to manage your own brackets based own votes and win prizes. If you have participated in CBSSports’ March Madness, you’ll know exactly what we’re getting at.”

Check here for the details.

The list:
http://www.gamespot.com/greatest-vid…oes/index.html

You must sign in to your GameSpot account to vote. Need a (free!) GameSpot account? Sign up here.

More information will be added to this post as it becomes available.

Gears of War is awesome yet it never hit the top of the live usage charts and it gets criticized like no other even after 4 title updates. If Epic could make the following changes/additions, I think this would easily be atop the usage charts and dive deeper into the hearts of the average gamer.

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Gears design director Cliff Bleszinski took some time to talk to Destructoid about Gears of War’s iconic armor design.

Bleszinski was realistic when I asked what the space armor said about the characters or world it’s based in: “The armor on the characters in Gears of War implies that they’re incredibly strong, resilient, and that they’re shot at on a regular basis,” he said.

But it’s not all about bullets and brutishness. After several iterations, the Epic team settled with armor they felt was “iconic,” and did more than make the men look tough. It was used to reinforce the need to use the game’s cover system.

“We cycled on the armor designs a fair amount until we came to rest on the iconic ‘rounded chestplate/blue emissive’ look,” Bleszinski said. “As with all things in game development, it required many iterations until we found something we all felt was iconic. Above all, it made the characters feel ‘heavy’ so that when the player took cover he really felt like he was slinging a massive entity against a wall.”

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GamePro’s XboxFanForce has interviewed Gears of War novel author Karen Traviss. She talks about everything from her novels, to working with Epic and where she thinks the Gears universe is headed.

XBFF: In “Aspho Fields”, we saw how Marcus and Dom met, as well as learned more about little known Gears characters and backstory. When working with such a big license, how much freedom do you have in creating the story? Was Epic very protective over their story and characters or were you given free rein over The Gears universe?

KT: In licensed work, the spectrum of working practice is vast. You can get anything, from the license owner who won’t tell you what’s coming up in the original property or even speak to you – you get third-hand messages via the publisher, or lobbed through your window wrapped around a brick if you’re really lucky – right through to the owner who brings you into the creative team, involves you, and gives you every freedom you can possibly want. Epic’s at one far end of that curve – they’re totally open, totally team-minded. I work directly with Rod, Cliff, and Mike. Plus if I have bizarre questions, like where the controls that aren’t shown in a ‘Dill might actually be located, I can talk to the concept artist. In fact, we work so directly that the publisher doesn’t get involved with the book until the manuscript is finished and Epic has signed it off with me. That’s very unusual in this industry.

The Xbox 360 is due a dashboard update tomorrow, which is to include the previously-reported Gears of War style armor for your Live avatar…