I never thought I'd see this: Moa Burger Pringles.

These limited edition Pringles, sold exclusively in Walmart (so we don't have to suffer them on these shores) riffs on a Halo: Reach in-joke - and a rather niche one at that.

OK, some background. In the world of Halo, the moa is an ostrich-looking creature native to the planet Reach. So the lore goes, moas were used as pets and also food. They're sort of like Halo's version of the chocobo from Final Fantasy.

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Bungie's Halo website goes dark permanently in February, scattering its many player stats to the wind.

In a post on Bungie.net, the developer said halo.bungie.net goes offline permanently on 9th February.

Almost nine years ago, stats and files from Bungie's Halo games stopped getting updated on Bungie.net. Since then, all stats, files and other data from Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach lived on at halo.bungie.net.

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This week's arrival of Halo: Reach on Xbox One, Windows Store and Steam is a highly significant release. Nine years after its Xbox 360 debut, it has finally been added to the Master Chief Collection with all last-gen Bungie and 343 titles now available to Xbox One users. It's also available on PC as part of a scheduled, episodic roll-out of Halo titles - and it's the first full franchise release to hit the platform since 2004. It's a big deal then, but how does it improve on the original and are there any problems with the conversion?

I've been really looking forward to this, simply because as the final Bungie release in the series, Reach is simply an incredible game that's just as brilliant to play today. Its single-player component is deeply evocative of everything that made Halo: Combat Evolved a milestone achievement. There's that sense of ambience and enchantment from its beautifully designed alien structures and the sheer scale of its outdoor environments. Then there's its incredible soundtrack, of course - and all before we consider the actual gameplay mechanics, which still feel superb. It's Bungie at the top of its game and it's frankly unmissable.

So how can we improve on such a wonderful piece of work? Well, the increased processing power of today's hardware gives us plenty of avenues for an even better Reach experience. The first and most immediate difference in the remaster is the frame-rate. The inconsistent and often chugging performance level of the Xbox 360 release was eventually cleaned up to a nigh-on locked 30fps via its back-compat release but this new port goes the extra mile, targeting 60fps instead. On PC, you can technically go higher, but the situation is somewhat complex there - and I'm not sure going beyond 60 is actually a good idea.

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It's been a long wait but Halo: The Master Chief Collection is finally coming to PC. At X019 last week, Microsoft confirmed that the planned episodic roll-out of the collection is set to kick off on December 3rd with the arrival of Halo: Reach. We went hands-on with the port at the event, grabbed a bunch of capture and dug deep into the settings menus. We also spotted the intriguing addition of an 'enhanced mode' that uses the extra power of modern hardware to further upgrade the Reach experience beyond resolution and frame-rate alone.

System requirements for Reach are slight to say the least - which is perhaps not surprising when you bear in mind that the original game launched just over nine years ago for Xbox 360. 343 Industries says that an Nvidia GTX 770 (pretty much on par with a GTX 680 or GTX 960) is good enough to deliver 60 frames per second at 4K resolution - and you can get an idea of what that experience looks like by taking a look at the video embedded on this page.

Based on our playtest of the PC game, 343 Industries has stuck to the Master Chief Collection template established by the Xbox One compilation. New assets - if any - are thin on the ground: this is effectively the original Reach, liberated from the 1152x720 resolution of the Xbox 360 game. That's absolutely fine as despite being mastered to last-gen standards, the art design still holds up beautifully today. Performance-wise, the original release had some issues maintaining its 30fps target frame-rate - a situation resolved by the revamped Xbox One back-compat rendition of the game. Obviously though, PC goes much further: at X019, the game ran very smoothly at 60fps and it'll be interesting to see if the port can be unlocked to run faster still.

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