Major XBOX gaming news was announced by Microsoft today at their E3 briefing.
Project Netal adds new motion tracking accessories more powerful than Wii and allows you to play games without any controllers
A new Halo game, Halo Reach, was announced
Halo 3: ODST gets a release date and more
Left 4 Dead 2 comes out this year (exclusive to PC and 360)
Forza 3 comes out this year
Metal Gear Solid announced for 360
Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm come to the New Xbox Experience
Full XBOX 360 titles will be downloadable from XBOX Live
Beatles for Rock Band announced
New skateboard peripheral announced for Tony Hawk game
Crackdown 2 announced
Splinter Cell: Conviction announced
Add Netflix titles to your queue via the XBOX
Simultaneous viewing of Netflix movies
Instant 1080p streaming for videos over the Marketplace
Avatar marketplace
Final Fantasy XIII releases spring 2010 for XBOX 360
Halo: Reach
A multiplayer beta of Halo: Reach will be available with the purchase of Halo 3: ODST which releases September 22nd. Halo: Reach will be released sometime in 2010.
There’s no indication what genre this game will be although many believe it to be a prequel.
Halo 3: ODST
Narrative for Halo 3: ODST:
The year is 2552. The Covenant control the city of New Mombasa. They are searching for something beneath its darkened streets. You are an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper. Your orders: Stay alive, meet up with your scattered squad, and escape the embattled city. Stop the Covenant and we just might win this war.
Firefight is a new co-op mode available in ODST. Form a squad and fend off the Covies.
All released Halo 3 DLC maps plus three new Halo 3 maps will ship with ODST: Heretic, Longshore, and Citadel.
Recon armor will be achievable by playing Halo 3 and ODST.
SGT. Johnson will be a unlockable character in ODST if you pre-order.
Left 4 Dead 4
New melee combat options announced. Chainsaw, frying pag, axe, baseball bat, and blunt-force objects can be used. New AI Director 2.0 announced and will direct weather effects, world objects, and pathways provided to players.
To be released November 17th.
Valve has said this game will be larger than the original game with more maps and campaigns.
Crackdown 2
Lego Rock Band 2
Beatles Rock Band
To feature harmonizing vocals.
I Saw Her Standing There
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
I Feel Fine
Day Tripper
Tax Man
I am the Walrus
Back in the USSR
Octopus's Garden
Here Comes the Sun
Get Back
"Abbey Road" will be the first downloadable album.
Forza 3
Screenshot:
Project Natal:
The “Project Natal” sensor is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software all in one device.
Uses a 3D camera and a plethora of other sensors to detect emotion, the tone of your voice, recognize your face, and monitor you arm, hands, legs, feet, and body movements.
Call a play in a football game, and players will actually respond. Want to log onto Xbox LIVE? Simply step in front of the sensor
Steven Spielberg helped with the project.
Avatar Marketplace
Not only clothes, but new characters can be unlocked and purchased. Finally.
At next week's E3 conference Microsoft will announce that a new Zune-branded service will replace the current XBOX Live Marketplace TV and movie service. This will be the first step to letting XBOX 360 and XBOX Live users access the millions of songs available on the Zune marketplace.
Already, XBOX 360 users can access their full Zune playlist stored on another device on their network. This includes Zune Pass content. Here's hoping that Zune users will be able to tap into the TV and Movie offerings currently found on the XBOX Live Marketplace.
One annoying syncronization between the Zune service and the XBOX service is the buddylist. XBOX live buddies appear in my Zune friend's list while the limit on the number of buddies you can have remains at 100. This means that I have no room to add Zune friends because my XBOX Live buddy list is near full.
Microsoft should increase the buddylist limit. Buddylist limitations are one reason why it is hard to find social games of Halo 3; my gamertag and online presence is competing with other gamers. Xfire, Steam, and other social networking gaming services do not have such low limitations.
As pictured above, Microsoft has confirmed and soon will announce the Zune HD portable device. This slick looking media player will likely only support up to 32 GB of hard drive space. (I've downloaded over 80 GB of music in the last 4 months through the Zune Pass). The Zune HD will feature a touchscreen (ala the iPod Touch), have a large 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED screen, and an HD radio receiver.
The Zune HD will also feature a web browser.
Zune HD specs:
* 3.3-inch, 16:9 widescreen display
* 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display
* Multi-touch capability on the touchscreen
Yep. I'm experiencing the "Open Tray" error again. I'm starting to lose count of all the XBOX 360's that have RRoD or have experienced this "Open Tray" error. This next box that I get may very well be the 8th different serial number I've had.
Recall that this time last year I surveyed the gamers on my buddylist. Of the 90 gamers on my XBOX Live buddy list 50 responded. 35 people have had to repair their XBOX at least once on my list - including someone that has had to send in their system 7 times.
Since then I've got more reports of failures from people that did and did not respond to my survey. Suffice it to say there's about a 50% failure rate of XBOX 360's on my list. That rate is probably higher once you factor in the people that did not take the time to respond to my survey or if you take into account every single box and serial number that has failed.
Also note that every time I go to a shipping company to deliver or pick up my XBOX 360, the workers know it's an XBOX 360. One lady tells me that she ships XBOX 360's back for repair everyday. She went on to tell me about Rock Band instruments that she had to ship back after Christmas of last year. These people know their job and they know what they are shipping.
Thanks to a tip from Disavowed last night, I checked my warranty on my Elite that I had repaired in December. My box is still under warranty - by only 5 days. Perfect timing for Disavowed to speak up.
I've registered my box and determined how much time I have remaining on my warranty. I also have gone ahead and submitted a repair request. It was honored instantly and now I've got a shipping label to send my box back in. Pretty fast service. It's the least Microsoft can do.
Submitted by D15AV0W3D on Tue, 01/13/2009 - 10:41pm.
It's been a pleasant experience, so far. I'm using the 64bit version, and all of my hardware has been detected, and all the drivers that work w/ Vista, seem to work w/ Win7. Speaking of Vista, Win7 looks identical to Vista. The Aero look is still there. It is still in Beta stage, but it's been running pretty stable for me. Hasn't crashed at all.
I've got it running on my gaming PC. Same hardware as my XP machine, just swapped out the hard drive and put Win7 Ultimate 64bit on the new one.
IE8: also in beta testing right now. Surprisingly enough, IE8 renders pages faster than Chrome or Firefox did on my XP machine. Same hardware, same ISP, same browsing habits, faster page loading.
Windows Experience Index: something I haven't used much, since the only machine running Vista in my home right now is my wife's laptop. I scored at least a 5.9 in everything, save for the HDD test, which gave me a 2.9. WEI is by no means a precise method, but it gives a general idea. I'm a little puzzled as to why that is, seeing as the hard drive is a fairly good one (Seagate 160GB 7200rpm w/ 8MB cache, newly formatted). I haven't run any disk checks on it, but I had Open Suse loaded on it before, and that worked fine. WEI concerns aside, Win7 loads and runs very fast, so the WEI might just be a load of crap, w/ a little bit of hype thrown in.
Windows Media Center: I like the layout. It recognizes my TV tuner card (Hauppauge HVR-1600), but doesn't find any channels, so I can't watch Live TV through Media Center. Later this week, I'll try the Hauppauge software for Vista, and see how it works on Win7. This is a bit of a disappointment, but it's still a beta, after all. XP paired w/ Hauppauge's driver and software recognizes digital and analog OTA channels just fine.
What does your XBL Avatar look like? Does it look like a more flamboyant version of you? Probably. Post it here! How? Go to this link, but swap out "MlNTZ" in the url with your gamertag.
Zune Pass users can now download 10 tracks per month in a protection-free MP3 format for permanent ownership, in addition the existing "all you can eat" subscription usage. For $15 a month users can download unlimited music and keep listening to it as long as they pay the monthly fee. Stop paying the fee and you get to keep the 10 songs per month that are a part of your Zune Pass. Each month, Microsoft will credit you with 10 free downloads.
Microsoft is also dropping the price of their flash-based players: The 4GB version will drop to $99, the 8GB model will drop by $10 to $139, and the 16GB model will sell for $179, down from $199.
90% of the Zune Marketplace library is in .mp3 format. The Zune Pass works with some non-Zune devices.
Submitted by TheRedOwl on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 12:13pm.
In case you all missed these: Epic has been releasing these "developer diaries" for the upcoming release of Gears of War 2. You can download most of these in High Definition WMV format at the official GoW 2 website: http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/Media/videos.htm
All videos are chronologically ordered, from newest to oldest.
