In what has got to be seen as an amazing feat, the XBOX Live service has reached 1 Million subscribers. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I dont like the service. What is amazing to me is how quickly Microsoft was able to garner 1,000,000 subscribers to its service. It usually takes a while to get 1 Million people to do ANYTHING, let alone play video games together. As Microsoft noted in the announcement, they reached this milestone faster than the AOL, HBO, and TiVo services did. It appears that the slogan must be true: "It's Good to Play Together".

Gallery: XBOX Live Hits 1 Million Subscribers

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As a follow up to the previous story, it appears there was a misunderstanding regarding Sony's announcement. To clear it all up, the new Sony handheld console, the PlayStation Portable (PSP) will be the console to launch in March 2005.

At the same press conference, it was also revealed that the PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be on display in full working, playable form at E3 in May 2005.

Read More | Reuters

Gallery: PlayStation 3 Displayed in May ‘05 - PSP US Launch in March ‘05

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Turn your Xbox into a media center with XBMC. What is XBMC?

XboxMediaCenter is a free open source (GPL) multimedia player for the Xbox from Microsoft. Currently XboxMediaCenter can be used to play/view most popular video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF plus many more less known formats directly from a CD/DVD in Xbox DVD-ROM drive or of the Xbox harddrive, XBMC can also play files from a PC over a local network and even stream media streams directly from the internet. XBMC has playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast and many audio visualizations. All these features enable the Xbox running XboxMediaCenter to fully function as a multimedia jukebox.

Download Here | XBOX Media Center

Gallery: XBOX Media Center

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In what has to be considered a bombshell announcement, Sony Computers President Takeshi Kutaragi revealed to the press that the next version of the PlayStation videogame console is targeted to launch by the end of the fiscal year. What this means is that Sony plans to have the PlayStation 3 on store shelves by the end of March 2005, two months before the 2005 Electronics Entertainment Expo. If the announcement serves to be true, then Sony just changed the game in a major way.

Microsoft has begun making noise about launching the successor to the XBOX sometime in 2005 as well, though no specific date has been set. Meanwhile, Nintendo has sworn up and down that they will not be the last one's out of the gate this time, and are reportedly hard at work on the "Revolution", which is the follow up to the Gamecube.

Read More | Seattle PI

Gallery: PlayStation 3 May Launch in March 2005

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In the wake of the soon to come Nintendo DS, I thought we would take a look at the last handheld released by Nintendo, the Game Boy Advance SP. This little peice of hardware really is "more than meets the eye".

When former Nintendo monarch Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down, Saturu Iwata took over as Nintendo CEO. His first order of business was to do away with the childish image many had with Nintendo and its consoles. Being that the Game Boy franchise had long been the biggest breadwinner at Nintendo, Iwata decided to soup up the product line. His goal was simple: Get a Nintendo Game Boy back in the hands of adults.

Click to continue reading Game Boy Advance SP Review

Gallery: Game Boy Advance SP Review

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Remember the simple days of gaming? Back when it wasn't all about graphics and sound, but rather about...making fun of the cheesy graphics and sound? I digress. Either way, Jakks Pacific has decided to bring back the favorites of yesteryear in a simple and easy plug and play format. Your old favorites from Namco, Atari, Activision and more come in a joystick pre-loaded with games. Plug the joystick into an RCA input, and it will seem as if you and Ms. Pac-Man were never separated.

Read More | IGN

Gallery: Jakks Brings Back Old School Favorites

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Over the past week, the successor to the XBOX has been the talk of the gaming world. First, questionable XBOX 2 specs are leaked. According to the "leaked" info, the XBOX 2 will have a 3.5GHz IBM Power PC Processor, a 500MHz ATI graphics processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 12X DVD drive (but the XBOX isn't supposed to be a computer, right?). Then a report was released that the XBOX 2 would not be backwards compatible with any current-gen XBOX games.

Finally, Microsoft jumped in and basically stated that nothing has been announced yet in regards to the new console, codenamed "Xenon". However, they did not confirm or deny anything. Well, after speaking with a few major developers over the past couple of days, it is beginning to sound like those leaked specs are a reality. Many are reporting that the games currently in development for XBOX 2 are in fact expected to run on a machine similar to what was leaked.

Gallery: XBOX 2 Specs Leaked, Then Retracted, Then Confirmed?

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KevinRose.com has a tutorial on how to soft mod your XBOX to give it much more functionality than it has out of the box. If you have ever wanted to back up your games to your hard drive, browse the internet, or even turn your game system into a video recorder, check out the article. It is very straight forward, and when you are done, you will have a much more powerful machine.

Read the article at KevinRose.com

Gallery: Mod Your XBOX Without a Mod Chip

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