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Latest Gear Live Videos
Bungie Announces Podcast
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Corporate News, First Person Shooters, Internet, Xbox 360, Xbox Live,
In their weekly update, Bungie, creators of Halo, have announced that they will be starting a podcast. They promise that it will be “Bungie-fied” and chock full of interviews with individuals close to the Halo 3 process. Also in this weeks update are more cries from the Land of the Banned and a new Mister Chief. More quality video game podcasts are always welcome. Do any readers have a video game podcast recommendation? Don’t forget to check out The Bleeding Edge, a technology podcast on our sister site Gear Live.
Read More 
| Bungie
Gallery: Bungie Announces Podcast
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Xbox Live Anywhere Screenshots Emerge
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Portable/Mobile, Screenshots, Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Marketplace,
Xbox Live Anywhere screenshots have surfaced in the TeamXbox forums where Captain Panic was able to post images of Live Anywhere running on BREW. The images show the ability to queue up downloads for both your Xbox 360 and PC, messaging people on your friends list, and downloading an arcade game. Screenshots also show the ability to view your achievement points! It is not yet known if completing an XBLA game on your phone will result in gaining those achievement points on your Gamertag.
One interesting screenshot shows the ability to buy a pass to all games from a certain publisher on a monthly basis for $3.95. Could this signal a subscription plan for XBLA too? I for one would welcome a $3.95 monthly charge for Xbox 360, PC and mobile versions of the same game, especially if this included a subscription to the publisher’s entire library. We’ll keep you up to date as new info emerges.
Read More | TeamXbox via 360updates.com Additional Pictures
Gallery: Xbox Live Anywhere Screenshots Emerge
Team Xecuter Xbox 360 Connectivity Kit Review
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Hardware, Mods/Hacks, Xbox 360,
Maxconsole.net managed to get a hold of the new Xbox 360 Connectivity from Team Xecuter, and they ran it through a few tests. There are two items included in the kit: a hard drive adapter, and an optical disc drive adapter. The hard drive adapter is a fairly standard connectivity kit for the Xbox 360 hard drive, except that it allows both USB and SATA connectivity with the same cable. The connector also features an LED to let you know its operating, but it is hardly the clean solution that the Datel kit is. However, the second part of the set is more interesting; it is an optical drive adapter that allows the user to remove the DVD-ROM drive from the Xbox 360 and use standard PC power to connect it to the host computer, so that the Xbox 360 doesn’t have to be near the PC and powered on to work with the DVD drive. The connector has a toggle switch to allow selecting either normal or debug mode (for using the drive without any add-on software) and has a SATA connector to allow firmware manipulation, so that gamers can have access to their legitimate Xbox 360 software backups. Maxconsole gives the kit a favorable review, only dinging the optical drive adapter for not supporting USB at this time, and the complexity of the firmware patching process, which is more of a software issue than anything else. The kit retails for $29.95, and is available now.
Read More | MaxConsole
Gallery: Team Xecuter Xbox 360 Connectivity Kit Review
John Woo’s Stranglehold Will Launch With PS3
Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Action, Fighting, PC, PlayStation 3, Release Dates, Xbox 360,
It had been suspected for a while, but today IGN confirmed with Midway that John Woo Presents Stranglehold will launch on November 17th with the Playstation 3. Of course, the title will also be launching for the Xbox 360 and the PC at the same time. This is great news for fans of gunfighting, slow-mo and Chow Yun Fat, and appears to be one of the stronger launch titles for the PS3.
IGN earlier had a chance to play through a demo and was impressed with the completely destructible environment and free-form gunfighting controls. This sounds like one of those games that’s going to be a great way to demo your brand-spanking new PS3 to your jealous friends on launch day.
Read More | IGN PS3
Gallery: John Woo’s Stranglehold Will Launch With PS3
Interview With Matt Lee, Xbox 360 Game Technology Group Developer
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Hardware, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360,
Ars Technica has a fairly in depth interview with one of the developers from Microsoft’s Game Technology Group, Matt Lee. In his words, his job “is to help game developers make better Xbox 360 games.” There are a ton of technical details in the interview, ranging from improvements in the Altivec units on the PowerPC cores, CPU multithreading issues, and procedural world generation.
Somewhat interesting are the perspectives on the video game market; as a developer, the marketshare statements might not hold a lot of weight. Bandied about is the 10 million unit head start, as if that were fact at this point. With the PS2 outselling the Xbox 360 in May, and an average of 250,000 Xbox 360 units sold by month, if Xbox 360 sales remain the same for the rest of the year, that targets an additional 1.5 to 2 million Xbox 360s in the United States; Europe might add a similar number, and Japan’s sales will be negligable. Add to this the fact that Wii and the Playstation 3 ship in November, and Sony’s marketing machine will be intense. So 10 million sounds good, but is probably as optimistic as Microsoft’s original holiday projections for the Xbox 360. Saying that “Both the Japanese and US markets are reaching saturation at this point” may have some weight in that there aren’t a lot of ways to incrementally add new gamers, but the existing core gamer demographic is still a battle to be fought every generation. Add to this the strong drives that Nintendo is making with its “Blue Ocean Strategy” in all three territories seems to indicate the opposite; that there are new opportunities, just not in the standard game development genres.
Lee also takes some time to discuss the PS3 architecture. Given that he probably doesn’t have a Sony NDA signed or a development kit, he’s probably working off much of the same information as the general public. There might be some insight he has talking with developers experienced on both platforms, so the commentary is interesting from that light. Porting from PS3 to Xbox 360 and vice-versa will be difficult, Lee predicts, but that’s hardly a revelation; the original PS2 and Xbox consoles saw some spectacularly bad cross-platform ports in their day, most notoriously with some of Midway’s releases. The Xbox 360’s unified memory architecture may be somewhat of an advantage, but its hard to tell at this point. It is, however, interesting to get a technical review through Microsoft-colored glasses.
Read More | ArsTechnica
Gallery: Interview With Matt Lee, Xbox 360 Game Technology Group Developer
Tim Schafer Calls for Psychonauts on Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility
Posted by George Hatzidimitriou Categories: Xbox, Xbox 360,
The always charismatic Tim Schafer, founder of Doublefine Studios and of Monkey Island fame, posted this amusing call to action this week, pleading for fans of the cult hit Xbox title, Psychonauts to help get the game added to the Xbox 360’s backwards compatiblity list by sending emails to Microsoft’s backwards compatibility team and voicing their support through whatever methods necessary.
“I want you to get up. I want you to walk over to your window right now. I want you to open your window up, and then I want you to stick your head out, and then I want you to take in a nice breath of fresh air, and then I want you to close that window and walk back to your computer and click on this link and send Microsoft a heartfelt message. Something to the effect of, “I am a 9-year-old boy in the hospital, dying of consumption, and my last wish is to play Psychonauts on my XBOX 360!” (Please, try to make up your own disease.)”
Apparently that entails posing as a terminally ill child with a dying wish. A noble cause if I ever saw one. Rock on Tim.
Read More | Double Fine
Gallery: Tim Schafer Calls for Psychonauts on Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility
Gamasutra Podcast On Next Generation Development
Posted by George Hatzidimitriou Categories: Culture, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360,
Gamasutra has updated their weekly podcast with the first in a two part roundtable discussion focusing on the various challenges developers are facing with next generation console development on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
Featured are:
- Brian Eddy of Midway Games (Stranglehold / Xbox 360, PS3)
- Nicolas Eypert of Ubisoft Paris (Red Steel, Wii)
- Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks (Oblivion, Fallout 3 / Xbox 360)
- Bryan Intihar (Previews Editor of EGM)
- Aubrey Pullman of Microsoft Game Studios (Forza Motorsport 2 / Xbox 360)
- Evan Wells of Naughty Dog (Unnamed Next-Gen Title / PS3)
Thankfully, the discussion stays away from overtly technical talk, instead opting to focus on staffing, budget and management issues. The panelists all seem to agree that due to limited budgets and an ever increasing amount of required development time, developers must choose more carefully which areas of graphics,physics and AI to specialize in rather than striving for all around perfection. Other topics include middleware, specialization of staff, the definition of “next gen” and what is undoubtedly every one’s biggest concern, realistic trees in video gaming.
Read More | Gamasutra
Gallery: Gamasutra Podcast On Next Generation Development
Resolving HDTV Lag In Games
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Hardware, Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360,
The Xbox 360 has sought to usher in the era of high definition gaming, and many gamers have purchased HDTV sets to go along with their new Xbox 360s. However, while HDTV offers spectacular pictures at stunning resolutions, there are some issues, the most vexxing of which is HDTV lag. IGN.com tries to dissect the problem, and offer up some solutions to the issue. There are basically two areas where HDTV lag can occur: first, when resolutions other than the native resolution of the television are used, the TV will have to alter the signal to display correctly on the set. This will sometimes require scaling the image up or down in resolution, and may also require converting the signal from an interlaced signal to progressive, or vice-versa, depending on the television type. This conversion takes a finite amount of time, and depending on the television, will either be so quick as to be unnoticeable in gaming, or can be long enough to affect the ability to play games at all.
The second issue occurs when there are additional filtering options offered by the TV. One of the more common is Samsung’s DNIe, but most of the high end HDTV manufacturers will have their own proprietary signal filter that will attempt to improve the picture seen by the user. This process again takes time. Usually it doesn’t take that long for signal processing to occur, but combined with the time taken to scale the image in the previous examples, this can again cripple gaming.
IGN proposes a few solutions to this problem. First, if the gamer hasn’t bought an HDTV set, try to test the set first with some timing intensive games in the store first. Obviously, it will be difficult to bring your dance pad in to work through some 10 foot Dance Dance Revolution tracks, but fighting games are notoriously twitch sensitive.
If you already have a set, try and set your HDTV to as close to native resolution as possible. With some consoles, this will be next to impossible. The Gamecube supports 480P resolution on some games, but most will be 480i. The Playstation 2 will have even fewer 480p games. Most original Xbox games are also 480p, but some will support 720p and higher resolutions. The Xbox 360 should offer native support for most resolutions, including 480p, 720p, and 1080i. Relying on the Xbox 360’s internal scaler should help resolve the issue in most circumstances.
They also recommend turning off any image enhancement filters on the TV. Some sets offer a “game” mode that passes the signal through without any additional filtering, and this may help as well. Finally, if none of these help, it may be necessary to purchase hardware that has a faster scaling engine than the one in the television set. IGN has a couple of recommendations, including the Micomsoft XRGB boxes that are usually available from import stores like Lik-Sang or NCSX.
Read More | IGN Gear
Gallery: Resolving HDTV Lag In Games
Printer Friendly Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility List
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Retro, Xbox 360,
Microsoft has been making progress at getting more games on the Xbox 360 compatibility list, and as such, remembering which individual games will work and which will not is getting to be more of a chore when raiding the bargain bins for older original Xbox titles. Now, thanks to Major Nelson, with the printable list gamers no longer have to wonder if it was Sneakers or Conker that was compatible. (Unfortunately, it was Sneakers.)
Read More | Major Nelson
Gallery: Printer Friendly Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility List
Second Xbox 360 Firmware Hack Released
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Mods/Hacks, Xbox 360,
Commodore4Eva, the hacker behind the modified firmware releases on the original Xbox, and the Xbox 360 Samsung drives, has released a firmware that allows Xbox 360 users with the Hitachi DVD-ROM drive to play backup software. Both current drives should now be able to be modified to run backups, and there are several firmware swapping mod solutions on the way that will take advantage of this. This particular firmware is for the 47D version of the Hitachi drive, and a release for the 46 version should be coming soon. The hack is definitely not one for novices, and of course, will void the warranty of your Xbox 360.
Read More | Xbox Hacker
Gallery: Second Xbox 360 Firmware Hack Released
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