Tag: Microsoft

Major Nelson, Microsoft’s inside man on all things Xbox, is reporting that after numerous delays and much anticipation, the downloadable demo of Crackdown will be hitting the Xbox Live Marketplace for download on next Tuesday, January 23rd at 2:00 Pacific Time.

Halo fanboys unite! It’s been revealed that the upcoming $99 Halo 3 Legendary Edition (due this October) will include a variety of special bonus features, including 3 bonus DVDs with behind-the-scenes footage, hi-resolution cinematics from Halo and Halo 2, Red vs Blue episodes and more.

Now this idea has been bandied about before, but the rumor mill is abuzz today with talk that Microsoft may be nearing completion of a purchase of gaming giant Capcom. Certainly, Capcom has been producing some quality hit titles for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console of late, with games like Dead Rising and today’s release of Lost Planet receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from gamers.

For a while, there’s been talk about an updated Xbox 360 in the works that is to feature a smaller, cooler running 65nm CPU. Now it looks like the new version of the game console may include additional features.

Inching out the newly released Nintendo Wii, and thoroughly trouncing Sony’s troubled Playstation 3, it looks like Microsoft took the lead in holiday sales with their Xbox 360 console in the U.S. market over the 2006 holiday season.

Around 7:00pm Central Time today (12/27/2006), the online game play portion of the Xbox Live service went down for the count, and as of this writing, (about 4-1/2 hours later), the service remains down. According to most reports, other portions of the service, such as chat, messages and downloads appear to be functional.

Recently, it was revealed that Gears of War for the Xbox 360 had broken sales records with over 2 million copies sold since “Emergence Day” back in October 2006. Now it looks as if the dude with the disturbingly large head, the ruler of all things meat, Burger King may be giving Marcus Fenix and gang a run for their money.

Microsoft has released another update to add some titles to the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility list, enabling a variety of original Xbox titles to play properly on the 360. The newly added and updated titles include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Burnout 3: Takedown (updated) Conker: Live and Reloaded Dead Or Alive Ultimate Destroy All Humans!

In celebration of the release of the new Xbox Live Arcade title, Assault Heroes, Sierra is giving away 100,000 Microsoft Gamer Points to a single lucky winner. The best part of the contest – all you need to do is fill out this form to be entered to win.

A while back, we reported on the availability of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express, which allows you to roll your own homebrew games for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live Arcade. Starting on January 2, 2007, you’ll be able to participate in Dream Build Play, a competition offering a shot at prizes including a chance to distribute your gaming creation on the Xbox Live Arcade.

The guys over at nexgen wars are compiling up-to-date statistics on console sales to date for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii… At this time I wrote this article, the Xbox 360 was clearly in the lead with 7.7 Million+ consoles sold, compared to 687k+ Nintendo Wii consoles, and just 340k+ Sony Playstation 3 consoles sold to date.

Some crafty Xbox 360 owner in Brazil has come up with the Occam’s Razor approach to fixing the console’s “red rings of doom” failure. When in doubt, the simplest solution is usually the right one… simply smack the crap out of your hardware.

Not that your screen really needs saving these days, but some cruel jokers over at Microsoft TechNet have released the Blue Screen of Death Screen Saver for those of you with a sadistic streak. The screen saver accurately emulates the dreaded OS hard crash that Windows is (in)famous for.

On November 22, the Xbox Live Marketplace will start offering movie and television downloads for the Xbox 360. Microsoft has announced agreements with CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, TBS, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Warner Brothers to offer an initial lineup of over 1,000 hours of TV shows and movies on the Xbox Live marketplace.

In case you’re planning on picking up Microsoft’s new Zune player for the holidays, you might want to check out some of these new accessories being offered by Belkin: TuneBase FM Transmitter($79.99): Broadcast tunes to your car stereo; able to work in either portrait or landscape mode TunePower ($59.99): Special case which includes a battery for up to 6 hours of extra playtime and a “kickstand” for hands-free video viewing Acrylic Case ($29.99) Folio Leather Kickstand Case ($29.99) Microfiber Holster Case($29.99) Neoprene Sports Armband Case ($29.99) Sports Jacket Case with Armband ($19.99) ClearScreen Overlay ($14.99) All accessories should be released in North America by the end of November.

The Microsoft insiders at ON10.net have posted this video of detailing the features of the new Xbox 360 Wireless Headset. Some interesting revelations are shown in the video. The headset comes with small and medium “ear wraps,” taking into account the fact that everyone’s ears are different (what happened to “large”?).