All I have to say is… WOW
Source: Totally360
by David
by David
Coming March 3rd to the XBox Live Marketplace, and the Official Xbox Magazine, The Outfit, THQ’s WWII action title.
The demo will feature the Strategic Victory multiplayer mode, which Joystiq considers the most interesting mode.
Up to eight players are divided into two teams. Each team starts with several control towers and 150 command points. Teams lose points when their heroes are killed, bases are destroyed, or they lose a majority of their control towers. The first team to reach zero command points is defeated.
Each player will have access to the destruction-on-demand feature, using the team’s accumulated F-Us (Field Units) to order in AI reinforcements, vehicles, air strikes, and weaponry. In addition, maps contain neutral resource buildings that, when captured, become spawn points and grant access to special destruction-on-demand items. However, capturing a resource building does not affect your team’s command point total, at least, not directly.
Source: Joystiq
by David
A new Bomberman game is in the works for the Xbox 360, and this is not the Bomberman you grew up on.
Hudson Soft’s twenty year old brand has updated the idea just a bit.
The game, currently rumored to be entitled Bomberman Act Zero, keeps the gameplay, but evolves the graphics a bit.
The information comes from scans of Famitsu Weekly which shows a little on the graphics, but not too many details are known.
Will it be an Xbox Live Arcade game or a full retail release? If it is anything like the old Bomberman, it will be a sweet addition to the Xbox library.
by Ben
Your not the only person that thought it was an old school calculator, the P300 measures in at 87.5mm x 54.5mm x 8.9mm and only weighs 81grams. This tiny phone still finds room for a 262,000 TFT LCD color screen, 1.3megapixel camera, 80MB internal memory, as well as supporting MP3 & AAC playback. The camera is capable of image and video capture/playback; the device also has MMS/SMS capabilities.
Running on GSM 900/1800/1900MHz, data transfer by GPRS, the soon to be released Samsung SGH-P300 is a unique take on mobile phone innovation.
via [gadgetreview.com]
by David
360Monster ran a poll a little while back asking people what Live Arcade title they bought, and the results are in, and not surprisingly, Geometry Wars came out on top.
What is far more interesting is to see where the rest of the games lined up.
1. Geometry Wars Evolved [209 votes]
2. Hexic [141 votes]
3. Bankshot Billiards 2 [107 votes]
4. Bejeweled 2 [92 votes]
5. Smash TV [84 votes]
6. Gauntlet [73 votes]
7. Mutant Storm Reloaded [64 votes]
8. Outpost Kaloki X [51 votes]
9. Wik: Fable of Souls [47 votes]
10. Joust [44 votes]
11. Hardwood Series [42 votes]
12. Robotron: 2084 [28 votes]
Total: 982 Votes
This fits in with where I would put most of these games as well, though I am surprised how low Outpost Kaloki X is, as I have enjoyed it more than Gauntlet and even the classic Smash TV.
by David
A great article on XBOXIC about the patch system for the Xbox 360 and they mostly agree with my feelings on the whole thing.
Everybody who tried to play Call of Duty 2 online encountered a problem or two, if it’s not the connecting issue, you have terrible lag. You ask yourself how did this happen, don’t they know what testing a game is? Or how to create a proper online system without glitches? If this game was released on a previous generation console, you would be screwed.
But what if we take Full Auto for example, that game doesn’t do very well in the charts and suffers from bad frame rates and choppy performance. It would probably take a huge amount of time to even improve this a little. That’s an example of a premature released game, it works, but it doesn’t satisfy. It’s obvious that we’re going to see this more and more in the future as it’s already happening with PC games. Gamers without a Xbox 360 HDD might even have a bigger problem as they’re unable to download patches. In the case of Dead or Alive 4, a bug causes you to lose savegames sometimes. How annoying is that, to lose all your unlocked characters.
How frustrating the whole thing is. I really don’t understand why the Xbox 360 has to be more like PC gaming.
by David
Rare’s letters page details their plans for updates for both Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero.
According to Kameo’s lead designer, George Andreas, “Co-op over Live is currently in the last stages of debugging and should be available very soon. And there are firm plans to release more downloadable content soon after – details of which will be made available soon. Watch this space…”
Some other information posted includes: “We do have DLC for both Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero on the way, yes. I can’t give exact details because nothing’s been announced yet, but I believe it’s common knowledge that there’ll be more multiplayer maps available for PDZ at the very least.”
And futher enhancements to Perfect Dark Zero, “We’re making more levels for multiplayer, and we’ll be doing a title update to fix some of the annoying issues players have with the game. More news on when exactly that’s going to happen will come later on down the line. Clan functionality was supposed to be available from the MGS side, but it didn’t make it in for launch.”
Good stuff though I am really not a fan of the need to fix glitches in their games. Why can’t they get it right the first time around, like they more or less used to?
Via: Xbox360Fanboy.
by David
For a long time now people have been wondering when Microsoft would drop the other shoe when it came to the media abilities of the Xbox 360, and especially since CES as Microsoft and DirecTV announced an agreement to basically work together. Part of that agreement involved extending “the DirecTV experience to the Xbox 360 system.
Well now it looks like in the March 2006 issue of Official Xbox Magazine there is an article that says “that a DirecTV blade might be added to your Xbox 360 Dashboard to accompany the Xbox Live, Games, Media, and System blades. In that blade, you could download TV episodes in high definition, HD movies on demand, and standard-definition streaming DVR (i.e., TiVo) functions.”
I currently don’t know where Microsoft is expecting people to store such content, and if they really want me to take advantage of it, they better find a way to let me download while doing other things like playing an arcade game while I wait.
by David
Xbox Canada and Blue Dot Gallery are going to bring an art showing of both pre-production and post-production artwork behind a few of the Xbox 360’s launch titles. The games will include Kameo: Elements of Power, Perfect Dark Zero, and Project Gotham Racing 3. If you want a chance to see some great concept sketches, background paintings, and high definition environments, from those popular games, you might want to check it out.
A free, public display of the work will be on display from February 24th through the 26th “roughly between 12pm-5pm”.
The private gala, for those that have access somehow, will be on the 23rd, and be attended by UK-based artists Wil Overton of Rare and Chris Davie of Bizarre Creations.
by David
When everyone was sitting on the bums waiting for the Xbox 360 to hit the market, and we were all met with delays and shortages, everyone had come up with reasons behind the shortages, but they were never really explained, and now it looks like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer basically told the story without pointing any fingers: “… [with] devices based on new chips, there’s always the question of what yield will you get out of the manufacturing process of the new chip. We’re getting a little less, but not much less than the yields we expected, and we know that the yields we expected will probably outrun supply.”
The Xbox 360’s 512MB of high-speed GDDR3 memory is only manufactured by two companies which are Germany’s Infineon and South Korea’s Samsung, and while both companies were contracted to supply the memory, Infineon had trouble producing chips that met the speed requirements leading to the shortage.
If it was the lack of memory that created the shortage, we can only hope that adding another manufacturing partner like they did will solve the problem, and fulfill Peter Moore’s prophecy of no more shortages in 4-6 weeks.