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Xbox News is a site that brings you the very latest Original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One news, the latest games and releases, Part of the
DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network.
THE LATEST NEWS BELOW
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January 11th, 2010, 18:51 Posted By: wraggster
How do you take a great idea like Xbox Live games coming to cellphones and ruin it? By only bringing those games to Windows Mobile phones, which may be what Microsoft has planned.
As you can see by the image above, taken from some internal Microsoft marketing material from last month, Xbox Live is spread across the Xbox 360, Windows and...Windows Phone. Now, this could just be a stand-in for many phones, or a new branding for game content to be available on many platforms. But it also could mean the games are just heading to Windows Mobile phones, which would pretty much kill the entire initiative right off the bat.
Also conspicuously absent from these plans: the Zune. No love for the Zune, Microsoft?
http://gizmodo.com/5445319/xbox-live...-mobile-phones
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January 11th, 2010, 18:48 Posted By: wraggster
Microsoft's told Eurogamer that Game Room decorations needn't be bought as they can be unlocked inside the games themselves.
High scores mean prizes, and you could walk away with a retro theme, prop or mascot for achieving them. You can also whip the wallet out and purchase them, but for how much Microsoft's not ready to divulge: "There's no more information at this time," a spokesperson explained.
As announced at CES 2010, 30 retro titles will be available for Game Rooms at launch this spring. As for additional titles, the platform holder told us they'll be added each week. Remember, Microsoft hopes to have 1000 available after roughly three years.
Each of those games costs 240 MSP (£2/€2.80) to own, either on PC or Xbox 360 - a dual-licence to own the title on both platforms costs 400 MSP (£3.40/€4.65). Leaderboards, Achievements, challenges and taunts are shared. And once you own the game, you'll never have to pay to play.
We're not sure whether there's an upper limit on how many games/cabinets one person can own, or whether multiple games can be played on one cabinet.
Those that don't own a game must pay 40 MSP (£0.34/€0.47) for the privilege, which should represent two turns' worth - although the length of time playing will depend on the style of game being played. It's not clear whether friends visiting your Game Room will have to pay to play, but that would obviously be brilliant.
Remaining answers will be cleared up when we can see Game Rooms with our own eyes.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ga...are-unlockable
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January 11th, 2010, 18:47 Posted By: wraggster
Film director Neill Blomkamp has said there are no current plans to make a game based on District 9 and that he's pretty conflicted about the idea anyway.
"The idea of District 9 as a videogame stresses me out a little bit because games based on movies rarely work. And movies based on games don't work - I don't know what's up with that," the director told the LA Times (thanks Kotaku).
"District 9 as a game would be fascinating. And I don't want to see it happen for any sort of corporate reason or profit thing. I used to be involved in computer graphics and I love virtual environments. That's why I like videogames, really.
"And I think a virtual environment of the slums of Soweto is an appealing idea to me. The weapons are cool, too. I photographed the film in a way that isn't that different than videogame perspective in some parts. So a game would be interesting to me. There's nothing happening with it though."
Blomkamp is probably best known in gaming circles as the man who was going to direct the aborted Halo film, which was in pre-production before the director declared it dead in late 2007.
When pressed by the LA Times on why he would have chosen to work on a film-of-a-game if he thinks they don't work, and if this meant he thought he could be the guy who finally did make it work, he replied; "Yeah, totally, that's exactly why." Oh well, District 9's done good.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bl...istrict-9-game
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January 11th, 2010, 18:42 Posted By: wraggster
Croteam’s over-the-top FPS romp gets an Xbox Live Arcade release this Wednesday
Microsoft’s Major Nelson has announced that this week’s Xbox Live Arcade release will be Croteam’s frivolous first person shooter Serious Sam HD.
Priced at 1200 Microsoft Points (£10.20), the game will be available to download this Wednesday (January 13th). The game was released on PC late last year.
The Serious Sam series has a cult following amongst PC, and to a lesser extent Xbox, gamers thanks to its flippant, gratuitous and non-stop action.
This new title is actually a visually enhanced remake of the IP’s first outing, Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Its follow-up, The Second Encounter, is also scheduled for a similar HD makeover with a release expected later this year.
Croteam is also working on a brand new title in the series – Serious Sam 3.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/37093/Seri...-XBL-this-week
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January 11th, 2010, 18:35 Posted By: wraggster
Casual games have featured prominently in Microsoft's list of the most popular games on it's online Xbox 360 Live service. While the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 dominate, a number of casual games have joined the best selling and most played online games on a console that appears to be courting an increasingly diverse userbase.
In the Xbox 360 top Live titles, which is based on unique users, interactive quiz show 1 vs 100 charts as the 17th most played game, while in the list of the best selling downloadable Arcade titles Hasbro Family Game Night takes forth place and Uno and Peggle secure 8th and 10th positions respectively.
The charts, detailed on on Microsoft's official unofficial blog Major Nelson, the top selling Indie games are also listed, and again casual titles boast a healthy presence, with the likes of Rumble Massage, myFishtank and Aquarium HD featuring prominantly.
The only chart without any casual titles is the Xbox Originals list, which shows the most played games from the first generation Xbox downloaded for the 360. Despite the absence of casual sector inclusions, in context with the other charts it demonstrates how Microsoft have managed in one console generation to move from courting an entirely hardcore audience to a far more varied demographic.
http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/296...-games-of-2009
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January 11th, 2010, 14:16 Posted By: wraggster
Microsoft has named its most played and downloaded Live titles of 2009, with Halo 3 coming out as the most popular Live game of the year.
Following behind Halo 3 in a chart determined by unique user connectivity, were three Activision titles, Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: World At War. Gears of War 2 came in at number five, and Grand Theft Auto IV and Left 4 Dead were at numbers six and seven respectively.
The most purchased Arcade and Indie titles for the year were also revealed, with Battlefield 1943 topping the former.
That was followed by Castle Crashers, Trials HD and the Hasbro Family Game Night titles.
The most popular Indie game proved to be Jamezila developed shooter I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES!!!1, followed by Avatar Drop, RC-AirSim, Headshot and Miner Dig Deep.
These are the full top tens, as reported on the Major Nelson blog.
Xbox 360 top live titles
01 Halo 3
02 Call of Duty 4
03 Modern Warfare 2
04 Call of Duty: World at War
05 Gears of War 2
06 GTA IV
07 Left 4 Dead
08 Halo 3: ODST
09 Fable II: Episode 1
10 Biohazard 5 - Resident Evil 5
Top Arcade titles
01 Battlefield 1943
02 Castle Crashers
03 Trials HD
04 Hasbro Family Game Night
05 Shadow Complex
06 Marvel vs Capcom 2
07 Magic: The Gathering
08 UNO
09 Worms
10 Peggle
Top Indie games
01 I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES!!!1
02 Avatar Drop
03 RC-AirSim
04 Headshot
05 Miner Dig Deep
06 Rumble Massage
07 Who Did I Date Last Night
08 Kodu Game Lab
09 Avatar Golf
10 Aquarium HD
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...e-game-of-2009
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January 11th, 2010, 00:24 Posted By: wraggster
Microsoft is developing Project Natal plus new software and content services to prolong the life of the Xbox 360 games console, rather than introduce a new machine
We all know that the games business goes in cycles and that a new generation of consoles always comes along to replace whatever is popular today. In fact, we should now be talking about the Xbox 720, Sony PlayStation 4 and Wii II, or whatever they might be called, because game developers need a couple of years to create new games to exploit the new hardware capabilities that justify the launch of a new generation. But we aren't, and Microsoft doesn't want us to.
"I think it's important to say that the Xbox 360 is the console of the long future for us. There is no need to launch a new console, because we're able to give this console new life either with software upgrades or hardware upgrades like Project Natal," said David Hufford, senior director of Xbox product management in a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "The Xbox 360 was designed for a long life, and I don't even know if we're at the midpoint yet."
Rather than release a new console, Microsoft is developing Project Natal to enhance existing systems. At a CES keynote, Xbox boss Robbie Bach said Natal will be released for the 2010 holiday season, ie in the run-up to Christmas. Hufford said the team had demonstrated at E3 that the technology worked, and now "we've asked the development teams to concentrate on making the games."
Hufford said that the Xbox 360 did not need an upgrade to support 3D games -- "Avatar is on Xbox and we have a 3D game, Scrap Metal, in our booth right now" -- and nor would he commit to offering a Blu-ray drive. Indeed, I couldn't even get him to speculate about moving the 360 forward to a more modern chip technology. This would reduce the Xbox's manufacturing cost and also produce a console that generated less heat and cost less to run -- benefits that have already accrued to Sony with the launch of the PS3 Slim. It should also be more reliable.
"We love our prices right now," said Hufford. "I don't want to say that technology stops, but we believe we have a high quality console, and we stand by that quality with an unprecedented warranty, so we think we're in a good place now heading into the Natal era."
Microsoft is clearly working on the software and content parts of the Xbox with the Zune movie service, support for social networking, the Gameroom of classic arcade games, Mediaroom TV services, Project Natal and so on. It's not looking to launch new hardware.
This makes sense because new consoles typically sell at a loss, and the system only becomes really profitable in the later years as manufacturing costs fall and sales of high-priced software mount up. Sony, of course, is in the same position but worse, because it's still selling PlayStation 3 consoles at a loss, and will need several profitable years to get back its huge investment.
So what has changed?
Most console wars result in a big win for one player -- Atari VCS, Nintendo NES, Sega Mega Drive, Sony PlayStation or whatever -- with the others failing. This encourages the failing companies to move to the next generation first to get a competitive edge.
This time around, the three major players have all achieved viable market shares. Perhaps there's no incentive for any of them to start a next-generation console war, and Ken Kutaragi will have been correct in claiming that the PS3 would last a decade.
What do you think? Technology has moved on since 2005, when the Xbox 360 was announced. Will you be happy to have the same system in 2015?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ft-no-new-xbox
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January 11th, 2010, 00:20 Posted By: wraggster
News via http://www.xbox-scene.com/
A few days ago we announced that we had designed a simple circuit to enable full firmware read/write on all versions of Liteon drive up to the very latest 93450.
The response was unprecedented - especially from installers who were given generous wholesale discounts by all of our resellers.
After reading an enormous amount of feedback we made some extra changes to the design in time for shipping to resellers next week:
* Redesigned circuit to give a cleaner filter when switching to Vendor mode. No more read errors !
* Enlarged solder points to give an easier flow to the Liteon PCB points - Noob friendly !
* Added Read/Write Mode LED (RED)
* Added Normal 360 Mode LED (Green)
* Upgrade the switch to a stronger more robust model
* Changed location of LED so they can be viewed when Liteon PCB is installed to its case
* Slight improvement to the PCB shape so it sits firmly and accurately in place when soldering.
Buy Here --> Mr Modchips
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January 11th, 2010, 00:17 Posted By: wraggster
News via http://www.xbox-scene.com/
FreeXeX released a new version of QuickBoot.
What's new/fixed:
* Added Support for making Games on Demand containers
* Added Support for all 3 USB slots. When you specify "usb:\" as the path it will now scan up to 3 usb drives looking for the file.
* Added Debug logging, this will create a debug.log on the root of ubs0 if an error is encountered
* Reduced file size of generated container from 804KB to 284KB
About QuickBoot:
[QUOTE]
QuickBoot allows you to build "short cut" LIVE containers that will allow you to launch applications directly from NXE.
The three main advantages of this are:
* Saves time by loading the application directly, rather than having to use XexLoader to browse the file tree and find the executable.
* Bypasses the 4GB size limit on live containers as you're not actually storing the application data in the live container, merely making a shortcut to it.
* Allows you to load applications off of external hard drives etc. straight from NXE.
Official Site: http://freexex.xboxapps.org
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January 10th, 2010, 21:52 Posted By: wraggster
Fun fact: We like to describe the pacing of a game's action on a scale composed of Brass-centric Americana music standards. For example, the speed of Modern Warfare 2 is moderate, yet fairly steady. In other words, it's normally set to "Spanish Flea," by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Unfortunately, wily hackers have gotten their hands on the game once again, cranking that speed up a few dozen notches to Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax." Check out the video after the jump to see the hyperspeed gunfighting in action.
We managed to get into one of these hacked games during a Headquarters match last night on Xbox Live, and while it may look like fun, it feels a lot like you're speed skating the entire time. As you might imagine, that makes shooting near-impossible -- but it makes the ever-whimsical "Sax" all the more appropriate.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/10/ne...nto-the-flash/
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January 10th, 2010, 21:45 Posted By: wraggster
Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg has opened up to our buddies over at Joystiq about the future direction of Projection Natal, and the big takeaway from their chat is that Redmond intends to use the new hardware primarily for "brand new experiences" designed specifically for it. Essentially, this means the majority of Natal-enabled games will be Wii-like in their focus and promotion of motion as the control scheme, but before you dive into a vortex of panic, there were also reassurances that "developers will have that out there at their fingertips if they want to enable those features." We now know that 10 to 15 percent of the Xbox 360's processing power will be sucked down by Natal, which may or may not be a reason for this shift away from what was expected -- layering Natal on top of games as an alternative control scheme -- to this shpiel about "unique" experiences. Either way, so long as we get to play Burnout on this thing, we could care less what others do with it.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/10/p...s-will-tolera/
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January 10th, 2010, 21:40 Posted By: wraggster
Alien vs. Predator developer Rebellion has confirmed that you can expect to see a demo of its bloodthirsty species shooter before launch.
We're guessing the demo will be pre-launch but the developer woudln't say either way. "There will be a demo. That's all we can say," reports AVP Galaxy. Still, good to know it's coming.
When asked about outfits for avatars on Xbox Live or PSN, Rebellion would only say, "We do have some pretty exciting stuff in development which is currently going through the process of submissions and approvals. There's nothing I can confirm yet but hopefully they'll be some stuff that people will be excited about it both of those forums."
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...VG-General-RSS
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January 9th, 2010, 18:25 Posted By: wraggster
Of the independent games available on Xbox Live, a sports title is currently the No. 1 downloaded title and another is the No. 2-rated game, across all offerings. But sports is far from the service's dominant genre.
The action and adventure, puzzle and trivia, and shooter categories all have more than 100 listings. Sports, just 25. And this is just one measure. On the whole, sports are not a particularly fertile subject for indie developers, especially if one considers racing games a genre outside of sports.
Where do sports stand on the indie landscape? Does this indicate an opportunity for a developer? Or a strict barrier to his participation?
Moreso than other genres, "You're gonna get compared to the big boys," Matt Davis of Houston-based BarkersCrest Studios, says of the biggest drawback. Davis' Avatar Golf is the leading download (and Stick Jockey's independent sports game of the year) on Xbox Live, and he followed it up last month with the one-dollar, one-button controlled Home Run Challenge that's done well since its release.
"These are games that have been accepted really well, but I surf the net, and every once in a while I see people who say [about Avatar Golf] ‘This isn't Tiger Woods; this isn't Hot Shots Golf,'" Davis said. "You will still get compared to the elite developers and their games."
Elite developers not only have tremendous resources and manpower, they also have the means to strike licensing arrangements with leagues and sports personalities to drive a product's realism and appeal. An indie sports developer then is really pursuing niches within a niche of video games, trying to find the aspects of a sports game that can still have appeal without a big budget to deliver them.
Avatar Golf and Home Run Challenge are about getting players Xbox Live avatars' involved in the games themselves - a feature with unique and obvious appeal. Inside Lacrosse College Lacrosse 2010 tapped the passion of a vastly underserved, highly motivated fan base with no major sports game to call its own.
But in the end, they're still dealing with front-loaded player expectations in ways that wholly invented games are not.
"I think doing a sports game is a little harder than a 2D platformer or a shooter," said Jonathan "Fritz" Ackerley of Dundee, Scotland-based Triple B Games, which developed the lacrosse title, plus a soccer game called Fitba. "Doing a really good platformer or shooter is hard as well. But to get a sports game to a level where it's recognizable as a simulation is a lot of effort. Perhaps it is a higher barrier to entry for that reason. People know what to expect from a game of football, they know there's 11 on each side, they want to select their teams, check their formations, they know the rules of the game. Whereas doing a 2D platformer, you can make it up as you go along and introduce the rules that you want to give to player."
On the other hand, that 2D platformer is still a game built out of thin air. However it is constructed, the rules and gameplay of something like basketball have been around for more than a century. It's not just that they're familiar to gamers, a game's established rules and norms also provide a benchmark to a developer for determining if his game is balanced properly.
"Sports has a huge advantage because explaining 80 percent of the game is already done; people already play sports," Davis said. "You don't have to do too much of an elaborate tutorial. One of the limitations of being an indie developer is that you're so small, you can only do so much. So any time you spend on building something so gamers can learn to play the game is time taken from something else. But people understand sports. They know the rules. It's really just a question of what buttons do what."
And that preloaded understanding of a game helps in another way. "The player, the consumer, the purchaser knows what they're getting without looking at the back of the box," Acklerley said. "Football's about football; tennis is about knocking a ball back and forth across the net."
That helps in another way: Rising out of the crowd. As mentioned before, there are more than 100 titles in the more familiar genres of core gaming on Xbox Live. The service features ratings and free demos, but a developer still has a short window in which to explain his game and make a player want to buy it. While some sports are uninteresting to some players, they're very interesting to their devotees.
And further, Davis explains, is getting rated and then cleared for release on the Indie Games channel. Games are evaluated by the development community, so clearing that barrier is the first priority. "The more interesting a game is, the quicker it's going to go through review," Davis said. "Sports games, you don't have to beat one the way you do a platformer. The main thing holding games back in review is not being interesting. A lot of games aren't fun to review. It has to be interesting enough for people to go out of their way to review it for you."
It's still a mixed bag. For an indie dev to take on a familiar sports game, he's going to have to do it differently, or reduce it to its most fun parts - penalty kicks, a field goal contest or a game of HORSE a fun diversion for fans of football, U.S. football, and basketball. Or it needs to be something relatively exotic like lacrosse, or hurling. I recall playing baseball's 1840s ancestor, Town Ball when I lived in Cooperstown, N.Y. a decade ago, and I think it'd be perfect as an indie video game. With no foul balls, runners traveling the stakes (bases) out of order, and fielders making putouts by throwing the ball at them, it's an action-oriented derivative of baseball with a definite appeal to a fan base mindful of the game's history. Plus, it's one of the major U.S. sports, but there's no league-licensed title towering over it.
With so many sports fans expressing frustration that big budget titles with exclusive licensing offer a paucity of alternatives, one would have to think sports, despite the structural or market limitations, present opportunities for indie devs that reduce the risk of pouring work into a completely unknown game.
But the indie market is also motivated by making games the developers themselves want to to play.
"It's an open area that not a lot of people have chosen to explore," Davis said. "People tend to make games that they like themselves, and a lot of people who are developers are hardcore video game guys, not necessarily in sports. But Madden sells off the charts, and there's a reason for that. People like sports."
http://kotaku.com/5444293/can-sports...he-little-guys
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January 9th, 2010, 18:21 Posted By: wraggster
Hearing about using an Xbox 360 as set top box for IPTV providers like AT&T's U-Verse is one thing, but seeing it in action is another. As you can see from the video after the jump, the experience is very fluid and isn't what we'd describe as laggy even in the slightest bit. The 360 can act as a full blown client to the Mediaroom DVR which provides a pretty complete multi-room experience. As far as we could tell the entire experience was there as well, but then again we're not exactly experts on Mediaroom. Apparently one thing the 360 can't do is be the only set top box in your house, which is probably a detail lost on many since we'd bet very few people who subscribe to pay TV only have one set top these days.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/09/m...-the-xbox-360/
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January 8th, 2010, 23:23 Posted By: wraggster
Capcom is showing off Mega Man 10 at CES. CES has possibly the highest concentration of video cameras of any location on Earth. You see where this is going.
After the break, we've embedded off-screen footage of the faux-retro downloadable game's stadium stage, captured and written up in preview form by The Mega Man Network. Capcom didn't allow the boss's name to be released, so it's just "the stadium stage" for now. The MM Network blogger managed to play, and record, the stage in both normal difficulty and the new Easy Mode, allowing us to see some of the differences. It's especially notable in the goal post mid-boss area: in normal difficulty, there's a spiked ball that constantly slams into Mega Man, but in Easy Mode that obstacle is absent, making the boss a fairly simple matter. At the end, the game announces that, like Mega Man 9, there will be DLC and a time attack mode.
Mega Man 10 will be available on Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 as a download in March.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/08/me...aught-on-tape/
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January 8th, 2010, 23:20 Posted By: wraggster
As the first full day of the Consumer Electronics Show wore on, stories exploring the digital guts of Microsoft's Project Natal gave way to gamer anxiety that the hands-free controller can't work with high-end 360 games.
Reports covered by Kotaku this morning indicated that the Natal would use 10-15 percent of the Xbox 360's "computing resources." Those reports gave way to comments we received from a source familiar with the development of Project Natal who said that the peripheral would actually need to use up to 33 percent, a third, of the 360's CPU.
The source explained to Kotaku that, while Natal wouldn't use the horsepower of a full core of Microsoft's three-core central processor, it would need to use a core on its own in order to reduce latency between human input and what happens on a TV screen. That would leave the CPU's other two cores for the other processes needed to run Natal-compatible Xbox 360 games.
While this would seem to even further curtail the ability for technologically complex big-budget games to work with the Natal — such games would seemingly need as much of the 360's CPU for their non-Natal functions — the source said those fears were a little off. High-end graphics such as those in a richly-rendered racing game such as Forza 3 could still be possible, the source told Kotaku, but compromises might have to be made for "slightly reduced" artificial intelligence, sound or physics.
Microsoft was aware of the brewing gamer anxiety and expressed a desire to explain Natal's full potential in the future.
For today, they focused on shooting down the source's 33 percent figure: "The software behind 'Project Natal' is what makes it special. While we aren't able to share further details at this point, we can assure you that 'Project Natal' does not require a dedicated Xbox 360 CPU core."
At E3, Project Natal was played by several reporters, including me, with several games, including the high-end Burnout Paradise. At the time, Natal was actually a bunch of sensors held in a box, not a streamlined product in its final shell.
Part of today's Natal confusion has been over the rumored elimination of a dedicated processor in the Natal peripheral, first reported on the 4 Guys 1 Up podcast. That elimination seemed even more certain this week due to the slight but specific tweaks made in Microsoft's official Project Natal fact sheet. As noted earlier today on Kotaku, in mid-2009, the fact sheet cited a dedicated processor as a feature of Natal, but today in early 2010, it does not. Most of the rest of the fact sheet's language is unchanged, but the two references to the processor, in two parts of the fact sheet, were removed.
Microsoft director of product management Aaron Greenberg told Kotaku today that "The description of the product at E3 and the description of the product now shouldn't have changed as far as I'm aware." But he and other spokespeople for Xbox 360 declined to directly address whether the processor had been removed.
Greenberg did allow for the possibility that some of the elements of Natal may have changed: "The sensor that we showed and whatever basic details we gave about the sensor were very much in the incubation state [at E3]. These were early mock ups and things as we were describing how this would be done. And now, as we have development kits in developer hands and we've got developers actively working on games, those details are obviously becoming much more firm."
The bottom line as far as Microsoft is concerned, that Natal will still be an innovation. "This product... will see you," Greenberg said. "It will hear you. It will work." But with what kind of games? That remains an unanswered question, one that will come closer to be answered as more technical specifications are revealed and games running on final Natal hardware are shown closer to the device's late 2010 launch.
http://kotaku.com/5443233/ces-burnin...high+end-games
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January 8th, 2010, 17:05 Posted By: wraggster
We now know that Natal is going to make it out before the end of the year (if all goes well), but the company is still keeping a lot of secrets about the technology and being rather stingy with hands-on time. Natal lead developer Alex Kipman is spilling a few notable beans, however, indicating that the team has gathered terabytes of photos and video of people playing games, amassing a library of data that the system uses to anticipate where you might move next. Because of this the system can predict your hand position, even if it's obscured, based on the location of other parts of your body. He also indicated that the software required for all this will only take up about 50MB on your Xbox's (probably near-full) storage device, and that the algorithms it uses will suck down about 10 to 15 percent of the 360's overall processing power. That's certainly a substantial hit, but this is the price you pay for getting to kick virtual balls with physical feet.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/m...-your-hand-ev/
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January 8th, 2010, 16:59 Posted By: wraggster
Vigil plans to patch the Xbox 360 version of Darksiders as soon as possible to reduce the amount of screen tearing.
"It's something that's really not a difficult fix for us and so we're going to implement a patch to resolve the problem," Madureira told IGN.
"We're fairly certain it'll happen really soon so look out for it."
Eurogamer understands that the screen-tear, which is reportedly much less frequent in the PS3 version, is a specific issue that only popped up late in the development process and didn't actually affect earlier Xbox 360 builds.
Darksiders is due out for PS3 and Xbox 360 in Europe today, assuming you can actually get out of your house to go and buy it.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/da...ch-really-soon
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January 8th, 2010, 16:56 Posted By: wraggster
Silver members of Xbox Live will be able to experience Left 4 Dead 2 multiplayer next weekend for free.
The promotion starts at hometime (5pm GMT) on Friday, 15th January, and ends at 5pm on Sunday, 18th January.
Co-operative multiplayer is to Left 4 Dead 2 what olive oil and salt are to Jamie Oliver - you can get by without but it won't taste as nice. And nice it most certainly is, as we told you in our L4D2 review.
After 2m sales at retail alone - Steam sales are kept close to Valve's chest - more Left 4 Dead 2 is a no-brainer. And so Valve will expand the game in spring with add-on The Passing.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/l4...vers-next-week
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