Hasta La Gadget!

Show of hands: how many of you bought an Xbox 360 in its first month or so of release, five long years ago? Alright, now how many of you still use that same Xbox regularly, with zero RRoDs getting in your way? Yeah, we thought so. The Xbox 360 has been an astounding success for Microsoft and for gamers, a particularly strong feat when you consider that it was Sony’s race to lose going into this console generation. Still, when you talk Xbox history, it’s hard not to see that huge red smudge on an otherwise stellar record. In hindsight, perhaps it was wise for Microsoft to do such a stellar job of taking the console online, beyond all the obvious reasons: the overheating hunk of plastic and silicon in our entertainment center didn’t really mean much anymore, sentiments-wise. Instead it was our Gamertags and Gamerscores and cutesy Avatars that really mattered, the true “heart” of our console.

We can’t even count how many Xboxes we churned through in the past five years, with only Microsoft’s most recent attempt finally solving some of the machine’s egregious noise issues, but most of us stuck with the Xbox all the way through because that’s where our friends were. Cute trick, Microsoft, but let’s pick a slightly less expensive way to fail for the next generation, alright? Oh, and happy birthday Xbox; we’ll meet you at 8pm with the pizza and the wine and the Black Ops… you just bring the sexy.

Want to re-live a bit of the launch day insanity? Check out this little trip down Engadget memory lane:

• Live Xbox 360 shot!
• Engadget’s live coverage of the Xbox 360 launch
• Xbox 360 hands-on preview
• Unpacking the Xbox 360
• Xbox 360 gutted!
• Engadget Podcast 053 – 11.22.2005
• Xbox 360 backward-compatibility list (1.0) released

Boy, didn’t we look young and naive back then? The world was our oyster. There were so many Halos yet to come.

The Xbox 360 turns five years old… in a purely theoretical sense originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We love us some big fancy grown-up consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360, but ever since we saw the new Apple TV we’ve been wondering what would happen if Apple gave it the App Store and let developers go wild. Surely the results would look a lot like the video above. The developers of The Incident are showing off the upcoming 1.3 build of their ultra-addictive falling objects platformer, which allows for an iPhone to control the game while it’s running on an iPad, which is in turn outputting video to the TV. Of course, The Incident guys aren’t the first to think of this, we actually saw an SNES emulator running on a jailbroken iPad months ago, and plenty of other apps use the iPhone as a controller. Still, it’s some pretty great execution, and the iPad video out seems to be key. Still seem tame to you? Imagine the OnLive iPhone app up and running on this thing. Mind = blown, right? Right.

New version of The Incident offers glimpse of world where Apple TV is the console, iPhone is the controller originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony’s “it only does everything” claim for the PS3 seems to be growing stronger with every day that passes. After getting Hulu Plus in the US recently, the versatile console has just seen the green light to start some movie streaming action in the UK, courtesy of a hookup with Lovefilm. To get this free extra, you have to have a £5.99 or above monthly Lovefilm subscription (that’s excluding its Games offering), though there’s a limit on how much streaming you can do at that price point. Such stipulations fall by the wayside on the £9.99 top tier, leaving you and your console to enjoy as many movies as you can handle.

Lovefilm movie streaming now live on UK PlayStation 3 consoles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What do you know, someone’s been busy working in Microsoft’s labs while we’ve been waiting for the company’s Kinect motion control peripheral to launch itself into our living rooms. The highly sophisticated webcam has undergone some algorithmic optimizations and now Alex Kipman, lead software developer for what used to be known as Natal, tells us that its processing overhead for the Xbox 360 console will be no greater than a “single-digit” percentage. That contrasts very nicely with the last number Alex gave us, which indicated there’d be a 10 to 15 percent penalty for using Microsoft’s new motion controller, and should mean your petting sessions with Kinectimals will be running smooth as butter when Kinect hits stores tomorrow. Great news, eh?

Kinect will use only a ‘single-digit’ percentage of Xbox 360 CPU power originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not just the PS3 that will be doing its Netflix streaming disc-free from today: the Wii is joining in the fun as well! Americans and Canadians alike will be able to download and install Netflix from the Wii Shop Channel, provided they’ve signed up for a subscription of $8.99 (C$7.99 in Canada) or above. Notably, over three million Wii consoles are said to have been hooked up with Netflix since the service launched back in April, and this step should make that number grow even larger. Only question is what we’re all going to do with those three million redundant discs now. We can’t turn them all into coasters, any ideas?

Continue reading Netflix on Wii drops the clunky disc requirement, starts streaming through Wii Menu

Netflix on Wii drops the clunky disc requirement, starts streaming through Wii Menu originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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