Hasta La Gadget!

From its humble HD-DVD-playing beginnings, the Xbox 360 has grown into a full-fledged set-top box that pulls down HD content from Netflix, the Zune Store and Sky TV (for Ireland and the UK). Now, rumors indicate an Xbox TV channel might be next in line. Bloomberg writes that former News Corp. president Peter Chernin discussed the possibility of adding regular exclusive programming to the console at an April 12th meeting with Microsoft, and reportedly suggested a $1 to $2 increase in Xbox LIVE monthly fees to cover the additional cost. However, since Microsoft apparently hasn’t formally responded to the proposal, this may just be another pipe dream — from the man who thought we’d pay $30 per movie for on-demand HD, no less. ‘Course, with all this talk of Hulu going paid, we suppose just about anything is possible.

Former News Corp president wants Xbox TV channel? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve held off as long as possible, but the tips just keep flooding in — Xbox Live has a problem, and evidently it’s a rather noticeable one. Word on the street has it that a new Modern Warfare 2 map update has made a number of Xbox Live features unusable, including online MW2 gameplay. We’re also hearing that the Xbox Live Marketplace is off-and-on, and even Microsoft admits that quite a few other things are acting quirky. The good news is that a fix is on the way, so we’d suggest grabbing that lunch you’ve been denying yourself and trying again later. Hey, aren’t you supposed to be working right now, anyway?

P.S. – Let us know if you’re running into any issues in comments below, cool?

Update: Things seem to be working their way back to normal. Phew.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Modern Warfare 2 map update leaves Xbox Live in a world of hurt originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the “make a virtual representation of a gaming space” idea might seem ripped straight from Sony’s Home, there aren’t really any actual similarities — outside of the fact they’re both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom “level” of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We’re sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it’s a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there’s a “rewind” function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It’s perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.

Continue reading Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo

Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Talkin’ Windows Phone 7 Series gaming with Microsoft at GDC originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alright, we’re going to be straight with you: you’re not going to like this. See, Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0, but wouldn’t let us nab a single photo or video of the process. What we can tell you is that they exist, they work, and at least Microsoft tossed us some screenshots to wave in your face. The two titles are The Harvest (pictured), a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks, a less impressive one-on-one sword fighting Facebook game by Gravity Bear that’s being ported over. We didn’t get to see any full motion 3D camera moves, since Battle Punks is just composed of two characters duking it out, and The Harvest has a fixed camera and some pre-rendered elements, but there were indeed some real polygons being crunched before our eyes at a full resolution (no upscaling), alpha-rev, choppy framerate, and we were assured that full screen 3D was possible. We also got to see one of our first glimpses of universal notifications on Windows Phone: Achievement unlock notices (also pictured above) that slide down from the top of the screen in a black bar and then slide back, and can’t be interacted with. Follow after the break for some more nerdy details, along with a video of VisualStudio in action, and screenshots of the two games are in the gallery below.

Continue reading Microsoft shows off XNA games running on Windows Phone, full 3D is a go

Microsoft shows off XNA games running on Windows Phone, full 3D is a go originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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