Windows 8 with Xbox Live

Windows 8 with Xbox Live
30th September 2011

Microsoft is planning to jack its Xbox Live online gaming and entertainment service under the bonnet of its Windows 8 operating system. Mike Delman, vice president of global marketing for Microsoft’s interactive entertainment unit, told the LA Times Xbox Live will be used as the central application through which consumers will buy media across a variety of devices. At the same time, Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 will get a look which uses Vole’s “live tile” design seen on Windows Phone 7 handsets, which it has said will be central to the look of Windows 8. Delman insists that Xbox Live has done well on the Windows Phone. If it is put into a PC, it will be the service where you get your entertainment. It means that Xbox Live will work across devices similar in a way to Apple’s iTunes. Vole has twigged that consumers want to be able to navigate through multiple devices in a certain ecosystem easily. Vole will also be going through its “assets” and unifying them under the Xbox Live label.

Hilarious Bugs From FIFA 12

Hilarious Bugs From FIFA 12
22nd September 2011

FIFA 12 features an all new Player Impact physics engine, and EA claims that it "processes decisions continuously in real-time at every point of contact on a player's body."

YouTube user Kennybastards has found that the engine doesn't have a 100% success rate.

See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAR6I_T-uVc

Microsoft Asks: “Do We Even Need to Build a Better Xbox?”

Apparently, big game producers are quite happy with the plateau console development has hit, and big names in the industry like Frank Gibeau, of EA said there’s not any kind of urgency for Microsoft or Sony to develop a new gaming system. His exact words were “It’s hard for me to conceive what you would do on a PlayStation 4,” according to oursource. “The displays are already 1080p, you’re already connected to the Internet. … You could make it faster, you could have more polys and you could up the graphics a little bit … but at what cost?”

Gibeau refers specifically to the fact that thanks to add-ons like Microsoft’s Kinect or Sony’s Playstation Move, added to the frequent updates and almost photo-realistic graphics seen in some games, there’s not much a current generation console couldn’t do. This can be contrasted to the PC gaming current situation, though. Because the PC is an open platform, hardware development never stops and most high-end computers are already technically more powerful than current gen consoles, but there’s more to gaming than just pretty graphics. Granted, Crysis looks much better on PC’s than consoles, but then again, isn’t Crysis just your standard Sci-Fi FPS?

This generation of consoles has already had its share of classics, but we have to admit it took a while for developers to catch on, arguing that producing for the (at the time) next-gen consoles was just too expensive and not worth it. Now that pretty much everyone has caught on, is it worth it to go back to the previous situation just to have a new Call of Duty that looks slightly better?

And this takes us to our final point: there just haven’t been many new franchises this generation, and save a couple gems, we’re still playing the same games we played on our Playstation 2 and original Xbox, only with prettier graphics. Cranking the graphics up and releasing a new console before anything truly revolutionary comes along to warrant a new console is just gonna make games staler, and gamers will end up with just new sequels while indie developers will again be left out of the latest innovations being that the price would go up again.

Apparently, though, Microsoft, and Sony seem to understand this, and seem to be holding out for 2015 for their respective new systems (the 10 year life-span so many blogs talk about). In the meanwhile, Nintendo seems to be trying to catch up with their long-due Wii U which should make for some interesting competition.

Article by XBoxFreedom.com