In regards to massive engineering failures, the first generation Xbox 360 was one of the staple best. A poorly designed PCB and internal cooling system caused critical internal components to eventually wriggle apart and displaying the dreaded RRoD (Red Rings of Death) error. Over the last 5 years, the RRoD death has become as much of a sign of failure as it has the butt of countless jokes. Though theres one other big Xbox 360 failure that doesn’t get nearly the same amount of attention — customizable faceplates.
According to Microsoft’s Albert Penello in an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, customizable faceplates were “what everyone wanted to do”. Apparently not. Sales we never anything to write home about. With the recent Xbox 360 refrsh, the plates were discontinued entirely, leaving the scores of custom Xbox 360 faceplates to collect dust on retail shelves and forever live in the bargain bin at your local walmart checkout lane.
But one, rare occurrence where Microsoft admits defeat.
The fall of the Kinect has to be one of the fastest break-ins in gadget history (excluding pre-release iOS jailbreaks of course). A mere 4 days after Microsoft launched the Kinect, hackers had already cracked it, albiet with rather simple tricks. And now but a few days after that, the Kinect underground scene is already proving to be a quickly evolving network of talent. Hacker Florian Echtler has whipped up some pretty awesome multi-touch demoes that more or less look like popular sci-fi tech displayed in movies such as Avatar and Minority Report.
So far, Microsoft has remained mum on the work of these aspiring Kinect users. And hopefully it stays that way. Any condemnation would be sorely misplaced as it’s already becoming apparent that hackers, not Microsoft, will be the true innovation behind the gaming accessory.
With that said, sit back, relax, and jump inside to see Florian’s multi-touch Kinect hack in action…
So if you’ve proceeded past the first mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops you’ll know (not to spoil anything) you are in Cuba for a special mission involving Castro himself. Okay, no big deal — so you would think. Without going too far into the missions of the game, Cuba is up in arms about that first mission of the game which involves the United States doing what it hasnt been been able to do in real life for the past 50 years. Cuba calls this game “perverse” and says that it “encourages sociopathic attitudes of American children and adolescents.”
Come on Cuba, really? Really? I think this is crossing the line a bit. The game is fictitious (as most games are). You shouldn’t read too far into them. If the premise of the game was to infiltrate Afghanistan and shoot Osama Bin Laden in the forehead, you wouldn’t bat an eyelash (or stub out a Cuban Cigar). I think it is ridiculous to compare this to GTA: San Adreas — which led to a teenager to murder three men.
It is a video game. Simple. Nothing more to it.
This article really has nothing to do with Gadgetsteria. I was just trolling the interwebs this evening and saw this story and had to get it out. The game is great. I’m about half way through the campaign and I haven’t once felt like going out and shooting someone in the head, assassinating someone, or thought that this hits too close to home in regards to the Bay of Pigs. Cuba is just mad that we smuggle in their cigars and talk about it all the time. We let you use Miami, let us have this!!!!
This is the translated website. It contains some story plots to the game, so don’t go if you want to be left surprised!!!!
Looking anxiously at your “Countdown ’til the next Xbox” calendar? Well…don’t. Because according to Microsoft, you’ll be waiting for a while. According to Microsoft’s Xbox and Entertainment Director Stephen McGill, they’re confident that their current 360 hardware and recently launched Kinect can hold their on in the coming years. Sadly, they are sorely mistaken. When developers complain the PS3 is too weak it’s time to start thinking about upgrading. Nonetheless, they’re sticking to their guns.
On the other side of the argument, there are still quite a few new games that don’t tap the full potential of any of the currently available systems. Though, that number of games is getting smaller with each passing month.
Actually, I’m pretty sure Microsoft is “thinking about” new systems, and probably already has a few concepts and/or working prototypes behind closed doors. They would be stupid not to. Sitting by twiddling your fingers with 5-year old hardware and blissfully believing you have a snowball’s chance in hell 2-3 years from now with the same hardware is border line insanity.
What’s your call? Think Microsoft can stick it out?
Remember a time way back in 2007 when AT&T announced a little gem for the Xbox 360 relating to U-Verse? For many people, that initiative to bring U-Verse programming to the Xbox 360 and have it function as a set top box have all but died. Three years and still no product/service generally means “death” in the consumer electronic world. But the powers that be have managed come through. The U-Verse-enabled Xbox 360 is nearing an official release.
But before you get all hog wild with the celebrations, we’ll point out that there are a few stipulations…
Feeling bummed that your modded Xbox 360 was shown the door a couple months back when Microsoft pushed out an update, locking all of said consoles out of their hard drives and Xbox Live? The real source of it all was HDD access. With the update that was pushed out, Microsoft disabled users from access the hard drive where Xbox Live account info is also stored which in turn caused the domino effect of suckage that ensued. Even worse, the update went through and completely scrambled the contents of the hard drive so that a person couldn’t take said hard drive to another box and continue on their merry way.
But today, gamers are realizing that the new Xbox 360 April 2010 Update (direct download link) is actually restoring the lost hard drive functionality. The process is a bit convoluted, but works none the less. The only caveat is that the scrambled contents from your past are still scrambled and unusable — so you have to start from scratch. However, those who’ve more or less accepted the fact that there modded 360 was nothing more than a big plastic paperweight will probably take what they can get at this point.
Give the “rebirthing” a shot by following the guide at Ngohq and letting us know how it all goes for ya. Video of the new update in action below…
Soon, all of us 360 owners will be shoved an update that will now allow for USB Storage compatibility! This is actually exciting news, we no longer will be only left with the option to fork out a small fortune for Microsoft’s drives, we can use our own HDD for game saves, downloadable games and DLC.
For me this is huge, because when I first purchased my 360, years ago, I had a 20g harddrive option. That is all I have, which is actually left with around 4 or so gigs. My only option at the moment is to purchase Microsoft’s drive transfer tool thingy, and a new 360 drive, transfer everything over, and then move on. This is the only thing I can do because I don’t want to lose all of my game saves.
This update will give us the ability to run up to 2 different storage devices which must be at least 1gb in size, and no more than 16gbs. That is an extra 32gb max of storage. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but for those of us that don’t want to give out all our money for the tools, we can add our own flash drives or whatever to store the DLC without losing our main HDD.
This is going to be a very satisifying update for myself, and I’m sure a lot of you out there are happy about this. I haven’t seen a release date of the Update yet, but it is supposed to be out sometime this year, lol.
Awesome — Windows Phone 7 has Xbox Live features built into the core of the OS. That’s a good nugget to get gamers into the smartphone arena. But what if you have a PS3? Well, in the near future, you too will be catered to if Sony CEO Howard Stringer has anything to say about it (which…he does):
“PSN is no secret weapon. Leveraging PSN we are building a new network service that will connect many more network enabled product including Sony Bravias, Viaos and Blu-ray players. To satisfy the demand for more open systems and to broaden the array of network devices connected to our network services we are committed to extending that service to Sony Ericsson mobile phones.
As part of these initiatives we are also exploring consistent user interfaces across Sony Ericsson products to ensure a seamless and integrated experience for the consumer.”
For now, the Xbox Live integration is more focused on all of the various achievements, messaging, and other non-gaming tasks. Though as time goes on and phones become more and more powerful, mobile gaming will reach higher levels of sophistication and realism, at some point negating the need for any standalone system at all. Oh how sweet a day that will be.
Video games are a wonderful thing. They increase your hand-eye coordination, entertain, and pass large amounts of time that seem to drag on forever. For most, the entertainment factor is the most important. Getting into the console gaming scene specifically, choosing what platform you want to use can at times be difficult. Do you want the eye candy and more hackability of the PS3, the expansive online gaming world of Xbox Live, or the get up and move nature of the Wii?
If you choose all three, dealing with the onslaught of controllers, adapters, and cables isn’t exactly the poster child for a great time. For cords, controllers are now coming wireless — problem solved. Adapters — well, you’re still stuck there. Though you can get switches to make moving back and forth between consoles as easy as the push of a button. Controllers however are a completely different beast.
When a new console is released, manufacturers spend millions of dollars and resources developing and designing these new controllers as they are literally the way you interact with the entire platform — clearly an import matter. But those different controllers can mean headaches for end users. For that, Sony may have a solution.
For now, this is pure rumor, but documents reportedly belonging to Sony show a universal game controller that would allow users to use the same controller on PS3, Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii. If the controller truly designed well, this could be a huge thing for the gaming world. I wouldn’t mind giving a universal controller a try if it didn’t make me curse it’s name five minutes after picking it up as so many previous attempts have. If they can concur that, they are well on their way. According to the patent:
“A game console controller includes a hand-holdable housing and a touch sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) on the housing. The LCD is caused to present, depending on what type of game console a user has selected, a controller key layout for a first type of game console or a controller key layout for a second type of game console. A key layout includes plural keys selectable by a user to input commands to a game console.”
One potential roadblock I see however, is Microsoft and Nintendo either not getting on board with this universal controller idea or devising some sort of software patch that would “authenticate” peripherals and render non-official ones useless — much like Microsoft did with 3rd party memory cards. If that happens, consider it a kick in the pants to the gaming population and another appearance of greed making it’s dirty mark on the world.
Also a potential hurdle, the patent mentions the use of a touchscreen for a fair helping of the buttons. That’s cool and all, allowing the layout to be customized more than a physical layout could ever allow, but many hardcore gamers (and myself included) won’t be too keen on hours upon hours of buttonless mashing. There are some things touchscreens just don’t accomplish too well yet. Sometimes feeling the button is the very thing that makes it desirable.
The real question is simply: Would you use it, or would the more touchscreen based interface turn you off and do you think there’s any real weight behind this rumor?
**Bonus question: Sony, long known for their proprietary lifestyle, is now secretly developing a universal controller that plays well with the other kids on the block? Why the change of heart?
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In regards to massive engineering failures, the first generation Xbox 360 was one of the staple best. A poorly designed PCB and internal cooling system caused critical internal components to eventually wriggle apart and displaying the dreaded RRoD (Red Rings of Death) error. Over the last 5 years, the RRoD death has become as much of a sign of failure as it has the butt of countless jokes. Though theres one other big Xbox 360 failure that doesn’t get nearly the same amount of attention — customizable faceplates.
