Launching this October exclusively for Xbox 360, “Forza Motorsport 3″ unites the racing game genre making it possible for everyone to experience the thrill of the world’s most exotic and exquisite cars. This game is perfect whether you’re a Forza pro or just beginning. All can race, drift and customize some of the world’s most exotic and exquisite cars. Watch as Jeff Rivait of Xbox Games & Accessories shows WatchMojo.com how to drive. Find out more Here.
Those hoping for full web browsing capabilities on their Xbox 360 Media system will be left wanting. So while PS3 and Wii owners continue to log into Facebook and Twitter, in addition to every other web page, the Xbox 360 continues to tease only portions of true online. Is anyone else bummed? In a way I’m happy as this keeps my Wii in constant use with its excellent Internet Channel.
Is anyone else out there baffled as to why Microsoft of all companies continues to sit out on a basic media application? Go nuts!
Read more about Xbox 360’s new controller free gaming from Telegraph.co.uk:
Microsoft says the enthusiasm of developers and publishers highlighted the “widespread enthusiasm” for Natal, a gaming system based on the Xbox 360 that enables players to do away with a conventional controller and instead make natural gestures to control on-screen action.
Several major publishers, including Activision, Blizzard, Capcom, Electronic Arts and Sega, will announce at this week’s Tokyo Games Show that they are working on games that will complement the Project Natal platform and work with its gesture-controlled interface.
It has raised speculation that the gaming system could be in shops by the end of next year, sparking a new console war with rival platforms Sony and Nintendo.
“Project Natal could fundamentally change the way players experience sports games,” said Peter Moore, president of EA Sports. “Some of our top development teams are experimenting with these tools with the goal of delivering a completely fresh take on genres like sports and racing.”
Project Natal was unveiled at the E3 games show in Los Angeles in June. It is designed to work with existing Xbox 360 games consoles, and uses a camera, depth-sensor and microphones to track the movement of a player and replicate it on-screen.
“We see enormous opportunities with Project Natal,” said Yves Guillemot, chief executive of Ubisoft. “With the 3D camera, your body becomes the interface. Any barrier related to the use of pad controllers that may have existed for potential gamers is now abolished.”
Console makers and game developers have already set their sights on the next generation of gaming and entertainment solutions. Nintendo’s Wii, which uses innovative motion-controlled ‘Wiimotes’, has attracted a new audience to gaming, and other companies are keen to tap in to the casual gaming trend.
Sony is also working on its own gesture-controlled gaming interface, and demonstrated a prototype of the system at E3. Sony emphasised the accuracy of its system, claiming that it could track and replicate the movements of a player in real time, and even understand from their gestures how hard they had hit a ball, and map its flight using the angle of the player’s body.
Although Microsoft has yet to officially announce a launch date for Project Natal, the company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, said that a new Xbox 360 with “a natural interface” would be launched in 2010.
Ballmer later back-tracked on his comments, and Microsoft maintains that it is “not even halfway through the current console generation lifestyle”.
“We believe the Xbox 360 will be the entertainment centre in the home for long in to the next decade. Project Natal will be an important part of this platform, but we have not confirmed a launch date at this time.”
From PCWorld
“A new study on game console reliability confirms the popular attitude that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is the least reliable of the current crop of set top systems. According to SquareTrade, Nintendo’s Wii is nine times more reliable than Microsoft’s Xbox, and four times more than Sony’s PlayStation 3. The study scrutinized failure rates for over 16,000 new game consoles covered by its standalone supplementary insurance plans.
In the first two years of ownership, SquareTrade found that 2.7 percent of Wii owners reported a system failure, compared with 23.7 percent of Xbox 360 owners and 10 percent of PS3 owners. Slightly more than half of all Xbox 360 failures were “red ring of death” related, while the remaining 11.7% were “other” failures. The good news for Xbox 360 owners? RROD failures appear to (finally) be in decline in 2009.
There’s a caveat: SquareTrade says it believes Microsoft’s warranty policy (an excellent, commendably responsible policy, in my opinion) “may result in an underreporting of failures by Xbox 360 owners to SquareTrade, relative to the other consoles.”
Because the RROD problem is so widely known to be covered by Microsoft’s warranty, we believe that more customers bypass SquareTrade and reported failures directly to the Microsoft. In a survey of SquareTrade customers with Xbox 360s conducted by email, SquareTrade found that over half of our customers who experienced a RROD error reported their problem directly to Microsoft without contacting SquareTrade. Email survey respondents tend to be a self-selecting group, so the data should be used directionally rather than definitively, particularly because we did not survey PS3 and Wii owners with the same question. With that caveat in mind, applying the survey data to the analysis shows that the Xbox 360 failure rate could be as high as 35%.”
This is pretty slick… from E3 2009:
Check it out:
visit www.TheWitcher.com for more info…
If you’re playing Burnout Paradise on your Xbox 360, and think you see “Obama for president” billboards, you’re not crazy. It has been confirmed that the presidential hopeful has bought advertising space in the game - presumably to try to appeal to the youth demographic.
Microsoft is locked in a three-way competition with Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii and the PlayStation 3. The Wii is currently leading the race, while Sony’s PS2 was the winner of the last generation of consoles.
“Xbox 360 will sell more consoles worldwide this generation than PlayStation 3,” Don Mattrick, a senior vice president at Microsoft’s Xbox division, said at a Microsoft news conference before the start of the E3 video game industry trade show.”
Click here to read more about what the Xbox 360 and the competition have to offer!
Nintendo’s popular Wii game console will displace Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as the new-generation game machine, iSuppli said Thursday.
The market researcher forecasted that the global installed base of Wii game consoles will rise to 30.2 million units in 2008, up from 18 million in 2007, putting it ahead of the Xbox 360’s projected 25.7 million units.
Read more.
The fight between Sony and Microsoft took an interesting turn:
Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game console topped Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in U.S. unit sales for the first time in January, but the Redmond company said its sales were hurt by supply shortages.
The PlayStation 3 sold 269,000 units for the month, according to statistics released by the NPD Group market research firm. That was just behind Nintendo’s Wii, which sold 274,000 units, NPD said. Microsoft sold 230,000 Xbox 360 consoles.
“We certainly believe that this is an anomaly,” said Microsoft spokesman David Dennis of the Xbox 360’s third-place finish.
The company said this week that higher-than-expected demand for Xbox 360 during the holidays caused subsequent shortages.
Sony, in a statement, pointed to progress in areas including movie studios’ embrace of the Blu-ray next-generation DVD format, which the PS3 uses. Jack Tretton, Sony Computer Entertainment America chief executive, said that it’s “shaping up to be a breakthrough year for us.”
Sony’s PlayStation 2 dominated the previous console generation, but the PS3 has struggled to find its footing.
Read more.
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