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For the most part, executives from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo don’t usually have too harsh of words for one another; they’ll talk up their respective consoles quite a bit, but that’s usually the extent of it. But that’s not always the case, as we learned from a new Destructoid interview with Aaron Greenberg, the director of product management for Xbox 360 and Live.

The interview focused on the success of Grand Theft Auto IV, and while Greenberg took a veiled shot at Sony for the problems that have been reported with the online play on PS3, he didn’t say much until he was asked about the PS3’s 2008 prospects. Destructoid asked if Greenberg thought that the 360 had enough to fend off the PS3 and its growing momentum with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, and Home.

[D]idn’t Sony promise all of this last year including Home as well? We have been fighting Sony’s promises from the day we entered the market and if you remember at that time it was all about PS2 being an online cybercity with partner announcements from the likes of RealNetworks and AOL. Then three years ago at E3 they showed what PS3 games would supposedly look like with the Killzone 2 video, that we are now learning will ship four years later. That means that we will have shipped Gears of War and Gears of War 2 before they can even get Killzone out the door. Think back to GDC 2007 when Sony promised to leap ahead in online with the Sony Home unveil. Here we are two years later and multiple delays for a product that has appears to have little to no buzz. Where are the achievements? The friends list integration across all games? Where is the long-promised video store? Where are all the other products using and networking with their CELL chip? How come Blu-ray did not result in better games? What happened with Sixaxis and rumble? Where is the complete 1080p game library we were promised? If Blu-ray as they said would be such a catalyst to PS3 console sales, then why have PS3 sales over the past couple months not seen any lift since the format victory?

There are indeed inaccuracies in there; it’s only been a little over a year since Home was unveiled, and the PS3 has outsold the 360 most months this year, even in the US. He does raise some good points as well, but I mean, jeeze — do you really peg this as something you’d hear an executive say publicly?

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Microsoft has announced that three special outfits will be available as DLC for the upcoming Ninja Gaiden 2. The game’s star, Ryu, Hayabusa, will be able to don these different costumes as he slices his way through demons and monsters. Each one will cost around 200 MS points, though 39,000 people who pre-order the game will gain access to the first one on launch day. Sadly, the offer is only available in select countries and so far they only seem to be ones in Europe. The picture above shows the free costume those poeple could get, but the other tow will also be available on launch day. You know, if you want Ryu to look all special or something as you play through the story.

Via NeoGAF

Apparently Microsoft will give Banjo-Kazooie 3 fans what they have been wanting come Gamer’s Day. Microsoft UK confirmed to Videogaming247 this morning that assets will be released on Tuesday, May 13 at 8am PST - which is noon for those of us close to the Eastern Seaboard, stuck in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains, or fighting off mosquitoes in the Mississippi Delta.

Not only will Banjo-Kazooie 3 (working title) assets be shown, but a plethora of other Xbox 360 related goodies will be released as well, so please be sure and look us up four days from now.

Thanks: Videogaming247

The unfortunate people who have had to send their Xbox 360 in for repairs have likely run into issues with DRM (digital rights management). If your DRM licenses weren’t moved, you’ll have to be logged into Live to access things like your Xbox Live Arcade games, downloaded TV shows, etc. There’s now a way to restore your licenses manually, so that anyone on the console can access the content — whether or not you’re signed into Live.

Prepare yourself, though, because it’s not going to be very easy.

To restore your licenses:

1. Attach your hard drive or memory unit.
2. Turn on the console.
3. Sign in to Xbox Live with the gamer profile that originally downloaded the content.
4. Go to Xbox Live Marketplace and select Account Management, Download History.
5. Select an item and then select Download Again.
6. Repeat step 5 for each item in your download history.

It’s straightforward, don’t get me wrong, but if you own a lot of content, you’re going to spend a LOT of time trying to re-download all of it. Fast internet or not, you’re still going to have to deal with keeping an eye on your downloads so you can queue up more. That’s not going to be pretty.

This is far from a perfect solution, but it is, at least, a solution.

via Gamerscore Blog

Both Microsoft and Game|Life have each compiled interesting lists focused on numbers surrounding the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. So if either numbers or GTA isn’t your thing, you should probably just move on.

According to Microsoft’s US team:

• Actual MS sales data from last week shows Xbox 360 console sales at retail went up 54% week-over-week as a result of GTA’s success
• According to retailers more than 60% of all GTA games sold in the first week were the Xbox 360 version
• Retailers are telling us that the game is attaching strongly to new console sales, with roughly 40% of new consoles selling with a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV

As for Xbox Live:

• In the first week, more than 2.3 million people played Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox Live
• GTA IV is now the number one played game on Xbox Live
• Over the weekend, we saw the Xbox Live service reach 1 million concurrent users
• Gamers have unlocked more than 12 million achievements worth over 100 million gamerscore points in GTA
• Grand Theft Auto IV set a new record for time played, with the average gamer spending more than four hours playing the game on Live in the first week alone

And some of the random facts Game|Life has compiled:

• Damages sought by Take-Two after GTA IV ads were pulled from Chicago buses: $300,000
• Steps included in official fix for PlayStation 3 issues: 12
• Current Metacritic rating: 99
• Restraining orders filed against the game: 1

The numbers don’t really lie, so it’s fun to take a look at them and try to crunch some of these numbers. And to think, the game’s only been out for a little over a week.

Project Gotham Racing has always been published by Microsoft and developed by Bizarre Creations, who was also responsible for Geometry Wars. When Bizarre was acquired by Activision this past September, the recently released PGR4’s future — as well as that of the series’ — became unclear. We’ve seen some installments of downloadable content since then, including a new game mode and a variety of cars. But a post on Bizarre’s forums has revealed that we won’t be seeing anymore DLC for PGR4, or at least not from Bizarre.

Sorry but you won’t see any more PGR4 DLC from Bizarre Creations. We’ve handed over the reigns to Microsoft now. It’s possible that they may create some more content in the future, but we haven’t heard of anything in the pipeline I’m afraid.

It’s rather disappointing to see support cut off so soon, but don’t underestimate Microsoft’s interest in trying to get a few more dollars out of PGR4’s DLC scene.

via Xbox 360 Fanboy

If you aren’t a sucker as much as I am, you’ve probably held off on purchasing the 120GB hard drive for your Xbox 360. You have to be a sucker because the thing costs $180 — an absurdly high amount, particularly when you compare it with an equivalent drive for PS3, which costs just $70. So what’s that extra $110 going towards?

Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg defended the price a while back, claiming they focus on security and quality. He also said, “[I]t is a little apples and oranges to compare it to internal PC hard drives because those are off the shelf drives that you have to install yourself. You have to format those and figure out how you are going to move your content over.”

But isn’t $180 still rather excessive? MTV Multiplayer enlisted the help of iSuppli, a company that examines gadgets and determines their real cost. You can read about exactly how they came to their estimate at the Multiplayer blog, but the bottom line is that they estimate the drives to cost Microsoft no more than $100.

I now feel that much more ripped off.

If you’re a game developer looking to mess around with development on Zune, today’s your lucky day. The XNA team announced today that they’ve released the first Community Technical Preview of Game Studio 3.0 (as promised) As the announcement reads, “This feature gives you access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience.  In addition, this release now requires either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.”

With these tools, developers will be able to access music on the Zune (so long as it’s non-DRM) and use them in gameplay — Audiosurf, please. That’s my dream Zune game; it’s just so awesome, I can’t help it.

There are three important things the XNA guys wanted to highlight:

• Either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition are required to install and run the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP.  Visual Studio 2005 SKUs are not supported with XNA Game Studio 3.0 and beyond.  However, you do not need to uninstall Visual Studio 2005 or XNA Game Studio 2.0, as those products will work side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP.
• This current CTP does not enable Xbox 360 game development.  Only Windows and Zune are supported in this CTP.  If you want to build and deploy games for the Xbox 360, you must continue using XNA Game Studio 2.0 for now.
• This CTP doesn’t work in 64 bit yet.  We plan to support it before RTM.

The final release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 is scheduled for this holiday season. There’s no word on exactly when we can expect to start seeing games, or if there will be any sort of preview event like 360 owners had earlier this year.

via XNA Team Blog

Chalk up another use for the Xbox Live Vision cam, as well as Scene It’s Big Button Pad with the release of this week’s one Xbox Live Arcade game, Wits & Wagers (800 Microsoft Points). If it weren’t for Jonathan pointing it out, I’d never know that the game is inspired by a board game of the same name, but what I do know is that the XBLA version contains 700 questions, online play, and it claims to contain up to 25 hours of gameplay, although I’d attach a huge “YMMV” sign to that statement.

From having watched a trailer, I’ve come away with two thoughts. One, this game has “DLC incoming” written all over it.

Two,  why are the characters just randomly jutting around? I know the Xbox.com page says they’re supposed to be dancing, but this is like Elaine-little-kicks dancing. Sweet fancy Moses!

Oh, and here’s a freebie answer to the question above: it’s 1793. See, it helps to be a history buff sometimes. Or to have quick and easy access to Google.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that achievements would be a big hit in the 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV; to me, it’s even one of the selling points right behind the exclusive DLC. But it’s interesting to now try and wrap your head around a figure that Major Nelson revealed in his most recent podcast — in just 24 hours, two million achievements worth 15 million Gamerpoints were unlocked in Grand Theft Auto IV alone.

Wow.

Major Nelson has promised more numbers like this in the future, which would be much more interesting to look at if he would also reveal the numbers behind some other big games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 so that we can compare. Even without it, it’s incredible to think that little pop-up came up two million times because of a single game in a single day. Incredible.via 1UP / image via Media Inside

We’ve learned some new details on the XNA initiative’s Zune efforts – most notably that the first community technology preview will be seen in early to mid May, so in the next two weeks we should hopefully be seeing more of what the indie crowd has cooking up for the Zune’s currently nonexistent gaming scene.

No matter which Zune you have – the 4, 8, 30 or 80GB models will all be compatible, as you can see in the slide image above. (No, the numbers weren’t indicating a date as I spent three minutes trying to decipher.) Ad hoc multiplayer is going to be cool, assuming you actually know someone else that has a Zune (I know I don’t), but the Zune won’t support any sort of hardware 3D acceleration. As a result, don’t expect to see anything mind blowing on the system, but hopefully developers will be able to manage some interesting games without that support.

Engadget has a video of one of the games Microsoft has running on the system – Zauri – which doesn’t look particularly exciting, to be kind.

One of the bigger pieces of gaming news sweeping the internet over the weekend was a report stating that a technology manufacturer had received orders from Microsoft to construct Xbox 360’s with built-in Blu-Ray drives. Well, now Microsoft has stepped in to temper the rumors, stating once again that they don’t have any such project in the works:

“As we have stated, we have no plans to introduce a Blu-ray drive for Xbox 360. Games are what drive consumers to purchase game consoles, and we remain focused on providing the largest library of blockbuster games available.”

Whoa, whoa, back up there, MS. What happened to all that talk about turning the Xbox 360 into one all-encompassing media center? If you’re all about the games, then why is there a collection of TV shows and movies on Xbox Live that rivals my local Blockbuster? And, er, I think the growing sales of the PS3 compared with dwindling sales of stand-alone Blu-Ray players might have something to say about that “games are why people buy gaming consoles” talk.

Via GamePro

Microsoft has given up on buying out Yahoo for now at its last offer of USD 33 per share was rejected. Yahoo claims the company is worth USD 38 per share despite closing out at 30.98 at close Friday. Despite a reactionary drop in stock prices, Microsoft claims to have changed its mind.

“We believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a letter to Yang following the unsuccessful negotiations.

Microsoft initiated the buyout in February. When Yahoo rejected the offer, Microsoft threatened to launch a proxy fight.

via GamesIndustry.biz

The war is officially over. After all the nonsense about HD downloads being the way to go, Pegatron an Original Equipment Manufacturer for Asustek Computer has been awarded a contract to build Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles equipped with a Blu-ray Disc (BD)-ROM drive. According to DigiTimes, Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) newspaper pegs the release to market date for third quarter 2008.

We’ve haven’t heard “officially” heard from Microsoft that this is the case so I wouldn’t say this is a sure thing yet. However, I’d hope that a company as business savvy as Microsoft would be able to see this as inevitable.

Well, July is approaching fast, and E3 with it. We received the list of E3 exhibitors, and thought we’d share them with you. As usual, you can expect us to have a team from Gaming Today on site to bring you coverage right from the Convention Center.

This year’s list includes (among others) Atari, Eidos, EA, Konami, LucasArts, Square Enix, and of course the big three of the console world: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Contrary to popular rumor, Bethesda will make an appearance with Fallout 3, as confirmed by their blog post. Apparently they were left off the initial listing for an unknown reason.

You can see a full list of the companies currently expected to attend after the break.

Read the full article

The strategic errors and shortsightedness of one company often end up greatly befitting another. Take for example Valve’s Steam digital distribution service. When Valve first came up with the concept, it presented the idea to both Microsoft and Yahoo. Neither company saw the potential that has now been fulfilled by Valve’s Steam service.

Valve’s VP of marketing Doug Lombardi described the situation to GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview.

“You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft…and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam,” he explained.

“We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later.

“We went around to everybody and asked ‘Are you guys doing anything like this?’ And everyone was like ‘That’s a million miles in the future…We can’t help you.’”

Steam handles Valve’s products and many others with over 300 available titles and over 14 million accounts; all at a time when the games industry is pushing towards digital distribution.

As Jonathan reported yesterday, no new Xbox Live Arcade games were released today, thanks to Grand Theft Auto IV’s release yesterday. The day after Halo 3 was released we also saw an XBLA release of Jack Squat, so today’s lack of any releases doesn’t come as much of a surprise. After a rocky start to the whole Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday campaign, we’ve had just four weeks (not including today) since August that didn’t bring any new games – and that was due to new games becoming Arcade Hits, Undertow being temporarily released for free, or Halo 3’s release. So I won’t go too hard on Microsoft.

What you can find new on the Xbox Live Marketplace today is a totally free Dr. Pepper theme! Please, hold your applause, because there’s more. A bunch of Turok themes have also been released (although they’ll run you the ridiculous standard price of 150 Microsoft Points each), a free F-16C -PJ Emblem- download for Ace Combat 6 owners, an Alone in the Dark trailer, and some sort of Raving Rabbids invasion of Chessmaster Live that will run you 150 points. I have no idea what it’s all about, but I’m jealous that Chessmaster gets it and not Spyglass Board Games.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled GTA session.

Journalist and MMO commentator Michael Zenke has written an article explaining his theory on why Microsoft has a black thumb when it comes to MMOs. Microsoft has a bad track record with the genre. Marvel Universe Online is the latest title to make the list of its failed games; which include Asheron’s Call 2, Mythica, True Fantasy Online and Vanguard.

Zenke chalks many of the casualties up to poor planning and lack of foresight. He also cites preoccupation with Xbox Live as an obstacle to cashing in on porting MMOs to its console.

Of course Microsoft’s failure has made it that much better for Sony. SOE has very successfully capitalized on the MMO market including porting them to the PS2 and PS3 consoles.

Zenke presents a very simplified theory, but I happen to think it’s a sound one. Take a look at all the evidence and judge for yourself.

via Gamasutra

see more crazy cat pics

I guess this was to be expected, but it’s still nonetheless very impressive. GTA IV is just one day out of the gate and already it’s smashing records. Early sales figures are showing that 609,000 copies of the game were sold on day one, edging out the previous record-holder, GTA: San Andreas. But the one piece of data that’s sure to have the fanboys arguing for awhile is that the Xbox 360 version accounted for 55% of sales, narrowly edging out the PS3 version. That’s hardly a win though, considering the millions that Microsoft pumped into promoting the 360 version, compared to Sony’s much more humbler promotions. GTA IV’s sales however did substantially surpass each console’s previous “day one bestsellers”: Halo 3 for Xbox 360, and Gran Turismo: Prologue for PS3. Either way though, it’s looking to be a very good week for both Sony and Microsoft. And yes, I’m sure every single person who bought the game is a minor with psychotic tendencies.

Via MCV

I’m sure that even in the wake of GTA IV’s release there are still several people looking forward to the latest puzzle game, side-scrolling shooter, remade arcade “classic” that few would waste a quarter on today, or whatever sort of title is next on the XBLA release list. Well, looks like those people are going to have to find something else to do tomorrow, since Microsoft has announced there will be no XBLA update this week. Naturally, they’re anticipating there won’t be any need for one, since probably every other Xbox 360 owner will be engrossed with “The Fantastic Adventures of Niko Bellic.” Next week we’re sure to get a new update that we can test out the trial of and then never look back at it again.

Via Gamerscore Blog