In anticipation of next week's E3 Media and Business Summit, we've prepared bingo cards for each of the big press conferences, filled with some likely (and some not-so-likely) predictions for what each of the big three console makers intends to announce at arguably the biggest trade shows of the year.
Today's card is for Microsoft (special thanks to X3F). We're going out on a limb and giving Avatars away as the free space. Click on each of the slides above for more information about our predictions. Microsoft's E3 press conference is scheduled for next Monday at 10:30 am PT (that's 1:30 pm Joystiq Time / ET). As always, we'll be liveblogging the event, so you can play along in real-time with us.
Stay tuned for more press conference bingo cards in the days leading up to the conference. (Also: check out our bingo card for Sony's press conference.)
A demo for the ultra-violent Ninja Gaiden II is due out today for the approximately 14 people in Japan who own an Xbox 360. Chris Paladino of Micorosft's Gamercore blog confirmed the news via NeoGAF earlier this morning, adding, "Looking for details on rest of world, haven't found anything other than 'soon,'" followed by a colon and a capital P.
Since March, the NGII page on Xbox.com had a message that said, "Get your hands on the free demo coming to Xbox LIVE Marketplace in May," but that was quietly removed sometime this week. Ninja Gaiden II will paint the wall with blood in North America and Europe next week.
We never forget a face. That explains why we nearly overlooked the charming fellow above, as his disturbing assemblage of teeth, eyes and wrinkles really stretches our definition of "face" to its very hideous limit. Apparently, we were supposed to meet him for a round of Mass Effect today, foiling his and his fellow Batarians' plan to toss an asteroid at an unsuspecting planet.
If you feel like your galactic romp across BioWare's rich galaxy is in need of extension, the "Bring Down the Sky" Mass Effect add-on promises "approximately 90 minutes" of gameplay and 50 gamerscore points. It's available on the Xbox Live Marketplace now for $5, or 400 MS Points. Oh, and you can win a download code for it right now.
To enter this giveaway, suggest a caption for the above image in the comments section.
You must be 18 years or older and a resident of the US or Canada (excluding Quebec).
Limit 1 entry per person. If you enter this giveaway more than once you'll be automatically disqualified and jettisoned into space!
This entry period ends tomorrow at 5:45pm ET Tuesday 3/11/08. We'll randomly select 10 winners at that time.
For complete rules capable of generating extensive dialogue trees, click here.
[Update: The contest is over. We'll be contacting the winners shortly, so please keep an eye on your inbox!]
We realize that a lot of crap gets dumped on Xbox Live Marketplace that we don't comment on. We used to notice it more, but mocking it is almost sort of futile now. But when someone sends along a tip to alert us that they've just sullied the Marketplace, we feel compelled to comment on it. So, here it goes. As seen above, Disruptive Media Publishers has just unleashed the "Hardcore Gamer Picture Pack," a name so ironic that Alanis Morissette just beat herself to death with a shoe.
If you pony up the $1.25 for the Hardcore Game Picture Pack, we're officially not friends. We would honestly prefer you to get your Xbox Live Vision camera, and take a picture of your crotch and make it your gamerpic. If you burned a combination orphanage/puppy mill to the ground and dragged a generator to the scene so you could (using the Shroud of Turin as lens filter) take a picture of the flames with your Xbox Live Vision camera and made that your pic, we would be less offended.
OK, we wanted to end on that line, but we had to mention the "Respawn" one. What does that even mean? That you're happy the game continues after you've been killed? Yes! We are too!
We were planning on accompanying this post with a poll asking how many of our readers regularly watch Hannah Montana, but we're pretty sure we can guess the results of that questionnaire -- half of our readers would fess up to watching the pre-teen pop queen, and the other half would be bold-faced liars.
Fine, you don't have to admit it -- but if you have a friend (wink, wink) with an Xbox Live account, that friend (nudge, nudge) can now download episodes of Hannah Montana as well as a plethora of other Disney channel programming on Live Marketplace. It's just like having that dreamy Zac Efron live inside of your Xbox 360 hard drive, ready to serenade you at your behest, just one ashamed button press away from your Veteran career on Call of Duty 4.
At CES today, Microsoft announced an expansion of its Xbox Live video offerings. ABC Television and MGM will both offer HD videos on the Marketplace. Coincidentally, these studios are exclusively aligned to Blu-ray. This agreement gives Xbox owners a chance to experience this content in HD as well.
ABC Television Network, ABC Family, ABC News, Disney Channel and Toon Disney are all part of this new offering. More than 500 hours of content, in both standard definition and high definition, will be offered including ABC Television shows Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives. Past and current shows will be offered, as will archived ABC News broadcasts.
MGM will offer a wide variety of movies, from the Rocky series to Dances with Wolves. Movies across all demographics will be available, including Terminator, Silence of the Lambs, Legally Blonde, Barbershop and Agent Cody Banks. Platoon, Rain Man and The Usual Suspects will also be available.
Price and an exact launch date of this newly announced content have yet to be revealed. HD DVD may have gotten a serious death blow this week, but it appears Microsoft's on-demand offerings should more than satiate the HD film appetite of the Xbox fan.
After a blatant bug caused it to be yanked from the Xbox Live Marketplace, Sensible World of Soccer has returned sans obvious technical faults. This version of the footy classic still has the problem of us being completely rubbish at it, but we can't lay the blame at the feet of the developers. They'd just boot it into our obviously unguarded net.
If you were enjoying the previous release of Codemasters' kicker despite the creepy crawlies in the code, you're advised to delete the game from your Xbox 360 hard drive and download it again. Major Nelson assures us that you won't be charged if you've already paid for it -- and if not, swos never your concern anyway.
The video just about sums it up. After a long build-up, Sensible World of Soccer rushed onto the Xbox Live Marketplace field this morning and promptly fell on its face. (Thanks to West Ham's Robert Green for the visual aid.) The beloved soccer game apparently suffered from a bug that would sign players out of Live as soon as it started up, and wouldn't sign them back in until they returned to the dashboard. After the forums erupted on Codemasters' official site, the game was pulled from Marketplace.
There's currently no announced timetable for its return, but we'll update this post as soon as we hear something new. In the meantime, Major Nelson has the lowdown on all the "anonymous" information your game will collect on you to present you with the very finest in in-game advertising. ... Once it's working, of course.
Be honest now. It's not like you have anything better to do than to stare at a series of polygonal environments and pretend you're dashing through them, mowing down multicolored cyborgs and kidnapping defenseless flags. In the gallery below you'll find images depicting the three environments comprising Halo 3's "Heroic Map Pack," which arrives on the Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th. It'll set you back 800 MS Points ($10) unless you're the patient and/or apathetic type, in which case it'll cost you nothing early next year. But then, we already lost the apathetic readers at the headline.
If you've made it this far (kudos to you for putting up with an unreasonable amount of filler nonsense), you'll want to be reminded about those three new maps again: "Rat's Nest," an indoor area rife with vehicles! "Standoff," a valley overshadowed by a large melancholy dish who's always staring off into space! "Foundry," a level you get to strategically clutter up (sometimes with soccer balls) in Forge! The constant use of exclamation marks is unnecessary and annoying!
Microsoft is reemploying their Bringing it Home campaign for this year's Min-E3. The campaign has previously been seen during last year's E3 and their X06event in Barcelona, Spain.
As part of Bringing it Home, a barrage of content will be made available via Xbox Live, including their July 10 press conference, game trailers, themes, gamer pictures, demos and other video updates. Some of the games mentioned include Assassin's Creed, Bioshock, Blue Dragon and Project Gotham Racing 4. A partial list (expect surprises from the show) is available after the break.
It's been a long while since the last group of downloadable songs came out for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II and it looks like those who are prepared to rock will need to wait just a bit longer. A post on the Red Octane site says that we'll finally get more songs come July. An administrative poster on the site by the name of Rodth says, "While nothing's been formally announced, look for something to come down the pipeline around the July timeframe."
Being as there is nothing "formally announced," we have no idea if they'll be more GH 1 rehashes or actual new songs. It's probably a safe bet that the $6.25 price tag for three songs like last time won't be changing. Although, it would be nice that the genres of the songs sync up a little better this time. At this point, all major announcements seem to have the smell of Min-E3 all over them.
Well, no, there's still no fix to the extremely long waits some Shadowrunplayers are experiencing before getting into a game, but at least when they finally get into one now they can really make it count with four new strategy videos released on to Xbox Live Marketplace for 100 points ($1.25) a piece.
The videos are broken up by maps and include, according to the blade description, "sniping points, teleport lines and routes to the artifact directly from designer Derek Carroll." We're sure they've got only the l33test of tips, but we're a little stunned that they've omitted the most important strategy for a good Shadowrun experience: Waiting for a price drop.
Xbox Live Marketplace will soon offer content from CMT, the nation's top country music station and Logo, the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender network, along with a slew of other content. Yeah, they're definitely going for a demographic spread -- although there is always that gay cowboy demographic (coincidentally Brokeback Mountain is available on HD DVD and not Blu-ray).
MTV owns both CMT and Logo, and following the success of their MTV, Comedy Central and VH1 brands on the Xbox Live service, decided to expand. CMT, beginning June 6, will offer Comedy Stage, Foxworthy's Big Night Out and Prankville. Logo, beginning June 11, will offer Noah's Arc (pictured), Wisecrack and Curl Girls. There will also be many Anime offerings including the HD version of Anime classic Akira and other properties of ADV Films (Samurai 7, Last Exile).
And you, and you, and you, you're gonna maybe love Dreamgirls, Pan's Labyrinth and other movies coming to the marketplace this month. More details can be found at the Xbox site. A demographic spread in content is always a good thing for consumers and for business.
We've got to be honest, we felt a bit like a really bad blind date watching this first installment in a new series of video diaries from Lionhead about Fable 2. Yes, we're trying to listen to everything you're saying about the difficulty of replicating love in a game, but our brains are just a bit occupied by unbridled lust to pay attention. To put it bluntly, we can't keep our eyes from wandering to your chest 3D engine.
The beauty part is that despite our lecherous behavior, Molyneux still gives it up at the end of the video with just under a minute of slow pans over the revamped Bowerstone Market and Brightwood. Why Lionhead, giving it up on the first date? We haven't even given you 30 boxes of chocolate and flexed 50 times yet. We've got download links below, but you can also get the video on XBL Marketplace.
Download - "Emotions in Action Games" HD 720P Download - "Emotions in Action Games" High Stream - "Emotions in Action Games" High
Has your copy of Bullet Witch just been sitting around gathering dust? Well, there's nothing you can do about that; you traded it to EB Games fair and square. No, we don't blame you, we just wanted to let you know that the new content for the game on Marketplace isn't going to do you much good. For those of you who are still hanging with the B-Witch, you'll be able to spend a quarter on a remixed level or the new secretary's costume. ("Eyes like gun barrels hidden behind glasses." They should officially be charging for descriptions.)
Also today, Test Drive Unlimitedfans are even more unlimited in their choice of car with the new free Saturn Curve download and a 350-point pack that includes the Ferrari Challenge Stradale, Cadillac Cien, RUF RK Spyder, Dino 246 GT, Lamborghini Murciélago Roadster, TVR T440R. If a majority of that sentence wasn't moon man talk to you, it should be $4.37 well spent.
Read -- Test Drive Unlimited DLC (Free and Premium) Read -- Bullet Witch In Game Content
