Microsoft

Here’s Microsoft’s Black Friday sales list for Xbox Live. Yes, Games on Demand games are still too damn expensive.

Holiday Gift Guide: What Do You Buy The Xbox Gamer?

We’ve shared some PC gift suggestions—from keyboards to games—and gifts that will cost you under $25. But today we want to suggest games and accessories to match an Xbox 360. Our editors are chiming in below, but feel free to post suggestions. Pretty controllers are totally acceptable! And hey, don’t knock the battery charging station.…

Microsoft’s New Xbox Game Charges By The Hour

Microsoft very quietly announced a new Xbox Live Arcade game today called Karaoke. On the surface, it sounds rather harmless; partnering with The Karaoke Channel, it lets users stream around 8000 songs from a central library, and you can use SmartGlass to queue up tracks and save a favourites list. The weirdness comes in when…

Microsoft’s Smartglass is Great (And I Don’t Even Use it For Games)

When Microsoft first announced its Smartglass technology at E3, I figured it would end up like the console’s video marketplace, or Facebook application. A neat idea for the guys in marketing, but wholly uninteresting for the average user. A few weeks in and I’m glad I’ve been proven wrong. I’ve got the app installed on…

More Than a Million People Beat Halo 4‘s Campaign in the First Five Days of Its Release

In the first five days since Halo 4‘s release on Nov. 6, 1,116,882 people completed the game’s campaign, or roughly one out of every four persons who played campaign at some point in that span. Some 4.5 billion kills were recorded by all these players, roughly two-thirds of the projected population of Earth. About 13.5…

Sony and Microsoft Could Have Killed the Wii Long Before It Would Save Nintendo

The midnight launch of the Wii U is a perfect time to reflect on the craze, six years ago, surrounding its predecessor, and the industry-transforming success of the Wii. And there really is no finer story you could read about that than what Rob Crossley has written for CVG. Microsoft and Sony both had their…

These Xbox 360 Black Friday Deals Include A Fancy White Console, an Exclusive Skylanders Figure and More

Sony isn’t the only hardware manufacturer trying to pry open your turkey-addled wallet next week. Microsoft will be partnering up with various retail outlets to offer their game console bundles with hot new games in a variety of configurations. The news comes from Xbox exec Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb: Walmart will offer an exclusive special…

Relive The Horrors of the Original Xbox Live Dashboard

Microsoft’s Larry Hryb has been digging through the archives in honour of Xbox Live’s 10th birthday, and has come up with a few dusty old relics. Above and below, you’ll find images of what the first, original Xbox Live dashboard used to look like. And you thought the current dash is bad. While it sort…

Over 100 Million Friendships have Been Made Over Xbox Live (And Over 200 Billion Achievement Points)

Amidst all the back-slapping and high-fiving going on at Xbox Live today, Microsoft released a statistic related to the service that I found pretty interesting. Seems that since Xbox Live’s inception in 2002, over 100 million friendships have been made. 122,265,266 at time of printing, to be exact. No word on how many friendships were…

Xbox Live Turns Ten Today. Let’s Look Back At Its Best And Worst Moments.

Today, Xbox Live turns 10 years old, meaning it’s finally as old as the majority of people who use it. Joking aside, Xbox Live has had its peaks and valleys, with both good and bad memories. Let’s take a moment to reflect back on those. You’re probably familiar with the bad ones. People who shoot…

Microsoft Sending Xbox Live Veterans a Custom, Free Xbox 360 [Update]

A few hours ago, Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb tweeted the following: Sounded largely unexciting, but then we got an email from a reader around the same time with these images, of a console his friend just got in the mail, emblazoned with Xbox Live 10th birthday graphics. In addition to a special box and…

Halo 4‘s Remote Detonator Has Already Reached Its Logical Conclusion

It stands to reason that most people who picked up the remote detonator in Halo 4 thought to use it in this way; but it was TheM0M0show who first documented the technique and put it on YouTube. Next time you see a mongoose cruising towards you, watch out. It may explode in your face.

The Craziest Feats Of Halo 4 Multiplayer Get Mythbusted

Do you ever wonder about really specific theoretical feats in Halo 4‘s multiplayer? Like, say, whether or not you can deflect an oddball with a gravity hammer, or trick an auto-sentry with a hologram? Wonder no longer: The folks at Defendthehouse have got you covered with the first episode of Halo 4 Mythbusters This must’ve…

Newest DirectX Upgrade Only For Windows 8 Systems

And so the inevitable march of Windows moves onward: DirectX, the software that Windows computers rely on to make games run, is getting an upgrade—but only for Windows 8. A Microsoft employee confirmed in a (tech-heavy) post to developers that “there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7.” Windows…

Pinch Me, I’m Excited About Halo 4’s DLC

Excited? About DLC? I’d normally rather throw myself under a bus, seeing as 90% of the stuff is usually over-priced fluff, but 343 look to be putting a ton of effort into Halo 4’s fancy Spartan Ops game mode. An episodic series of co-op and multiplayer experiences, I knew they’d have some sort of narrative…

Halo 4 Launching in Japan Is Pretty Much What You’d Expect

Japan has never been crazy about the Xbox 360, save for the few instances when it had exclusive role-playing games folks wanted to play. But generally speaking, it’s been an uphill battle. That being said, Halo 3 did okay! For a first-person shooter. On the Xbox 360. In Japan. Earlier this week, Halo 4 launched…

Will You Get Halo 4 on PC? Hahahahaha. No.

In the last ten years, while Microsoft has published all kinds of awesome games on the Xbox 360 (and has lately been quietly publishing XBLA games on the PC), it’s published exactly three of its major shooters. Halo, Halo 2 and the first Gears of War It’s a stupid move, one that seems increasingly stupid…

If You Play 140 Hours Of Halo 4 Multiplayer This Month, Microsoft Will Give You $7.50

So Microsoft is running a new promotion. It’s called the “Halo 4 Combat Tour,” and its purpose is to encourage you to play lots of Halo and buy lots of Halo-related things. “The more you do, the more you get,” Microsoft says. They’ll give you Microsoft Points—Xbox Live’s confusing digital currency—if you play an excessive…

This Kinect Patent is Terrifying, Wants to Charge You For License Violation

A patent filed by Microsoft last year, but only made public last week, wants to turn your Xbox 360’s Kinect into an instrument via which large companies can monitor your media usage and, if you’re found to be in violation of something, charge you for it. And no, I am not making that up. The…

Borderlands 2 Patch For Xbox 360 Fixes Potential Save-Erasing Bug

A potential game-save erasing bug affecting Xbox 360 players of Borderlands 2 has officially been patched today, according to developer Gearbox. The bug originated from players who hacked their own games and then played multiplayer games online with others. It only affected players on Xbox 360; players on PC and PS3 did not face an…