Microsoft - Page 172 of 239

Halo: Reach’s Defiant Map Pack Hits This March

Due out this March, the Defiant Map pack for Halo: Reach will include three new maps and 150 more Gamerscore points for $10. The three maps, all produces of 343 Studios, not Bungie, include one for Firefight and two for competitive play. Here’s the break down. Condemned: Condemned takes place aboard Orbital Station Gamma, a…

By Brian Crecente Published February 14, 2011

Won’t Anyone Let This Man Sell A Sarah Palin Xbox 360?

Poor David Morrill. All he ever wanted to do was sell an Xbox 360 that had, inexplicably, Sarah Palin’s autograph scrawled on the side of it. Instead, all he’s getting is trouble. First, unable to sell the console for one million dollars on auction site eBay, he had to drop the asking rate to a…

By Luke Plunkett Published February 11, 2011

Hacked Kinect Grooves Out A Beautiful Music Video

Kinect music videos are not new. There have already been a few like this one from Echo Lake. But while impressive, it’s not nearly as impressive as this. You are looking at “Catalina” by Portguese duo Moullinex, which is made up of Luis Clara Gomes and Luis Calçada. Gomes tells Kotaku that the video was…

By Brian Ashcraft Published February 11, 2011

Why You Shouldn’t Threaten School Massacres Over Xbox Live

A teenager from Maryland thought it would be a good idea to get hold of somebody else’s Xbox Live login details then send over 100 messages threatening to turn up to school with a gun and start shooting. It wasn’t. Instead, the boy has been arrested, after police (with help from Microsoft) were able to…

By Luke Plunkett Published February 11, 2011

Kinect Can Be Used For Real Games After All

The first bunch of games for Microsoft’s Kinect were…crude. Resulting in a fear from many gamers that the peripheral may not be cut out for more complex titles. Well, this Dead Space 2 footage might convince you otherwise. In it, you can see the guy – if this is legit – is almost literally playing…

By Luke Plunkett Published February 10, 2011

The Xbox 360 Experiences A Mid-Life Crisis In Japan

The Wii is easy to peg — family-friendly and fun. The PS3 is also easy to categorize — slick and high-tech. But in Japan, the Xbox 360 has a category of its own. And that’s starting to change. It was former Dead or Alive designer Tomonobu Itagaki who is quoted as saying that nobody buys…

By Brian Ashcraft Published February 9, 2011

Gears Of War For Kinect An On-Rails Shooter, Says Source

Microsoft’s Kinect may get its first taste of hardcore flavor—made a little bit softer—in the form of an on-rails Gears of War shooter, pictured above, said to be in development for the Xbox 360. According to sources claiming to be familiar with the project, the previously rumored Gears of War Kinect project is indeed real.…

By Michael McWhertor Published February 8, 2011

Xbox Live Arcade’s House Party Priced & Dated

Microsoft’s next big Xbox Live Arcade push, the “House Party,” kicks off next week with the release of Contra spin-off Hard Corps: Uprising. When can you expect the rest, like Beyond Good & Evil HD and Torchlight? And how much? The five XBLA games arriving over the next five weeks will run between 800 Microsoft…

By Michael McWhertor Published February 8, 2011

Boy’s Xbox Spending Spree Bleeds His Single Mother Dry

This is Brendan Jordan. He’s 11 years-old and he racked up £1082.52 (US$1,743.90) on Xbox Live. And now, his 37-year-old mom, Dawn, is working two jobs just to make ends meet. “When I put my card details in 18 months ago I thought it was just for his membership to play online with his friends,”…

By Brian Ashcraft Published February 8, 2011

Fanboy Or Gaming Hardware Loyalist?

In the first post-everything-changes edition of Speak-Up on Kotaku, GiantBoyDetective wonders who else sticks with one hardware maker for their video game platform needs. Anyone else only buy one brand of gaming system? I’ve only ever bought Nintendo consoles. The 3DS is next! I can imagine some people out there grew up on strictly PlayStation…

By Mike Fahey Published February 7, 2011

Why Conan O’Brien Isn’t Hosting An Xbox Live Show

Talk show Conan 0’Brien landed at cable network TBS after a brouhaha broke out on the Tonight Show. As previously posted, O’Brien could’ve inked a deal for Xbox Live, but didn’t. His producer now finally explains why. “The Xbox thing — a lot of the conversations were ‘well, it’s a show, but it’s not a…

By Brian Ashcraft Published February 7, 2011

Draw Your Own Controller With This Kinect Mod

The march of mod progress has steadily delivered many cool things during the Kinect’s short lifespan to date. We can add another breakthrough: The ability to recognize hand-drawn buttons. This hack, by Garratt Gallagher, won Willow Garage’s recent open-source Robot Operating System contest. Here he draws four buttons with a piece of paper and a…

By Owen Good Published February 5, 2011

And Now A Spooky Kinect Ghost Story

In today’s spooktacular edition of Speak-Up on Kotaku, commenter HeyCarl relays the twisted tale of the Kinect player that wasn’t there. Okay, my sister was telling me about her friend who has a Kinect. One night recently she was playing it (not sure what game though) with her son and after some time the son…

By Mike Fahey Published February 4, 2011

CultureTotal Recall

Microsoft’s First Console Adventure Was A Lesson In Failure

Like most other things associated with Sega’s ill-fated Dreamcast console, it’s been largely forgotten that the ahead-of-its-time machine featured the first ever console appearance (at least in terms of the console itself) for a company by the name of Microsoft. While Microsoft would of course enter the console business properly with the Xbox in 2001,…

By Luke Plunkett Published February 4, 2011

2010’s Most Popular Xbox Live Titles

Halo: Reach finished second to Call of Duty: Black Ops among the 2010 video game releases played most on Xbox Live. The annual rankings dropped yesterday courtesy of Xbox Live community guru Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb. In downloadable titles, LIMBO trailed Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, and Baby Maker Extreme was the top Indie game.…

By Owen Good Published February 3, 2011

Is This The First Kinect-Created Music Video?

Some music video directors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fancy special effects. Filmmaker Dan Nixon just spent $150 on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect to create the music video for Echo Lake’s “Young Silence.” I don’t know about the song, but the imagery in Echo Lake‘s “Young Silence” is quite eerie and haunting, thanks…

By Mike Fahey Published February 2, 2011

Mad Catz Is Making Official Wireless Headphones For The Xbox 360

Finding a quality set of headphones for the Xbox 360 just got a lot easier, as Microsoft teams up with peripheral maker Mad Catz to create a line of co-branded wired and wireless stereo headphones under Mad Catz’s Tritton brand. Mad Catz and Microsoft will be working together to design the headphone line, which will…

By Mike Fahey Published February 2, 2011

The Xbox 360 That Thinks It’s The End Of The World

The Xbox 360 was recently redesigned to make the thing look better. More stylish. If, instead, you’d like to lock it away behind a giant (and slightly terrifying) sci-fi gas mask, well, have we got the deal for you This is the C11 XBOX360 MLG Vault, which may look like an Xbox 360 case mod…

By Luke Plunkett Published January 31, 2011

Autistic Boy Branded A Cheater By Xbox Live [Update]

Julias Jackson is an 11-year-old boy living with autism, whose only real social interaction comes from playing online multiplayer games on Xbox Live, an activity that became more difficult when the Xbox Live team labeled him a cheater. Autism is a neural development disorder that is often associated with a lack of social and communication…

By Mike Fahey Published January 26, 2011

What’s The Best Game For Disabled Gamers?

That may sound like a tough one, but actually, the AbleGamers Foundation has an answer, and that answer is Forza 3. The Foundation, which exists to promote awareness and accessibility in video games for disabled gamers, selects once a year a recipient for its “Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year”. This is awarded to the…

By Luke Plunkett Published January 26, 2011