Microsoft - Page 188 of 238

Foxconn’s Latest In Suicide Prevention? Hiring “Mature” Workers

To combat its recent rash of suicides, Foxconn has installed safety nets, nixed suicide compensation, raised wages and even considered moving factories to China’s interior and increasing automation on the assembly line. The company’s latest brainstorm? Foxconn is looking at hiring more mature workers. This comes as last week a 22-year-old female worker fell to…

By Brian Ashcraft Published August 9, 2010

250GB Kinect Bundle Spotted

Microsoft’s controller-free Kinect platform is getting a 4GB bundle that comes with an Xbox 360, 4GB of memory, a Kinect sensor, a game and a controller. That doesn’t look like the only bundle. The Australian packaging for the 4GB bundle shows what appears to be a 250GB bundle that comes with a 250GB hard drive…

By Brian Ashcraft Published August 9, 2010

Kinect Is A Victorian Gentleman At Heart

You can keep your raft-paddling and dance dancing. I’m hanging out for Kinect’s moustache-twiddling minigame compilation. As seen on the USPTO

By Luke Plunkett Published August 9, 2010

And Another Foxconn Worker Dies

Foxconn is famous for two things: Manufacturing electronics (the PS3, the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360 and the iPhone) and having employees that commit suicide. This year, 12 Foxconn workers have taken their own lives. A 22-year-old female worker from Jiangsu Province has fallen to her death this week at the company’s Kunshan factory. Foxconn…

By Brian Ashcraft Published August 6, 2010

Is This How Microsoft Will Fix Kinect’s Couch Problem?

Microsoft’s forthcoming Kinect camera controller for the Xbox 360 plays better with standing humans than it does with couch potatoes. Microsoft says it’s still “calibrating” Kinect for seated players and may accomplish that with a little help from Amazon.com. The Xbox 360 maker may have turned to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to make Kinect’s depth-sensing…

By Michael McWhertor Published August 6, 2010

Halo Reach Afterhours at GameStop

GameStop, Microsoft and pro-gamer Tom “Tsquared” Taylor will be showing off some new Halo Reach footage and sharing some tips and tricks for the game at an event this Friday. The Halo Reach: Afterhours Event will also include a glimpse at the Xbox 360 game’s new Firefight mode. Hit up this site to check out…

By Brian Crecente Published August 5, 2010

EyeToy Creator Says Controller-Free Is “Limited”

Sony’s R&D wizard Dr. Richard Marks has two impressive entries on his resume: Creating the PlayStation EyeToy motion controls and the upcoming PlayStation Move motion controls. And he thinks controller-less controls are “limited”. “I created the technology for EyeToy which we made a controller-less device and it was really neat and it enabled new things…

By Brian Ashcraft Published August 5, 2010

Game About Befriending A Young Boy Is “Contentious”

Peter Molyneux, the game designer behind the Fable franchise, is working on Project Milo. The game is about a relationship with a young boy. Yep! According to Molyneux, there are “huge mountains” with the subject matter. “The reason for that is it is enormously contentious for us to do a game, a story, an experience,…

By Brian Ashcraft Published August 5, 2010

Deep Inside Xbox 360 Kinect and Why It’s the Future of Microsoft

Kinect is more than an Xbox 360 peripheral, it’s the future of Microsoft, or at least a very possible one. It’s the beginning of Microsoft’s plans for natural user interfaces, the step beyond the thing you’re staring at right now. *** Kinect is as much a product of serendipity as anything else. When Microsoft hired…

matt buchanan & Joel Johnson Published August 5, 2010

Microsoft Triumphs In Multiplayer Gaming Patent Battle

In 2004 Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum sued Microsoft over a 10-year-old patent for “communicating live while playing the same video game in separate locations.” After six years of legal tomfoolery, a U.S. District Judge has dismissed the case. Hochstein and Tenenbaum sued both Sony and Microsoft for patent infringement in 2004, claiming that both…

By Mike Fahey Published August 3, 2010

Settlers Of Catan, As Nature Intended

Last month we took a close look at a new version of classic board game Settlers of Catan, one being readied for Microsoft’s giant touch-screen computer. Since then, a new build of the game has been released. God this stuff looks good. It really is the best of both worlds; the social intimacy of a…

By Luke Plunkett Published August 3, 2010

Kinect Doesn’t Like It When Models Stand Too Close To Each Other

Microsoft tried something novel at a recent event in Hong Kong; they figured if you use a pair of scantily-clad booth babes to demo a Kinect game, maybe people won’t notice the game not working Things begin well enough; the waves to the crowd are twitchy, but recognised. Then the race starts. And things start…

By Luke Plunkett Published August 2, 2010

Microsoft To Sell 250GB HDDs Separately

Selling individual 250GB hard disk drives for the new Xbox 360 S seems like a predictable move, sure, but also one that until now had never been officially disclosed by Microsoft. Packaging shots for the 4GB version of the console, however, have shown Microsoft’s hand, revealing that in addition to controllers and Kinect, another accessory/upgrade…

By Luke Plunkett Published July 30, 2010

250 Foxconn Employees Poisoned By Pesticide

This time it isn’t an employee falling off a roof or out of a window. This time, it’s pesticide. Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics, is responsible for assembling the Xbox 360, the PS3, the Wii, the iPhone and more. After 250 workers at the company’s Chennai, India plant were hospitalized, Foxconn had no…

By Brian Ashcraft Published July 28, 2010

Halo: Reach Also Gets A Wireless Headset

Along with controllers and consoles, Microsoft today also quietly revealed a Halo: Reach-branded wireless headset for the Xbox 360. Selling for USD$50, the headset will be available a little ahead of the game’s launch in September, hitting stores worldwide in late August. Demand for these may not be as high for the shiny console, since…

By Luke Plunkett Published July 23, 2010

Unboxing Halo: Reach’s Games And Console

It’s one thing to see the guts of a Halo game spilled across a carefully-staged press photo, but it’s another entirely to see the actual product (or in this case products) opened by human hands. This video put together by Bungie shows Halo: Reach’s limited edition, legendary edition and special Xbox 360 console being taken…

By Luke Plunkett Published July 23, 2010

See Halo: Reach’s Forge World In Action

Halo 3’s forge mode – the game’s editing suite – is in for a serious revamp when Halo: Reach is released in September. As Mike saw earlier today at Comic-Con, Halo: Reach has replaced Forge with Forge World, a vastly improved editing tool that not only lets players craft much larger maps, but also have…

By Luke Plunkett Published July 23, 2010

Halo: Reach Bundle Confirmed

At Comic-Con today, Microsoft revealed a Limited Edition Halo: Reach bundle, packing two controllers with an Xbox 360 Slim, all in special silver casings, for $399. A copy of the game is also included. It’s available Sept. 14. The bundle will be available on Sept. 14, when Halo: Reach also launches. It will cost $399.…

By Owen Good Published July 22, 2010

Halo: Reach Gets Its Own Xbox 360 Controller

A product listing briefly appearing on Xbox.com revealed a sleek and sexy silver Halo: Reach branded Xbox 360 controller, likely release in conjunction with Bungie’s Halo swan song this fall. The Xbox.com product listing for the Halo: Reach Xbox 360 controller came and went quickly, but not before the image of the shiny new controller…

By Mike Fahey Published July 22, 2010

Where Board Games And Video Games Come Together

For as long as we’ve known the pair, video games have been video games, and board games have been board games. But as time and technology march on, could two become, as the Spice Girls say, one? There has long been a fairly simple divide between the two: One medium involves playing games on a…

By Luke Plunkett Published July 22, 2010