Latest Xbox 360 News

Microsoft lowers the prices of their Xbox 360 gaming console

Software giant Microsoft has announced that they are now cutting the prices of their main Xbox 360 video game console model by about 13 percent in the United States.

The company is aiming to boost the sales of this product as the holiday season arrives in the coming months.

The Xbox 360 premium model would now cost around USD 350. Microsoft is facing intense competition from Nintendo Wii console which is still cheaper at USD 250. Microsoft has their core Xbox 360 (with no hard disk) priced at USD 280 now. The Xbox 360 Elite edition would now sell for $450.

The Xbox 360 will reduce the Canadian retail price of Xbox 360%u2122 by $100 (CDN) beginning Aug. 8 at Canadian retailers nationwide.

Price drop coincides with release of "Madden NFL 08" on Xbox 360, one of many titles that make up the greatest holiday lineup in video game history.

Yesterday the first leak of a Xbox 360 V2 with HDMI (Zephyr) happened. Later reports (e.g.: Mercury News, TeamXbox - stories have been removed) have appeared that Bill Gates and Robbie Bach will actually announce the new Xbox 360 at the Microsoft Keynote on Sunday at the CES.

The new Xbox 360 will have HDMI as reported. The new Xbox 360 might also be an IPTV setop box. We will most likely hear the details tomorrow in the keynote.
The photo above is from a video that Xbox-Scene published showing a developer Xbox 360 with HDMI port in action.

Engadget scored some scoop and a photo of a new Xbox 360 console.

In April last year first reports appeared that there is a new Xbox 360 CPU in the works with 65nm. The new Xbox 360 has apparently the codename Zephyr and is sporting a HDMI port. A 120GB hard-drive is supposedly also part of the new Xbox 360.

Police were forced to wait to obtain a court order allowing them to collect details from Microsoft about a man who had stolen an XBOX 360 and subsequently called Microsoft up to request a free power cord (he left his at the crime scene).

Microsoft had the man's name, address and phone number but refused to provide Police with said details until they obtained a court-issued search warrant which took nearly two additional weeks from the date of the robbery.

The victim of the burglary was both confused and annoyed at Microsoft's lack of action:

"This will happen again if they don't change their ways," he said. "They knew it was stolen, and they just did nothing." Click here to read the full article.

If a recent report from Emerging Media Dynamics is to be believed, then Microsoft are set to make an estimated $726 million from their Xbox Live movie and TV services by the year 2011.

In the report which is titled "Spotlight on Television 2.0 Leaders: Microsoft Corporation", Emerging Media Dynamics said that this coming year revenue from the aforementioned services should hit $92.5 million, with it steadily increasing until the total revenue figure of $726 million is reached in the year 2011.

Even if the revenue levels remain at their 2007 estimated level of $92.5 million, that is a total of $462.5 million for the 5 year period ending 2011, and given what the future holds for high speed content delivery, we wouldn't be surprised if they even topped the $726 million figure estimated above.

Xbox 360 will always have the advantage over PS3, according to Bill Gates. In a recent interview with gaming guru Dean Takahashi, Gates let his feelings on PlayStation 3 be known.

He said that Sony had no advantage in graphics at all. He said Sony started earlier but "burned a year" trying to make the Cell processor do graphics functions. When it didn't work, Sony went to a fallback plan by tapping Nvidia for the graphics chip at the last minute. It also didn't have embedded DRAM or unified memory. The Xbox 360 game developers would always be a year ahead of Sony on the learning curve in taking advantage of the system. As a result, Gates said that Sony would never have games that look beter than Microsoft.

Nintendo sold 1.1 million Wii from launch through till the end of the year. Sony came in a distant second selling 687,300 Playstation 3s. Comparably, Microsoft sold 607, 343 from their launch date in Nov. 2005 through the end of that year. (Microsoft has sold a total of 4.5 million Xbox 360's since their launch in 2005) So, apples-to-apples, Nintendo came in first, Sony second and Microsoft third, with Nintendo nearly tying the second and third place combined.

Capcom Co. has said that they have sold more than a million copies of their game Dead Rising for the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console.

The game was launched in august 2006 and crossed the milestone in December 2006.

Dead Rising for Xbox 360 stars a freelance journalist who must fend off hordes of zombies by any means necessary and uncover the truth behind the horrific incident that started the zombie outbreak.

The Xbox 360 HD-DVD movie player add-on has sold about 92,000 units since its launch in mid-November last year. According to NPD's figures, the hardware sold 42,000 units in November and 50,000 in December. NPD analyst Anita Frazier said that the life-to-date figure indicates a 2 percent attach rate to the Xbox 360 install base. The firm reported last night that life-to-date Xbox 360 sales in the US stand at 4.5 million units.

The HD-DVD add-on retails for $200.

Microsoft has beaten expectations with HD-DVD movie sales, with Xbox Live doing better than more "traditional" mediums such as Amazon.

Microsoft made a strategic choice to price HD titles only a dollar over standard definition, and it's paying off so far.

"If you look at our sales charts, movies like The Perfect Storm, Unforgiven and Swordfish are all doing disproportionately better than you would expect, and the only explanation is that they're available in HD," explained Ross Honey, senior director for media in Microsoft's content and partner strategy group.

GOW for Xbox 360 is continuing to hoard the end of the year gaming awards and has now been announced as Game Of The Year by arguably the most respected video game site on the internet.

From Gamespot:
Gears of War, a graphically stunning sci-fi shooter published by Microsoft Games, was named Game of the Year by GameSpot (www.gamespot.com), the leading source for unbiased gaming information.
For GameSpot's 11th Annual Best & Worst of 2006 Awards, more than 40 awards were presented in categories ranging from Best New Character to Best Game No One Played. A complete list of winners is available here.

"Gears of War is a stunning, extremely satisfying, and challenging shooter," said Greg Kasavin, editor-in-chief of GameSpot. "The developers at Epic Games have set a new standard for how believable and intense action gaming experiences can be."

Sure, you'll never see this ride rolling on actual asphalt, but building an Xbox 360 into the dashboard of a vehicle is infinitely cooler than any bling-laden spinning rims. The "SXBox," as it's called, is on display at the 2006 San Diego International Auto Show, and is based on the 2007 SX4 sedan.

The console itself is actually embedded in the dashboard itself, and runs in tandem with a "close proximity digital projection system to display games or watch a HD-DVD movie on the interior of the vehicle's retractable hood." Meanwhile, another Xbox 360 is hooked up to two LCDs integrated into the backs of the front seats for back-seat gaming. A 30-inch rear projection screen fills out the space cleared when the hatchback is opened.

Microsoft Corp. has extended the warranty for the Xbox 360 console from 90 days to one year from the date of purchase in the United States and Canada. The company said it extended the warranty in these territories to be consistent with the standard one-year Xbox 360 warranty that is available throughout most of the world.

The extended warranty applies to both would-be purchasers and those who already have Xbox 360 and are still within their first year of ownership.

The one-year warranty is now the standard for the Xbox 360 console. Customers who experience hardware issues with their Xbox 360 within one year of purchase can have their consoles repaired at no cost. Moreover, the new warranty policy is retroactive, so consumers who may have already paid for an out-of-warranty Xbox 360 repair within one year of purchase will be eligible for reimbursement of their console repair charges.

MojoPlay, the company with the funny name, has extended their line of LCD screens to include a model for the Xbox 360.

"One of three new displays from MojoPlay for 2007, the new 9.2" MP-920XB features a sleek mounting system that seamlessly integrates onto the Xbox 360 without affecting the cooling vents on the top of the console. Featuring 800 x 480 resolution and built -in stereo speakers, it can do justice to even the heartiest single person shooter games. The mounted display travels easily to a friend or relative's house to keep the kids (and adults) entertained during the holidays while freeing up the TV in the living room for the big game. The dual headphone jacks provide a nice quiet alternative to the built-in stereo speakers."

Microsoft has just announced that Gears of War has sold 1 million copies worldwide in just its first two weeks of release, elevating the game to the fastest-selling title of 2006 and fastest-selling original Xbox game of all time.

The game has also become the most-played Xbox Live game as more than 850,000 unique gamers have engaged in 10 million gameplay sessions while unlocking an impressive 7 million Achievements. Microsoft also believes that the game has driven new members to the network, as paid registrations per day have skyrocketed more than 50 percent since the game's launch.

1. Gears of War (9.6/10)
2. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (9.1/10)
3. Call of Duty 3 (8.8/10)
4. F.E.A.R. (8.6/10)
5. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent (8.5/10)
6. Dead Rising (8.4/10)
7. Viva Pinata (8.3/10)
8. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (8.3/10)
9. NHL 2K7 (8.3/10)
10. Saints Row (8.3/10)

For more information and reviews, please visit: GameSpot.com

the Xbox 360 is much more than just a games console, its ability to act as a media extender and player allowing you to access video from your media center PC and other devices is a great selling point. The video download option is also quite nice.

The Xbox 360 also offers a HD-DVD player add-on which was released last month, again adding to the game console's stance as an all around media player and media extender.

CNET recently did a review (complete with video) of the device stating that it was a great buy at $200 compared to other HD-DVD's on the market but its lack of HDMI connectivity does let it down.

When Microsoft debuted its new Halo 3 trailer and invited Xbox 360 gamers to sign up to participate in the Halo 3 multiplayer demo next spring, it was obvious what would happen next.

Gamers signed up like crazed weasels. They hit the Halo 3 site so hard that some people couldn't even get through the registration process. From IGN:

Today, Microsoft revealed that more than 140,000 people signed up for the North American beta within the first 24 hours. During that period, halo3.com was bogged down with requests and for many the sign-up page would not load. Registration is still open to the public. To participate in the beta, you need an Xbox 360 with hard drive, an Xbox Live Gold account and a Microsoft.NET Passport account linked to your gamertag.

The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsoft's original Xbox video game console. The Xbox 360 console was for the first time unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, and release on November 22, 2005 in North America, December 2 in Europe, and December 10 in Japan, and became the first console to have a simultaneous launch across the three major regions. The Xbox360 is also the first next-gen console to hit the market.

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU

Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance

9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor

10 MB of embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance

500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate

16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance

48 billion shader operations per second

Memory

512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM
Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth

22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance

1 teraflop

Storage

Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O

Support for up to four wireless game controllers
Three USB 2.0 ports
Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online

Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
Built-in Ethernet port
Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
Video camera ready

Digital Media Support

Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
Ability to rip music to the Xbox360 hard drive
Custom playlists in every game
Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support

All games supported at 16:9, 720p, and 1080i, anti-aliasing
Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio

Multi-channel surround sound output
Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32-bit audio processing
Over 256 audio channels

System Orientation

Stands vertically or horizontally

Customizable Face Plates

Interchangeable to personalize the console

The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsoft's Xbox video game console, developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS. Information on the console first came through viral marketing campaigns and it was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information divulged later that month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The Xbox 360 is the first console to have a near-simultaneous launch across the three major regions, and the first to provide wireless controller support at launch. The console sold out completely at release and by the end of September 2006 had sold 6 million consoles worldwide.

The Xbox 360 was the first console to be released in the seventh generation of game consoles and competes against Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. Its Xbox Live service allows gamers to compete online, download games and additional content.