Gamernode: Latest Xbox 360 News

Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten's letter to the gamers

Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten just sent out a letter in regards to the recent Xbox Live issue which has been bothering many gamers over their holiday break. Rather than give a play-by-play of the entire thing, I'll just say that to make up for it Microsoft will be giving away a free XBLA title (to be determined) and let you read the rest yourself. I assume you can all read, especially if you're reading this sentence.

Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of y...

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Xbox 360 sales hit 17.7M, Halo 3 sales hits 8.1M

Thanks to the holiday season, Xbox 360 worldwide sales have reached 17.7 million units. Last we heard about Xbox 360 sales was back in October when Microsoft reported they've sold 13.4 million units and its gaming division profited for the first time.

Microsoft also mentioned that Halo 3 has sold over 8.1 million copies since its September 25th debut and Mass Effect has sold over 1.6 million copies since its release on November 20th. We last heard about sales for the two games early last month, when it was reported that Halo 3 sold 5 million copies and Mass Effect reached over 1 million copies.

In addition to the two big titles, November NPD data reports that the Xbox 360 has a record-high software attach rate of 6.9.

Due to the surplus sales of the Xbox 360 this holiday, Xbox Live suffered...

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Far Cry 2, Just Cause 2 heading to X360 and PS3

Ubisoft and Eidos Interactive revealed a double-whammy today and confirmed that Far Cry 2 and Just Cause 2 will head to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Previously, only Far Cry 2 was definitely confirmed for PC, while Just Cause 2 remained platform-less.

Far Cry 2 will be set in Africa and Ubisoft Montreal is handling the game's development. They developed the entire console Far Cry "spin-offs" after Ubisoft acquired the Far Cry license back in 2006 from Crytek. A release date is expected during Ubisoft's 2009 fiscal year, which begins on April 1st.

Initial details of Just Cause 2 come from CVG; Peter Johansson, lead game designer, summed up the sequel by saying, "We identified the key areas we wanted to improve for Just Cause 2. We wanted to make better use of our huge game world, enhance the ...

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Major Nelson apologizes for XBL downtime

Major Nelson, aka, Larry Hryb, head of all things Xbox Live, issued an apology for the XBL problems many users were having during the past 10 days.

In his blog, he stated:

"You may have noticed that the LIVE service has been having a few issues over the past few days. This includes things like signing in, matchmaking and account recovery.

"Not everyone has had problems, but I know some of you have and I wanted to give you and update. While the service was never completely offline, problems like this are not acceptable.

"The entire LIVE team has been working day and night to ensure that you can have a great LIVE experience. While we're not done yet, I wanted to let you know that things are getting better each hour and that no one on the team is going anywhere until the job is done. Thanks fo...

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UT3 90% complete for the Xbox 360

According to this image of an unnamed German gaming magazine, the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament 3 may be as much as 90% complete RIGHT NOW.

MaxConsole's maxtranslation skills say that the game is expected to release on Microsoft's gaming system in April of 2008. That gives Sony and the Playstation 3 just about a four-month headstart in the race to claim Unreal fans' support.

Now I have no idea exactly how accurate this claim may be, but nothing about it seems too unbelievable. Looks like 360 owners are in for quite a wait.

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Gamers demand payback for broken XBL service

The Christmas break/vacation was, for a lot of us, a time to just relax and catch up on some serious gaming time. But if you owned a 360, that experience was seriously flawed due to Xbox Live servers constantly being broken.

The worst of the XBL weirdness occurred this week as a great deal of gamers was frozen out of their accounts due to serious glitches in the system.

While some just chalked the problems up as just part of being a gamer, others have not been so understanding and are demanding that Microsoft compensate them for the downtime by offering Microsoft points or games. The typcial price of an Xbox Live Gold account is $50 per year.

Torifle, a user of the Xbox.com forums stated:

"...I understand some glitches for a few hours. Stuff happens. But to have an outage as long as this on...

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Jade Empire 2 on the horizon

Released for Xbox back in 2005, BioWare's action/RPG Jade Empire garnered quite a few positive reviews for its wuxia setting, plentiful dialogue and interesting NPCs. But after a decent port to PC, BioWare remained silent on a sequel.

I have good news though, Mercury News' Dean Takahashi claims he talked to someone who saw code for Jade Empire 2 and the sequel is certainly on the horizon for the Xbox 360.

Now that EA is all set to acquire BioWare, it'll be interesting to see if Jade Empire 2 will remain an Xbox 360 exclusive game. What I want to know is how long it'll take for the PC port, because I don't want to wait an additional two years for it.

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Metal Slug 3 coming to XBLA this Wednesday

This Wednesday, get ready to rock out with Metal Slug 3 on Xbox Live Arcade. The fourth game in SNK's Metal Slug series, Metal Slug 3 features a host of new transformations, weapons, and slugs.

Already previously released on the Xbox, the game didn't do so well considering the steep price for the fairly simple arcade title. This time around, Metal Slug 3 will set you back 800 points. My guess is they put it between the normal retro arcade games and the Xbox Originals so they didn't have to make the call.

The game is going to be a straight-up port, with one major addition: online co-op. If playing Metal Slug online with friends isn't reason enough to get this game, you have no heart. While 800 may seem like too much for it, just imagine all quarters you'll save next time you go to the local...

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Xbox 360 game sales in Japan worse than you think

We all know that the Xbox 360 is struggling to succeed in Japan. Microsoft's been trying to promote their console there, but things just don't work out. Lines to pick up Halo 3 were non-existent, Blue Dragon didn't sell nearly as well as Microsoft hoped, and early reports on holiday sales don't look very promising at all.

What many don't know, though, is the extent to which the 360 is struggling in Japan. In a recent issue of Famitsu, the top 50 lifetime Xbox 360 software sales were listed, up to December 9, 2007. Are they bad? Yes. Very. How bad? Look below to get a breakdown for each of the 50 games, but in the meantime, let's just put it this way: combined, the 50 best-selling Xbox 360 games haven't cracked the 2 million mark.

For some perspective on that, Halo 3 has sold nearly 4 millio...

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Tales of Vesperia debut trailer

Wake up, Tales fans, there is more on the way, and it is looking pretty. Here is the first trailer for the next in the series, Tales of Vesperia - to be released on an as-of-yet unamed console (although the keywords of the official website include Xbox 360) sometime in 2008. Oh, and the trailer is in Japanese, so don't be disappointed if you can't understand it.

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Xbox Live breaks during Christmas weekend

During the Christmas weekend, a lot of gamers and new inductees to the world of the Xbox 360 were eagerly looking forward to some quality frag fests and fun via Xbox Live.

But all was not well as reports were coming in from various parts of the country that the Xbox Live service was behaving naughty and not nice concerning problems dealing with logging on, maintaining a solid connection and faulty service.

Not everyone experienced these problems but those who did were somewhat frustrated as connections to Xbox Live would suddenly, for no apparent reason, stop in the middle of gaming. Although the user's status on XBL was seen as "online," the connection was actually broken and games being played at this time would indicate that the user was disconnected from Xbox Live.

Although no reasons ha...

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Give the gift of Microsoft Points

If you're in the gift-giving mood and you know someone who is an Xbox 360 fanatic, then Microsoft has something right up your alley. Major Nelson notes that folks can now gift Microsoft points.

As of now, this is only available to U.S. accounts only. You'll need a Windows Live ID in order to send the gift points, but Microsoft is working on the ability to gift points based on your Gamertag, so sit tight.

So here's the blurb, "You do need to know the persons Windows LIVE ID for the gifting. I have asked the team to add the ability to gift points based on Gamertag, and they said they'll work on that for the future, but for now...you'll need to know the recipients Windows LIVE ID."

If you don't know what to give to that stingy Xbox 360 friend, then here you go!

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Next batch of Rock Band DLC, the holiday edition!

The next batch of downloadable content for Rock Band will hit Xbox Live tomorrow, which is just in-time for Christmas. Note that the DLC will hit the PlayStation store next week, along with next week's regularly scheduled DLC, due to the holidays.

So if you're fans of 30 Seconds to Mars, All-American Rejects or The Sounds, then you'll have no excuse to not pick up the DLC. Also note that prices have been reduced for the holidays so each song is just $0.99 USD/80 Microsoft points. Enjoy!

1. "Attack" - 30 Seconds To Mars (from 2005's A Beautiful Lie)2. "The Kill" - 30 Seconds To Mars (from 2005's A Beautiful Lie)3. "Dirty Little Secret" - All-American Rejects (from 2005's Move Along)4. "Move Along" - All-American Rejects (from 2005's Move Along)5. "Song With A Mission" - The Sounds (from 2006'...

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The Club trailer

Here's an interesting title. The Club is a third-person action game from Bizarre Creations, and will be hitting the PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 in mid-February. Admittedly, I had heard nothing of this game until today, but a little bit of research has informed me that The Club is an "arcadey" FPS about killing for sport.  It's designed around multiple environments and characters and asks players to blast everything in sight as quickly as they can. It looks pretty good, too. Check it out:

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Sensible World Soccer pulled from XBLA

Looks like Sensible World Soccer, the just-released XBLA title, continues to suffer problems. After a series of release delays and technical problems, the game was released today but was quickly yanked after a serious bug was discovered.

Major Nelson offers a note that the game was pulled and will issue an update when it's available again. He also advises that to the gamers who already downloaded the game to delete it and re-download it again.

"This game has been pulled. I'll post an update when it is available again. In the meantime, if you downloaded this busted version, please delete it and when the new one is available you'll be able to downloaded (sic) it again (at no charge if you purchased it.) While you do that, I'll go yell at some folks for letting this happen. Apologies and the mo...

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When will we see another 360 price cut?

Microsoft is poised to take another whack at the Sony fortress if they decide to lower the price of the Xbox 360 come the first quarter of 2008.

According to some veteran analysts of the videogame market, lowering the price of the Xbox 360 during January would be another right step in Microsoft's chances to winning the console war for this generation. 

Microsoft has the advantage of stellar titles which warrant buying the Xbox 360, a cheaper manufacturing system than Sony, and still advantageous position of releasing a year early. Some suggest that Microsoft create another Halo3 bundle at a reduced price.

While this sounds good on paper, these analysts are not factoring in the Wii. Nintendo's system is still one of the hottest tickets this holiday season. Without a doubt they are going to cl...

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Rockstar says no additonal new content for GTA IV

There was a lot of buzz recently about more new content for the upcoming game, Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar has already announced that there will be two additional episodes--one coming in 2008 and the second one in 2009.

But a fourth quarter business conference call by Take-Two had talking heads speculating that even more content was coming our way.

But it turns out that there won't be. According to a Rockstar rep, the content that was mentioned in the conference call was merely continued talk of the already planned release of the second episode. Some took the "announcement" to mean more new content was going to be released.

GTA IV was originally going to hit store shelves in 2007 but was pushed back to April of 2008. This is a pretty big deal for Microsoft--unconfirmed rumors say that it ...

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Kane & Lynch demo on XBL

Here's a way to try out that game that shitty PR decisions have all but destroyed in the eyes of the hardcore gaming community. A demo for Eidos' Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is now available for download on Xbox Live.

The demo weighs in at 520MB and features a single level, playable in either single-player or cooperative mode.

Now, everyone who was curious about this game before its publisher screwed things up can give it a shot without having to fork over any cash.

I, for one, will be doing a bit of downloading today.  How about you?

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Blue Dragon 2 an MMORPG?

The Xbox 360 has been struggling in Japan since it was released in December of 2005. Sales of the console have only reached about 500,000 units, but Takashi Sensui, Japanese General Manager at Microsoft's Home & Entertainment Division believes that reaching one million units is not far fetched.

A low number of RPGs on the Xbox 360 is partially to blame for such a low sales count, so in order to cater to the hardcore, more RPGs need to be included in the up-and-coming games list for Japan. One of these RPGs might be a sequel to Hironobu Sakaguchi's Blue Dragon. In April 2007 he reaffirmed that he wanted a sequel for the game after stating as early as November 2006 that Blue Dragon 2 was being planned.

CVG reports that Sakaguchi talked to korean press about this sequel saying, "we're in talk...

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Linkin Park, Mastodon and The Used rock out with G...

Activision announced the next line of downloadable content for Guitar Hero III today. The three song pack includes "No More Sorrow" from Linkin Park, "Sleeping Giant" from Mastodon and "Pretty Handsome Awkward" from The Used. Also all three tracks will be master recordings.

In addition, another three song pack will be released featuring European bands Extremoduro, Trust and Die Fantastischen Vier. Finally, in the spirit of the holidays, Activision will release a rock rendition of "We Three Kings" from Steve Ouimette for free.

Expect all of these tunes to go online this month!

[Via GameDaily]

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