Sky on 360 hasn’t quite gone to plan…
The service will, eventually, show what channels your friends are watching amongst other features
Sky launched their streaming channel service on UK 360’s yesterday, promising access to 24 channels on demand. If you have an Xbox Live Gold account, with either a Sky TV or Sky Player subscription you can watch the ‘Base Entertainment Pack’, which includes GOLD, Sky Real Lives, Sky Arts 1, MTV One, Sky Sports News, British Eurosport, ESPN Classic, Sky News, National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, History, Eden, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Nick Jr.Oh, and if you need your movie or sport fix you can add them as well, unless you have them already in your sky subscription. If you are not a Sky Subscriber, it’s £15 for the standard pack (per month) with an extra £19 for sports.
However, you now can’t on a 360. The service, which requirements were essentially a 2mb internet connection, appeared to be very unstable at launch, crashing quite a lot. So much for this digital TV revolution, and Sky have now taken the service down. A quote from CVG from Sky said:
“Sky Player engineers are hard at work to resolve the problem. We expect to have the full service available on Wednesday.”
Now it is Wednesday and apparently the service is still not yet up at the time of writing. Sky have also responded to calls for a similar service to appear on PS3 and the response has been the default ‘no comment’. So it’s just 360 users, who soon will have access to both Facebook and Twitter through the dashboard following the next update, will soon have their Sky TV back.
Whilst there is no confirmation of a ‘HAWX’ style mode yet, I’m sure it won’t be long
Once again, a shady French gamer has got hold of a game way before launch and in this pinnacle of filming expertise, shot some footage of the PS3 version of Modern Warfare 2, showing a ‘behind the back’ camera option in multi-player of MW2. So now join me as I attempt to link all this together.
First of all, here is the footage coutersy of Destructoid:
“It’s just another cool way to play the game, you’ll still have the option to play the other game types as normal”
Now that’s cleared up, Destructoid translated the game modes as being: “Third Person Deathmatch” (straightforward enough) and “Cage Match Third Person”. And that is pretty much it, apart from more thing. According to the aforementioned “FourTwoZero’s” twitter status, if you don’t want Modern Warfare 2 spoiling, vanish of the face of the earth, or alternatively, don’t pay attention to the video gaming news community. Problem being, is that I don’t really want it spoiling, nor can I stop checking the news. Oh crap.
The Need for Speed Money Machine keeps pumping
Need for Speed Shift was the series first branch into the simulation genre stood up pretty well to competition
EA have announced that they have sold 100 million copies of Need For Speed games, since around 1994, and are quite happy about it.
The landmark comes following the release of Need for Speed: Shift, a simulation racing game as the series branches out, attempting to discover which area of the market Need For Speed really excels at. Now, NFS:S wasn’t bad, but then there was just a ton of racing games out around this period, with Forza Motorsport 3 and DIRT 2 being personal highlights of mine. Needless to say, EA have jumped on this to prove the success of what some may call their definitive racing series.
Need For Speed has been going since around 1994 and EA have released a new game every year without fail since then, so there are 15 NFS games out there for you to try and perhaps even compare. The series began a series of races which is all what you really needed back then, none of this career mode and online multiplayer that are seen as ‘musts’ now. Some may argue that NFS has had it’s day, with Burnout currently enjoying more success in the current generation of consoles.
However, ignore Mr. Misery over here, EA have some facts about the series which actually illustrates the way the series is actually, pretty huge. They’ve sold one for every household in the USA, it has been translated into 22 languages and more than 60 countries, and somehow they have gauged that players have drove 279 billion miles since the original and 17 million vehicle customisations. Online stat tracking was there in 1994 after all… Stay tuned for what the series has round the corner, as it’s going to be a different type of game every year apparently
Xbox Memory Unit lock out disappoints Datel
Larger size and cheaper, but essentially the same, so why is Microsoft blocking these memory units?
Microsoft’s recent decision to “lock out” unofficial Xbox 360 memory units has attracted criticism from third party hardware manufacturers, paticulary Datel according to CVG.
Users were equally critical after it was announced on Major Nelson’s blog that third party memory units, which often sell at a lower cost and larger size than Microsoft’s official units hold. For example, a 2GB Datel unit will set you back around £20, a 512MB official unit will be around £22 and if I needed to pick up a memory unit for my harddriveless 360, I’d almost certainly go for Datel’s offering, possibly even their 4GB version, giving my profile enough space for save games, even if its not great for XBLA games.
Here are some of the official prefs that you can get for the 360
Reasons behind this? Well, it’s not too clear at the moment why MS has taken the decision to lock out the “unauthorised” units. Nelson gives the advice of making sure that if you use them as a backup you move all recent data onto your official card, if you have one, as it won’t recognise anything on your third party card. Whilst there had been rumours of booting some strangeness into the 360 from the larger and unprotected memory units, I’ve never heard of a company taking a measure like this to block it.
A Datel Rep spoke to CVG and told them what they thought of the situation, ignoring the fact it’s a little bit of a sales pitch, they are not happy with MS.
“We are following this issue and awaiting the outcome like everyone else. If the Major Nelson blog is to be taken at face value then we’re disappointed to see that Microsoft are taking these steps to prevent customers from exercising their freedom of choice. Everyone is looking for ways to make their cash go further at the moment and we believe that Max Memory offers a good value, high capacity, alternative to the official Memory Unit.”
Unfortunately, it appears to many of the people who posted on Nelson’s blog that this is MS attempting to stop the selling of units which MS doesn’t make a profit from, nevermind freedom of choice. Now no one will mind me saying that the price of official 360 Hard drives, wireless cards and other official peripherals is silly money, when there are unofficial items on the shelves next to them. I’m not here to slam MS, but present the facts really, and the fact is that you can get the stuff without a little MS sticker on far cheaper. Whilst I personally wouldn’t recommend “Madcatz” stuff, which seems to be made out of sticky back plastic, I’ve had pretty good luck with unofficial stuff over the years.
I take it back, thes Mad Catz MW2 controllers are amazing. I tell you that on the grounds of only seeing that picture
I had a unofficial rumble pack/controller pack for my N64, which had the equivilent of 4 selectable packs (they saved your data on them so it didn’t stay on the cart) and the rumble pack had, and in fact still has, a very responsive and violent kick to it. I had a wireless controller for my PS2, not quite sure who made it, not quite sure what dangerous rays it emitted, but it performed all the functions of a dualshock 2, but without any wires (you could say that should’ve been the Sixaxis and I’d agree). I’ve also got a memory card for my Gamecube which is about 100 times bigger than the standard cards Nintendo provided and despite the fact I have to move it about a bit in the console to get it to read, it’s served me well.
What do you readers think of alternatives to official peripherals? A good value product that should remain usable or piece of cheap plastic you are not going to miss.
Site Re-fit, Enjoy your groups!
I’m going to let you into a secret. We’ve added some new features to the site, and I’m going to fill you in with all the new stuff we’ve added today.
Groups have their own albums and videos
We’ve made it so that groups can now upload photo albums and link videos just as if they were users. It works exactly the same as it does the rest of the site, so don’t worry about linking videos twice if it’s necessary. The admin of the group decides if everyone can contribute, or just limit it to the Groups admin.
You can now “Tag” your friends
If you go to a photo, you can now tag anyone who is your friend in it, just click ‘Tag this photo”, click on the photo and select from your friendlist who is photo-bombing.
We’re going to be featuring things!
We see a user being paticulary pro-active in the community and we’ll feature them, and we can do this with all different parts of Game Engine, so stay tuned.
Sharing is great
A new “Share” icon is now all over the site, allowing you to share your photo album, profile, group or whatever all over the internet
That’s about it for the main big features, we’re still tidying a few things up over the next few days, so feel free to post in Bug Reporting and we’ll take a look. Hope you enjoy!
MS Surface is in essence, a giant Iphone you put things on, but they won’t want you to call it that
I’ve been excited about Microsoft Surface on a geeky level for quite a while, the early shots of it automatically grabbing photos from your phone, recognising when a glass it placed on the table, all that kind of stuff really made “The Gadget Show” watcher in me want to own it. Well, the folks at Surfacescapes team at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University (cheers 1UP) have now given me a new reason to really want to convert all my tables to windows…wait a sec…
Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.
They’ve built Dungeons and Dragons, the table top game, to work with MS Surface. Of course, the words “Proof of Concept” come into play, and however in-depth it looks, its not the finished thing.
SurfaceScapes will provide Game Masters and players with a set of features to enhance the combat and role-playing aspects of tabletop games. This will include the ability to interact with the digital environment using real objects such as miniatures and provide automated calculations and visual and audio feedback for actions performed by the player and non-player characters.
Whilst that is a lot of game developer and Dungeons and Dragons stuff which whilst sounds great in theory, I wonder if in the future, we’ll get a load of iPhone esque ‘apps’ that whilst are cheap, ain’t exactly that cheerful. But I’m an optimist when it comes to these things, so lets hope that they take the pretty awesome platform and run with it
Assassins Creed 2 Goes all ‘Gorey’ on us
Failed at Shakespeare, don’t you worry your little Merchant of Venice, head over to video games
Nope, it’s not suddenly starring the ex-presidential candidate come environmental crusader, in fact, its about the Gore we usually associate with video games. Yes. There will be blood. Anyway, moving on quickly, Destructoid and a few other sites have posted what will be a series of videos based on the production of Assassin’s Creed 2, called by Ubisoft Assassins Creed: Lineage.
Taking less than subtle hints from the movie 300, in fact using the same live action thingy that Hyrbride Technologies, who are the studio behind the special effects of 300. This one actually stars Ezio’s Dad, who has a very Italian name Giovanni Auditore da Firenze (OK, I’ll admit to copying and pasting that), but he has a very violent way way of dealing with those who he doesn’t quite agree with. No doubt Ezio will take after his Papa and continue the family line.
Take a look a the vid below
Much Excitement: Wii Pokepark Footage
Make what you will people, Pikachu is branching out in his new Wii game
The earth nearly literally shook today when we found footage of Pokepark, from something called ‘Pokemon Sunday’, a new Wii title that stars the one and only yellow rodent Pikachu in his own little game. Now, it’s kind of difficult to fathom what is going on in the video and from what I’ve gathered, you (Pikachu of course) has to make friends who will in turn help you complete challenges, which, well, are there to help Pikachu for some reason.
To make poke-friends, your going to have to play mini games, such as the so far aptly titled “battle” and “Quiz” and then take part in a series of events; Furi Furi Dash, Habataki Sky Race and Marine Slide and more. The trick with these is your going to need different types of Pokemon, for example a water type, in order to do well at the Marine Slide, or a good flying type for the sky race. Or you could just be malicious and throw Charmander in a stream and Geodude out a plane…
Needless to say, this will contain a few tantalising bits of Pokemon RPG that all the fans of the Game Boy series are after, but possible won’t come to much, but to be fair, so long as the actual game contains the video below, we’re onto a winner.
Watch the 50 something seconds of awesomeness below, seeing is believing friends.
God Of War Collection HDified footage
Much of the original assets have been remastered, though can’t they just slip this part in…God of War III? Oh OK then.
Playstation blog have posted a first trailer of the God of War Collection. The collection, which has both God of War I and II, with 720p remastered graphics, is due for release before the end of this year. They are going to be bringing trophy support and all other goodies, such as exclusive access to the God of War III demo early to the game.
Check out the video below (HD for well, HD quality) and see if these last gen games stand up to their modern competition.
GAME: God of War
Developer
Santa Monica Studios
Publishers
Sony Entertainment
Platforms
PS2
Genre
Action/Adventure
Multiplayer Options
No Multiplayer
Release Date (UK)
March 22, 2005
Konami PC: Only on Steam
Looks likes the times are finally changing with regards to digital distrubution, which is great, as after my shopping experience yesterday to pick up Uncharted 2 (not regretting it mind), going to real life shops suck. With the launch of the PSP Go! and a whole slew of games only available to download and Steam continuing on it’s relentless march against boxed retail, it looks like, whether you are into it or not, the days of hard media (and not the type you get off the top shelf, quiet you) is very much numbered.
By that I mean Konami have stopped releasing PC ports of their titles, be that Silent Hill or their latest ’scare ‘em up’ Saw, on retail disc, instead just using Steam exclusively. This makes sense, in my opinion, for most PC ports of games, as to be honest, if someone doesn’t have a PS3 or 360 and is wanting to play , I’m pretty sure they will just add “torrent” to the title and enjoy the multitude of bare chested women and a download link. Through non-scientific research, I’ve concluded that if a game is availible on Steam at a reasonable price, people will actually consider paying for it, rather than “stealing it” so for Konami and a pretty middle of the range game like Saw, this makes perfect sense.
And never. Ever. EVER. Let me write ‘Scare ‘em up’ again. It’s been a long day.
