Rockstar ports another game to Wii (and 360)

It's Bully. Not much to say about that, the game never appealed to me. I guess Reggie wasn't kidding when he said they were working closely with Rockstar to get some games on Wii.

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Silicon Knights getting Epic

This may be one of the most misleading titles I've ever given a post. No, it definitely is. Silicon Knights has filed a lawsuit against Epic games based on the fact that they were sold on an engine that just doesn't deliver. They believe that Epic withheld newer versions of software they bought in order to keep a leg up on their competition, not to professional if you ask me. The house that Dyack built goes on to accuse Epic of sabotaging the development of Too Human and has stated that it was so bad that they had to actually build their own engine. Too Human will no longer be using the Unreal 3 engine- thats progress if you ask me: I hate all this engine licensing, its like saying you've renovated your house when all you did was give it a fresh coat of paint. Developers should just build their own engines, why depends on Epic to tap the potential of these new consoles? Clearly they aren't doing a very good job at it. One company with all the power? dangerous...

Hit the jump for the Press release
via Kotaku

SILICON KNIGHTS SUES EPIC OVER UNSATISFACTORY PERFORMANCE OF UNREAL ENGINE 3

ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO, CANADA, July 19th, 2007 - Video game developer Silicon Knights, Inc. has filed suit against Epic Games, Inc. for breach of contract, fraud, and several other tort claims in federal court in Greenville, North Carolina. In the lawsuit, Silicon Knights alleges that it has lost revenue as a result of the considerable delay in developing its video game for the Xbox 360, Too Human, because Unreal Engine 3, a game engine licensed from Epic, did not work as Epic represented it would and, moreover, Epic has been unable or unwilling to fix it.

As Denis Dyack, President and Founder of Silicon Knights, explained, "Our strong preference is to focus on making games, not be in court. Unfortunately though, as explained in our lawsuit, we have had extensive problems with the Unreal Engine 3 that Epic has been unwilling or unable to rectify. For more than a year, we have been trying to reach an agreement with Epic to resolve these issues without resorting to litigation, but were unable to come to reasonable terms with Epic. Regrettably, we are now forced to go to court in order to achieve satisfaction. We remain hopeful, however, that we can reach a reasonable business resolution with Epic at some point."

The lawsuit further alleges that Epic in fact never intended to deliver Unreal Engine 3 as a fully functional game engine as promised. Instead, Epic collected licensing fees from Silicon Knights and others in order to fund the development of its own video game, Gears of War. "No doubt Gears is a fun and phenomenally successful game, but as we alleged in our complaint against them, we strongly believe that from the perspective of someone waiting for a game engine that Epic promised it would deliver almost two years ago, it seems pretty clear that Gears was built on the backs of the Unreal Engine licensees. We certainly stand by our allegations in the lawsuit that instead of using our licensing fees to develop and support the Unreal Engine 3, Epic used that money to build Gears," said Mr. Dyack.

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DOXOPhobia First Impressions: Halo 3 Beta

Ready the man canon, I've got your first look at the Halo 3 multiplayer beta for this DOXOPhobia feature! New looks, new matchmaking, new weapons, same Halo gameplay!

Without any doubt Halo and Halo 2 defined the first-person shooter genre on a massive scale. On top of that Bungie hit the nail on the head when they decided to put Halo 2 on Xbox Live, which is now held under high regard with games like Counter-Strike, made by Half Life's Valve. Halo 2's matchmaking is one of the best around, the party up system has been copied, but never duplicated. So who else to actually improve on this method then Microsoft's own Bungie Studios, is it possible to make a great thing even better? Let's find out.

I'm going to start with the most important aspect of this beta. Halo 2's matchmaking is one of the greats, developers have tried to use the same method and improve on it, but haven't come close to what Bungie has done. In the Halo 3 beta, Bungie has revamped matchmaking. It's more customizable to make your Halo 3 online experience the best it can possibly be. If you're not to particular about people not being able to speak your language, you can change the settings so only people who can speak your language will be in your game. Want to play a game without having to worry about people pwning you? Change the settings so games can only be set with people at your level or close to it. This doesn't really apply to ranked matches per say, but in a social (training) match, you might want to consider this setting, since a training game will party any player searching for that game in Halo 3. Bungie has gone the extra step by adding in the new (and much awaited) "shut up button". No longer will little 12 year old brats or people who blast their tunes be a nuisance. You can easily mute these players during a game and it's done in less then a few seconds. While in a game, bring up the player's list, select the players' gamertag and press the X button, voila! That player is muted. Subtle things like this, make matchmaking an even better and more enjoyable experience.

Since this is a beta, the games types and the various games available are limited. I won't bore you with what we already know from Halo 2, but some new features in Halo 3 are, for the most part, found in Team Skirmish. The game types like territories, have been reworked to make it more of an attack and defend scenario. In the previous territories game type, a player would go and capture a specific key area on a map and gain time by defending it. Players from the other team can easily come in and take that back by killing player defending it. In Halo 3 this has changed, the attacking team has has 5 specific areas in which to capture. Once the attacking team has taken an area, the defending team can NOT take it back. Each team has two tries at capturing the 5 territories. At the end of the game the winner is judged by tallying how many territories you've captured, total.

A game type new to the Halo universe is VIP. Where one player on each team respawns as the VIP with an over charged shield. The opposing team must kill the VIP to get a point, once the VIP is dead, the next player to die after that is the new VIP. The game's limit is 10 and can only be found in Team Skirmish.

Everything else is pretty similar in the respect of game types. Halo wouldn't be Halo without their "specialty" games. In ranked matches unless it's an original game, meaning if it's a regular Team Slayer game, a game type of "Shotty Snipers" or Team Rockets will only go up to 25, as opposed to 50 in regular Slayer. Another sublte change to the game types is in Rumble Pit is instead of 8 players they reduced the limit by 2, to a total of 6 players. Like in Halo 2 you still cannot bring a party in a ranked Rumble Pit game, that about sums up the changes to Halo 3's matchmaking service. Keep in mind this is only the beat and changes can still be made.

A lot of people have been complaining about the graphics of the beta, saying they look just like Halo 2 and well, they do. Halo 3 wouldn't be true to the Halo universe if it had Gears of War graphics, it still keeps the Halo aesthetics, but at the same time improving on detail on the maps, weapons, explosions and the spartans. Everything in Halo 3 has a new shine to it, maps in the multiplayer, have an immense amount of details put in them. In Halo 2 things were flat and very square. In Halo 3 there's a lot more detail put in each maps from flowers in the grass, to leaves falling from trees. There's added physics to the game making it much more smoother to play, jumping and tossing a grenade never felt so good. A new addition to the physics would be the water in the game, yes I said the water. If you die and your things end up in the water, your guns and equipment along with your body will float down stream. Explosions have added effects to make it look even better, the weapons from the BR to the Rocket Launcher have all new animations for the shooting and reloading.

Sound is the same for the most part, everything sounds a lot beefier, explosions are louder and can be easily heard from across the map. Which brings me to the depth of the sound in H3. In Halo 2 you were able to hear shots being fired and if you were decent enough you were able to find out where it was coming from. In Halo 3, sound has some serious depth to it, you can still hear the gun fire, but pending where you are from the gun fire you can tell it's far away or very close.

There are some new additions specific for Halo 3. A major advancement to this is the equipment. You can pick up things like a Portable Grav-Boost, Bubble Shield, Trip Mine or a Power Drainer. The portable grav-boost is exactly what it says, you pick this up and if you wanna hop over a wall or get to a specific high spot, plop this down and fly high! The bubble shield is my personal favourite new piece of equipment, you drop this grenade into the ground and a shield comes up and protects you from any sort of projectile coming your way. Be warned that players can walk through the shield forcing a hand to hand combat situation. The power drainer will take out a players shield (friend or foe) and temporarily stall vehicles. Lastly, the trip mine is placed on the ground and mainly used against vehicles, if a vehicle goes over this puppy, consider that vehicle destroyed. Careful though, the trip mine goes by proximity. With this new equipment in place the default controls has changed a bit, H2 players will consider this a major change. To drop the equipment you have to press the X button which replaces the reload button. RB is now your button for reloading, entering/exiting vehicles and picking up weapons.

Bungie didn't have much to improve on for Halo 3 except campaign, but that has yet to be seen. For what Bungie has done for this beta has well surpassed what people have said in reference to graphics, if they still say they look EXACTLY like H2 then you know they haven't played or seen the beta on TV. It seems like Bungie has done it again, lets just hope the campaign is just as strong as the multiplayer.

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Xbox 360 Spring Update

Recently there's been some new details released about the 360's next dashboard update, due out this spring. On May 7th, users connected to Live will get the update on their console and Microsoft has revealed some new info on what the new update can do!

First off, is Messenger. According to Microsoft many users are rather lonely when Live is first setup. Adding messenger contacts to your Xbox 360 friends list will help their gamers get familiar with Live and it will also be able to show who on your friends list has a gamertag. People can now add up 600, count'em...600, messenger friends to their Live account. As of May 7th, Microsoft will only allow text-based chat with messenger accounts. Microsoft has hinted at new enhanced features for this in the latter part of the year, such being: audio and video. You'll be able to chat with 6 of your friends at once while playing games or watching a movie, little dialog boxes will pop up over anything your doing to allow the user to switch whenever they please. With this new addition of Messenger to your Live account, comes the updates on your Windows Live Messenger, when you're playing a game it will update and read "Xbox 360: [the game you are playing]: [your gamertag]." You will also be able to set your gamertag and Windows Live Messenger account status independently of each other, allowing you to appear on or offline to certain groups of users.

With that all being said, Microsoft has announced a new text input device for the 360. It connects via the headset input it lets you chat with your friends using a keyboard roughly the size of a Sidekick. No offical name or price has been announced.

The Marketplace will now have it's own seperate blade on the dashboard. The new blade will be themed independently from your own set of themes and will change looks constantly to cooperate with the season, holidays or special content!

Of all the announced additions to the spring update comes the most major tweak, but also very very minor. It's in the achievements, and now instead of it popping up and saying "Achievement Unlocked". Once an achievement in unlocked it will display the same message but with the Gamerpoint value and the name of the achievement! No longer will gamers have to switch to their guide to see what they just unlocked.

Finally for downloads, the console will receive an auto-shutdown feature and a low-power downloading mode. If you have an existing queue of downloads that you want to run overnight, you'll be able to shift the console into a low-power mode that turns off all the fans. Once the 360 finishes the last of the file transfers, the console will automatically turn off. The new download tools will also let you view partially downloaded video files. You'll even have access to the usual fast-forward, rewind, and pause functions. The video player will also allow for switchable aspect ratios (letterbox, zoom, stretch, native, and auto).

That's it for this round!

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Microsoft Expands It's Warranty

Hey hey people. Nothing huge today other than Microsoft has announced that they're expanding on their warranty service. Along side with their newly renewed 1 year warranty when you buy a new Xbox 360 console. Microsoft has heard the voices of it's people yet again and cleared up some major issues about the repair process. Let's get started shall we?

1) Microsoft is no longer charging the shipping costs to the end user and instead will be sending postage-paid containers for the broken 360s.

2) Customers will no longer get "replacement" units, they'll be gettin back their original console that they sent in, repaired. Some incidents may have Microsoft sending out replacements if the original can not be repaired

3) Repairs made on a console under warranty, Microsoft will cover the repaired system for the remainder of the warranty period or 90 days, pending which one is longer.

4) Repairs made on an out-of-warranty console will be returned with a 1 year "repair warranty".

5) On top of the new warranty on 360s, Microsoft has announced that they are hiring more customer care reps and supervisors, imroving training and hiring "customer care champions", for better support and quicker repair times.

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Don't Fret, Your 360 News is Here!

Hey hey everybody! I'm Pizzle, I'm new around here and I'm supposedly goin' to post some news regarding Microsoft's glorious new console the Xbox 360. I'm your 360 fanboy, so be expecting a lot of news regarding it cause we all know the P(l)aystation 3 (the 'l' is optional) has nothing goin' on :P. Now, on to my first piece of news...

Guitar Hero II hit stores today for the Xbox 360, offering an exciting new look for the guitar, a change from the Gibson SG to the Gibson Xplorer. The graphics are amped up on the 360 version and offerings of 1080i HDTV glory. There's also some subtle changes to the game, the set list is changed up in the 360 copy to help ease the progression of the game along with a total of 10 new songs not seen on the previous Playstation 2 version. Some new songs include Rancid's Salvation, Pearl Jam's Life Wasted and Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper. Along with these exclusive tracks Guitar hero 2 will also support the 360's Marketplace and will have some Download Content (DLC) on the way as early as next week! Other then that if achievement points are your heroin you'll be happy to know there's 50 achievements with a total of 1000 Gamerpoints! Happy trails.

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