Spong, featuring a new Googlified logo, put up a story late last night (so it's not an April Fool's joke, at least not a fair one) that says the Xbox 2 will have downloadable demo content right at launch.

In other news:

Eurogamer has a story that indicates it may be possible to "customize" your Xbox 2-- or at least for Microsoft to custom-tailor the console different geographical regions:

"We have ways, we have ideas. Look at cell phones," Microsoft VP J Allard told trade publication MCV. "You can have snap-on faceplates, you can change the skin and the batteries, and you can change the ringtones. I think we need to have a global foundation, and then personalise within region."

Over at Bungie Sightings, mnemesis points out a King County Journal story that says that Bungie Studios will be moving out of the Microsoft Millennium Campus in Redmond and into the Kirkland Hardware Store, previously home to the longest-running retail business in the area, open from 1890 to 2000. The move is apparently designed to alleviate space concerns and "maintain camaraderie".

Voodoo Extreme wonders whether Xbox demand is really as high as Microsoft says, or whether supply is being restrained in anticipation of the sequel's release. Only the Shadow knows.

Xbox365 suggests that Microsoft's new Xbox power cable may have actually made the problem worse, linking to user accounts in their forum.

SPOnG is reporting that they're now convinced that the name of Microsoft's second-iteration gaming console will be Xbox 360, having apparently gotten the information from a mole in a focus group that met yesterday in London. The group wasn't there to choose the name itself, but to choose among these possible slogans:

IGN has an article up entitled Everything You Wanted to Know About the Xbox 2, with nary a mention of Bungie or the Halo series. They believe that MS plans to have as many as 40 titles out within 2-3 months of the new console's launch. (However, there's little doubt that without Bungie's Halo, the original console would not even have fared as well as it did. What is Bungie cooking up for the new box, and when could it possibly be ready? --Ed.)

Major Nelson, back from GDC, posted up a big guide to Xbox 2 coverage at Xbox.com. Includes screenshots, movies and info.

The Game Developers Conference has kicked off with J. Allard's keynote address, and the web is atwitter with news about Microsoft's next console, despite the machine itself not yet making an appearance. Here are a few links to items floating through the ethernet at the moment:

More Xbox 2 specs, this time from GDC through GameSpy via Voodoo Extreme. The upshot? A triple-cored PPC, 256Mb of total memory, optional hard drive, 720p standard output and a new 500Mhz GPU. Yowza. Apparently part 2 of this series is due tomorrow.

In other news:

Just as other sites (DailyGame, TeamXbox, SPOnG) are picking up the same rumor promulgated by a quote of Microsoft's J.

Microsoft's J. Allard commented rather off-handedly, in an article about the size of Microsoft Game Studios, that Bungie will double in size (currently 65 people) in order to work on the "next installment" of Halo. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO. (Remember, though, Allard isn't technically Bungie, even if Bungie is technically Microsoft --Ed.)

The Junkyard has broken its three-month Halo spotlight silence with a new piece on Ross "Oz" Mills; check it out. Thanks Mhaddy. Also, the Junkyard's opinion piece on the Xbox power cord replacement program by Jake "Evergreen98" Billo is also worth looking at, if you haven't already.

[image:9096 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Only slightly more than three years have passed since the Xbox brought Microsoft into the console wars, and the next generation, if rumors are to be believed, will be upon us by the 2005 holiday season. Ahh.. Xbox. A console of infinite games... assuming they're all made by Bungie.

Here's a look at recent items about upcoming consoles, as well as goings-on in the Bungieverse:

Microsoft is recalling over 14 million of the power cables for its Xbox game console, representing more than half of all those sold worldwide to date and including all those made for continental Europe prior to January 2004 and those for the rest of the world prior to October, 2003.