1Up has a story that brings together a "panel of Xperts" as they put it to talk about what Microsoft needs to do in order to make the sequel to the Xbox a success. One of the Xperts is none other than Alexander "The Man" Seropian, cofounder of Bungie and founder of Wideload Games, scheduled to release a Halo engine game next year.
It seems you can now get Halo 2 Slurpee cups at 7/11 locations now. Let the commercialization of Halo.. continue! HBO pointed them out earlier this week, and just today Sanjuro Tsubaki gave them scans of the cups.
Microsoft employee Andy Pennell asks in his blog whether or not the launch of Halo 2 on November 9 will affect Microsoft's overall corporate productivity. Although XBL won't work on the company's network, apparently System Link games and tunnelers do. In fact, one of the comments on Andy's blog mentions a tunneler we seem to have missed before now: Xlink Kai.
Macs are big in Japan; Apple's svelte and stylish laptops have been doing well there since the PowerBook 140. To say that video and computer games are big in Japan is probably something of an understatement.
The New York Times has put up an article on how true innovation is lacking in today's videogames-- but holds up Halo as an exception to the rule. Editor's Note: Free registration required, or use the login/pass rampancy/rampant.
Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Silicon Valley startup Transitive Corporation, has stated in an interview with Wired that his company's QuickTransit approach to emulation will allow the Xbox 2 to run games that run on today's Xbox. However, despite this, the company refuses to name any of their six clients, all of which are described as "OEM PC manufacturers" which would not be Microsoft unless you called the Xbox a PC (which is a no-no).
Geek toy site Engadget has put up a pair of photos that purport to be designs for the successor to Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. GameSpot is reporting that these are most likely fakes, but on the off chance one is a real design under consideration, you could go take a look.
GameSpot is reporting that ATI's CFO, Terry Nickerson, has been quoted as saying "We're actually winding down development on some of the Microsoft product" at the Smith Barney Citigroup 2004 Technology Conference in New York. Some are taking this as evidence that the release of the Xbox 2 may be closer than indicated by statements by Steve Ballmer indicating it would not be earlier than August of 2005.
Several stories around the web the last few days (XboxSolution, CNN have mentioned the resignation of Take Two's CEO, Jeffrey C. Lapin, and the subsequent revision of financial estimates for the second quarter and year-end results for 2004. Lapin had the CEO job for only one year and three months.
IGN has an interview with Greg Thomas of Visual Concepts; they develop the ESPN branded sports games for Sega. In the interview, he mentions that MS is introducing LSP (Live Server Protocol) next year that will allow developers to host their own servers with Xbox Live, something that stopped Electronic Arts from bringing their industry-leading sports games to the XBL service when it launched.
I know that the money to run this site has to come from somewhere and I do not have any problem with the adds along the side of the page, but how exactly is "Defect and Microstructure Analysis by Diffraction (International Union of Crystallography Monographs on Crystallography, 10)" related to Halo? I have seen other books such as one about moding an xbox and that makes perfect sense, but who gets to decide what products are advertized? To whoever it is, "Defect and Microstructure Analysis..."
This week seems to have been rife with notices of Xbox titles either cancelled or developers going looking for new publishers after Microsoft nixed their deals. Is something going on?
Microsoft has recently promoting XNA as the underpinnings of their next-generation Xbox, while keeping whatever hardware prototypes exist behind closed doors. The demos shown at GDC ran on PC hardware connected to Xbox S controllers, and the development kits supposedly seeded to developers are Apple Macintosh G5s.
But is the focus on the Xbox 2, which no one has yet seen and has as of yet no official release date, consuming resources for games that were supposed to be released for the first iteration of the box?
Oddworld figured heavily into Microsoft's launch plans. It was one of the only other games available near the time of the console's launch, and a demo of it is on the original Halo discs. Yet now Oddworld Inhabitants and their new game, Stranger, has been dropped by Microsoft and is in search of a publisher. The XSN sports games, an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to compete against Sega and EA in the arena of sports games, is going to take the 2004-2005 season off, leaving gamers to wonder if those games won't return until the next generation Xbox is out. Psychonauts, according to GameSpot, was also dropped by Microsoft.
Both Psychonauts and Stranger are still expected to be released for the Xbox, possibly as exclusives, and Microsoft is reportedly supporting their developers in the search for a publisher. But choosing not to publish these titles themselves seems to say something-- either about the confidence of Microsoft in those games, or in the willingness to spend cash bringing games to a platform that may be in its last year.
So, is anything going on here? Is this the normal ebb and flow in relationships between hardware manufacturers, first party developers and third party developers? Or is this indicative of the fact that the Xbox's life as a viable development platform is ending, even in the eyes of its manufacturer? This November the Xbox will celebrate its third birthday, a ripe old age for a gaming console.
Another story on CVG today quotes Peter Moore of Microsoft as saying the Japanese gaming market is "flattening out and declining" and says that, of course, Microsoft has the solution: "They have no choice because they can't survive on Mahjong games shipping for 100,000 people anymore - they have the same issues that we're resolving with XNA now: they need to develop large-scale global games to stay in business."
PC Pro has an article paraphrasing Chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach as saying he believes the Xbox 2 can beat out Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3, possibly even in the Japanese market.