J. Paradise recently began a series over at DailyGame called Confessions of a Girl Gamer, cataloguing some of the less-fun aspects of multiplayer gaming on Xbox Live. As a female gamer, she noted some of the less pleasant behaviors of the majority of the other gamers on the system, who presumably are male, if common sense and all known statistics can be trusted.
While most of her complaints are entirely valid and each of the behaviors she describes is undoubtedly annoying, I thought there were one or two points which deserved to be responded to, given the criticism the gaming industry receives almost daily in the current political climate for promoting sex and violence. Before this and other articles get referred to in an attempt to heap the charge of promoting sexism among America's youth gets piled onto the heap, it might be worth thinking a little further on some of the topics J. Paradise raises.
Kotaku today asks if female gamers are going to generate the extra revenue needed for the industry to grow, based on
Mindquirk Software has released version 2.02 of Xbox Live Friends for Mac OS X. This version fixes a problem with auto sign-in that appeared as a result of changes at Xbox.com
In the absence of real information, outrageous rumors about Halo 3-- a game that hasn't even really been announced officially by Bungie-- are circulating far and wide. Since Bungie probably isn't going to shoot them down just now, I thought I'd take aim and do some Halo 3 Rumor Control in the latest Narc's Retort.
We've seen this set of rumors, supposedly coming from someone whose uncle works at Bungie (oh dear God not again--Ed.) several times in the past few days. They were even translated into French at Halo.fr.
Given that Bungie seems to be enduring some kind of self-imposed silence bordering on self-denial with regards to the very existence of Halo 3, even to the point of failing to confirm or deny the existence of the game after it was referred to by no less a personage than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
That, plus the fact that historically Bungie, like other game studios, usually doesn't comment on rumors, means that regardless of the particular situation right now, these rumors would no doubt spread unchecked anyway.
Beyond3D has an in-depth technical article on the Xbox 360's GPU. The heads-up came from ars technica.
For various reasons it's been hard for me to keep up with news posting lately; many thanks to trav himself (formerly Sistimatic) for picking up the slack. Here are some recent items of note:
TotalGaming is reporting that a recall on Xbox power cables now has been issued for all units made prior to January 14, 2005. The article and link included cite UK phone numbers and the UK replacement cord program.
Mindquirk software has released a revamped version of its Xbox Live Friends application that includes a Dashboard widget, as well as a new application, Emblem Designer, for previewing Xbox Live emblems on your Mac. Emblem Designer, as well as Mindquirk's other Halo app, xstats, all part of Mindquirk's Live Suite, require OS X 10.4. Xbox Live Friends runs on 10.3 or above.
Tuncer Deniz has posted at IMG Magazine that they are hosting a 25 Mb QuickTime version of the Stubbs the Zombie trailer; earlier it was available in WMV format at MTV.com. The modified Halo-engine third-person action game comes out this year for Mac OS X, Windows, and the Xbox.
Even though there is no officially announced Bungie title in the works at the moment, it's a safe assumption that there will one day be a Bungie title for the Xbox360, or at the very least Bungie titles that run on it. That's the line of logic we've been running with in covering so much about the Xbox 360, and in the absence of more specific information about any Bungie title, info about Microsoft's second gaming console keeps pouring in. Here's some more:
Newsweek seems to think that Sony's strong-but-silent approach won over E3 attendees, opposed to Microsoft's MTV extravaganza. Thanks Major Nelson.
Worth pointing out is one major gaffe in the article, in the following quote:
