Fourteen new screenshots for Wideload's upcoming Xbox third-person action game, Stubbs the Zombie in: Rebel Without A Pulse have showed up on stubbsthezombie.com, and were later picked up by GameSpot.

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:

James "Fiend" Schneider of Major League Gaming has interviewed Alfonso "AYB Fonzi" Chartier. Fonzi and his teammates came to the fore with the launch of Halo 2. Thanks Dolbex.

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.)

[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:

Frankie has clarified his post from yesterday: there'll be "plenty of warning" before Halo 2 downloadable content is available. It's not going to be today and you shouldn't hold your breath and there'll be no more comments by Frankie on HBO, you insensitive clods!

In the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Interactive Entertainment awards, the sequel to the PC game Half-Life beat out the sequel to the Xbox game Halo in every category in which the two games competed head-to-head, leaving Halo 2 with the only award that Half-Life 2 couldn't possibly win: best Xbox game. Thanks BDGamer.

IGN is spreading a rumor that Bungie is already hard at work on Halo 3, and that it will be timed for simultaneous release with Sony's next-generation console, the PlayStation3, just to try and steal the wind out of Sony's sails. A nice idea, but not much other than unnamed sources to back it up. Thanks HBO. (Pass the sodium chloride. Also, do we now have to officially start calling the Xbox a 'this-generation console'? --Ed)

So here we go again, clearing out the fuel lines as I get ready to leave the site on autopilot for a few days. A few things of note recently:

Today's news summary:

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.

Joystiq today points to supposed specs for the Xbox 2's GPU gleaned from neowin.net, and a debate over backwards compatibility (also discussed here once upon a time) ensues.