xbox-360 posts

Square Enix has now confirmed that the US release date for Dungeon Siege III will be on May 31, a few days after the next game in the fantasy action-RPG series shows up on European shores on May 27. More importantly, a number of retailers have announced their own pre-order incentives for putting your money down early to get the game from developer Obsidian Entertainment.

Perhaps the coolest pre-order incentive is if you get the game via the Steam download service. Those folks will get free single player versions of both previous Dungeon Siege games (developed by Gas Powered Games) for free. Pre-orders at GameStop get two exclusive in-game items (Burning Band of Scorch and Talisman of the Grand Mage) while Amazon.com pre-orders get the Bite of the Arakun in game item and Best Buy pre-orders get the Sacred Heart of the Legion in-game item. Wal-Mart pre-orders will get a mini-strategy guide for the game along with a Dungeon Siege mini-comic produced by Dark Horse Comics.

We have seen how the Xbox 360's Kinect motion controller camera has been quickly picked up by the third party scene to do a variety of tasks. Now a programmer has actually come up with a program that allows the user to play Super Mario Bros on a PC.

Hey, we are not knocking the programming efforts of the guy who created this Kinect mod. It's just, well, ... Super Mario Bros? That's not even a PC game. We are still waiting to see if someone will come up with a third-party programming mod that makes the Kinect able to play, say, StarCraft II. How many of those cameras would sell just for that feature.

Kinect has become a massive DIY project for open-source driver creators as many of them have succeeded in making Microsoft's Xbox 360 motion-based camera-controller work on the PC. For a while it looked like Microsoft might not like these kinds of projects but now it looks like the company has toned down the legal threats.

In a chat with National Public Radio's Science Friday program Microsoft reps stated that making open source drivers for the Kinect does not constitute "hacking" the Kinect and in fact the company made the device's USB port open for such projects. Uh huh. We are not sure if that's entirely true or just a way to make a nice PR spin as more open-source drivers are released. Our question: where are the drivers for playing StarCraft II with Kinect? Get to work, third-party software community!

[Via Engadget]

This past week, Microsoft's Kinect camera controller for its Xbox 360 console finally made it to stores. Now a group has decided to give a $2,000 prize to the first development team that can create open source drivers that will make the Kinect hardware to work on PCs and other devices.

But it's clear that Microsoft doesn't care for this project at all. News.com reports that a Microsoft spokesperson stated, "Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products." It added that it has put in "numerous hardware and software safeguards" into Kinect to keep it working just for the Xbox 360 and that it will "work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant."

When a console exec claims something is true on the PC platform, it should be taken with a grain of salt. That's exactly what happened in a recent interview with Kudo Tsunoda, the head of Microsoft's upcoming Kinect motion sensing camera program. In the interview, Tsunoda used first person shooters to help explain a point that games that use the Kinect tech should not be ported but made specifically for the camera.

He states, "If you think about the way that first person shooters evolved, they started on the PC. People for the longest time tried to port shooters from the PC onto the console." He added, "Halo did an awesome job of building a first-person shooter exclusively for the console, and now hardly anyone plays first person shooters on the PC anymore. It's all about the console." We wonder how the tens of thousands of players that sign on at one time to play Modern Warfare 2, Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike Source on Steam feel about that statement.

[Via VG247.com]

Microsoft hyped up their Kinect motion sensing control system for the Xbox 360 console to the top of its lungs at E3 2010 last week, but when will that kind of technology be made available for PC owners. Our sister site Engadget reports that the tech may be coming sooner than you might think.

The site chatted with a vice president of PrimeSense, the company that is behind the camera-controlling technology that Microsoft is using for its Kinect camera (previously known as Project Natal). VP Adi Berenson stated that the tech will be put into home theater PCs by the end of this year. It sounds like the company is concentrating on TV-based support for the technology but we are betting that there will be some game developers who will support the tech as well.

A while back, Microsoft released a game development tool for the Xbox 360 called Kodu. You wouldn't be able to make a game like, for example, Darksiders, with Kodu but it was designed to make simple casual games easily. It was also designed as a educational tool for schools.

Now Microsoft has just released a version of Koku that is made specifically for making PC games. The user interface has been redesigned to be used with a mouse and keyboard rather than just with an Xbox 360 game controller. While the download is free it does require you to sign in with a Windows Live ID. You most likely won't be able to make the world's hardest game you could make simple arcade titles with the software like a helicopter game.

While Big Download is a PC gaming site first and foremost, two upcoming games from the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade might be of interest to PC gamers as well. The exhibit floor at QuakeCon 2009 had not one but two games based on previous id Software PC titles in playable form.

One is Quake Arena Arcade, the XBLA version of id's 1999 multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena. id actually announced plans for such a game at QuakeCon in 2007 but it's finally looking like it will be coming out fairly soon (although no release date has been announced). The game itself is being ported by Pi Studios and on the show floor it looks terrific. We were told that the game actually has some slightly higher polygon counts for the levels and characters than the original Quake III Arena so purists will have little issue with the game's looks.

So why get Quake Arena Arcade when you can play Quake Live (also based on Quake III Arena) for free on your web browser? Well, one reason is that this game is fully "M" rated; that means when players die on screen you see gibs and blood rather than the "disappearing in a flash of light" thing you see when you kill players in Quake Live. The other reason is that in addition to all of the levels in Quake III Arena, Pi Studios has created a whopping 12 all new levels unique to Quake Arena Arcade. Oh and did we mention that there are plans for even more downloadable content for the game after it's released?

Check out the other XLBA game based on an id Software classic after the jump:

Though mostly conjecture at this point, a perhaps overly-speculating Kotaku writer believes a PC version of Silicon Knights' Too Human, an action game developed for Xbox 360 action game, may eventually find its way to Windows desktops.

Kotaku examined the OFLC's (Office of Film and Literature Classification) database and unearthed two ratings for Too Human: the first, dated May 30, was rated MA 15+; the other, dated June 18, carries a slightly less harsh rating of M. Upon contacting Microsoft, Kotaku learned that "each rating is indeed based on a different build."

More interesting is the "Multiplatform" classification tagged to each of the rated versions. Because Silicon Knights is contracted to develop Too Human exclusively for Microsoft, a PlayStation 3 version of the game is unlikely. Might a PC version be on the horizon?