MrKniceGuy.com

Category: Xbox

  • Xbox live and xbox.com down for maintenance

    In case you may have forgotten, Xbox is down for scheduled maintenance today. The outage affects both Xbox LIVE and Xbox.com. They started at midnight PST, and plan to take up to 24 hours to make the needed changes. I am told that this is not the dashboard update to the “New Xbox Experience” and that we will not see any cosmetic changes at all this time around. Hopefully it’s driving us closer to seeing the new dashboard and Netflix streaming capabilities!

    So, COD4 friends… what do you plan to play since we can’t get on for multiplayer today? I finished Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise over the weekend, so it’s a toss-up between Lost Odyssey (in which I am stuck at the first boss) or Bioshock (in which I am stuck at a Big Daddy). Whatever it is, I won’t let this little outage force me into doing housework during my beloved gaming hours!

  • How to Get Your Girl To Game

    There was an interesting article on Kotaku over the weekend about Girls and Games. At the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle over the weekend, a group of girl gamers gave a Q&A Forum about getting more women to play video games.

    Some of the ideas are informative, and some of them just reinforce particular stereotypes about women (they don’t know what to do with a lot of buttons… they like Barbie’s Horse Adventures…).  But for those of you guys out there who feel that games are important enough to you that you want to share the hobby with your girlfriend/wife, I’d like to offer some tips of my own.

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  • More on the Fall 2008 Dashboard

    Major Nelson posted more details on the previously mentioned dashboard. Some exciting new features coming down the pipe.

    Play from the hard drive: The ability to copy your game to the hard drive on your Xbox. Play right from the drive and save your disk. You will have to insert the disk to confirm ownership though (of course).

    Web Access to LIVE Marketplace: Buy downloads from the web and have it download automagically to your console. New maps, TV and movies or even arcade games.

    Xbox LIVE Party System: Create a party of up to 8 friends and hang out! Play games together, watch Netflix together (sweet!) or share personal photos. And finally, chat with more than 2 people!

    Avatars: Mentioned earlier, this is your personally created character. You can play games with your avatar as well. We’ll have to wait to see more on what that is about.

    and new display support: If you use a widescreen LCD computer monitor, you know what I mean when I say “sweet! 1440X900 support!” That’s right, Xbox 360 will do 16×10 aspect ratio. Awesome.

    Microsoft Xbox 360 FTW!