Bill Gates visited South Korea earlier this month, and as is the custom when rich people visit powerful people, he had some gifts made up for everyone he stopped in to say hi to. No lapel pins or expensive wine here, though. No, when Bill went around for tea and buscuits with the President of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, he gave the man an Xbox 360. And a very nice one at that! Designed by Korean company Gookbo, the custom 360 is decorated with “mother-of-pearl ume flowers and butterflies”, and is called “Peace”. Oh, and it’s meant to symbolise, of all things, “patience and perseverance”.
If you will meet in LIVE guy who tells he’s a president - don’t laugh at him, maybe he is South Korean president.
If Microsoft follows the same schedule it did last year, the Spring system update for the Xbox 360 should be very soon. Today, an alleged and wholly unconfirmed list of changes included in the “Q2 2008″ update was sent to our friends, supposedly forwarded from an internal source. The full list—which is after the jump—features about 80 new feature additions, tweaks and changes but was purported to be incomplete and subject to change.
Some are simply interesting as curiosities, such as an option to purchase Xbox Live memberships for charities and the addition of a Media section for audio delivered through feeds, such as podcasts. Others sound more feature robust, such as Windows Live Mail integration and an expanded “Inside Xbox” with news, weather, entertainment, help and community features.
It has been almost a year since Chartered has begun taking the Xbox 360 Xenon CPU from 90 nm to 65 nm and it really was just a matter of time until other hardware would follow. According to the Taiwan Economic News, TSMC has initiated first wafer starts of the 65 nm Xenos GPU and Northbridge. Microsoft apparently has ordered 10,000 300 mm wafers from TSMC at this time.
As it is the case with any die-shrink, Microsoft should see substantial economic advantages from this move, supporting the company’s ongoing strategy to reduce the production cost of the console (the reduction of the Xbox 360 production cost has been one of the key reasons why Microsoft’s entertainment division has been able to notably increase its profits over the past seven quarters). If the 65 nm Xenos “v2″ scales down linearly from 90 nm, the new die size should be around 125 mm2, while the eDRAM chip will remain at 70 mm2. The new production process should yield about 35% more GPUs per wafer than before.
Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg says “the days of Sony snowing the consumers and the press are over,” that the company has failed to deliver on numerous promises, and challenges Sony’s latest European PS3 sales figures.
“We have been fighting Sony’s promises from the day we entered the market,” Greenberg told Destructoid. “Three years ago at E3 they showed what PS3 games would supposedly look like with the Killzone 2 video, that we are now learning will ship four years later. That means that we will have shipped Gears of War and Gears of War 2 before they can even get Killzone out the door.
Old habits die hard in gaming it seems, as former Xbox boss Peter Moore couldn’t resist taking a swipe at one old sparring partner this week, expressing dismay at the ongoing delay of Sony’s Home service for PlayStation 3.
The EA Sports president’s comments came less than 24 hours after PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai apologised again for the latest delay to Sony’s ambitious online social networking project, with a release now set for this autumn.
Haven’t heard much about ! Mark Rein from Epic was happy to tell us some fresh details about this development. As he says Epic is going to demonstrate Xbox version of UT3 on Midway’s Gamers’ Day, in Las Vegas. Official release date is still unknown, but top managers of Epic company affirm that work is in progress.
Speaking to C&VG, Epic Games VP Mark Rein revealed that the creators of the Unreal games and technology have already begun work on what would eventually become the Unreal Engine 4. Rein revealed the interesting fact that the fourth iteration of the Unreal tools and technology has indeed been in development for the last two years.
“Unreal Engine 4 will be totally groundbreaking and the way games will be done in the future,” said Rein.
“I don’t expect it to be staffed up as a full team for several years. But when people come to work at Epic, they can come here with the knowledge that we’re always keeping one eye on the future and they’re going to be helping to shape the future of the videogame business”.
Although no Unreal Engine 3-powered game has yet shipped to store shelves, the next-generation engine is enjoying a big momentum in the development community, with more and more developers and publishers signing every month a deal with Epic Games to license the technology. Microsoft Game Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Vivendi Universal, Midway Games, 10TACLE and Namco are just some of the game companies that have licensed the Unreal Engine 3 tools and technology.
There were many things originally planned for the first Fable that didn’t make it into the final product. One of these exciting features was co-op play. It was functional, playable and pretty damned cool at E3 2003. Now Molyneux’s original vision of an RPG you can play on the couch with your buddy is soon to become a reality. Cooperative play is alive and kicking in Fable 2 and is the third of (what has now become) four innovations in Lionhead Studios’ upcoming RPG.
In Fable 2, you are the last hero of Albion. At least, the last person who seems to realize he (or she) is a hero. Your primary goal is to search the world for other heroes and recruit them to create a sort of medieval Avengers. Time is of the essence as a mysterious rival is assembling their own group of heroes (or villains). Whether or not this ties into online functionality for Fable 2 is unknown at this time. All Lionhead mastermind Peter Molyneux would talk about was the single-console co-op mode.
Bill Gates visited South Korea earlier this month, and as is the custom when rich people visit powerful people, he had some gifts made up for everyone he stopped in to say hi to. No lapel pins or expensive wine here, though. No, when Bill went around for tea and buscuits with the President of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, he gave the man an Xbox 360. And a very nice one at that! Designed by Korean company Gookbo, the custom 360 is decorated with “mother-of-pearl ume flowers and butterflies”, and is called “Peace”. Oh, and it’s meant to symbolise, of all things, “patience and perseverance”.
