Console Game Player XBox and XBox 360 News

Filed under: News, Halo 3, Xbox Live, Gears of War

In gaming news that really isn’t all that newsworthy and should be filed under the “well, duh!” category is word that Halo 3 tops Major Nelson’s most played Xbox Live games list this past week knocking off Gears of War from its long held number one spot. Shocker! But don’t feel bad for Gears fellow fanboys, because it’s still holding strong nearly a year after its release at its newly acceptable number two position. You had a wicked good ride Gears, but now our new friend Halo 3 is taking the wheel and driving Xbox Live into 2008. And don’t worry, we’ll still visit you every once and a while.

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

It looks like all the game stats have replicated. Now we have to let all the table changes catch up to allow us to query the stats correctly. As always we are doing our best to get things back as fast as possible. Steve and I are a little burned out on this end… it has been a battle. So if we seem a bit snappy in the blog comments or support emails, sorry!

Originally Syndicated via RSS from 360voice

Filed under: News, Halo 3

In continuation of the Halo 3 Hayabusa armor saga comes word of another ninja armor permutation that can be unlocked to show your uber l33t pwnage skills … a ninja sword! According to various post on the Bungie.net forums and around the internet is word that an un-usable, decoration-only ninja sword attached to your Spartan’s back is unlocked when the player achieves a 1000 Gamerscore in Halo 3. And, as you can see in the picture above, the ninja sword goes perfectly with your Hayabusa armor and looks quite badass. But is the Hayabusa sword incentive enough to make you want to go out of your way to earn a 1000 Gamerscore in Halo 3? Answer: Yes, yes and yes.

[Thanks, Glodek]

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

Filed under: News, Halo 3

Friday, in Bungie’s Weekly Update, Luke Smith took on the Halo 3 640p resolution rumor head on and confirmed that Halo 3 does output natively at 1152×640 resolution and is up-converted by the Xbox 360 to either 720p or 1080p. But, before smoke comes spewing out of your ears because you feel cheated out of 80p, know that Bungie has a semi-good reason for reducing the pixel count … high dynamic range lighting! Yes sir, during development the dev team calculated (through very geeky methods) that in order to make Halo 3 run smoothly and use two filters to create amazing HDR lighting effects they’d have to compromise and go with a slightly lower resolution. Bungie didn’t tell this before, because they thought it wasn’t all that important and didn’t want the internets to blow it out of proportion (too late for that). Anyway, don’t feel cheated about the resolution, because you have pretty HDR lighting to fill your 80p void and we know you couldn’t tell the resolution difference anyway. Could you?

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

Filed under: News

Tech nuts the world over have been waiting for the new 65nm Xbox 360 “Falcon” CPUs for a while and word on the street is that they’re finally being rolled out to retail.

According to various reports and photo evidence over on the Xbox.com forums, new Halo 3 Xbox 360 consoles with lot numbers #734 have been confirmed to have the newly new 65nm CPUs in them. So, if the Halo 3 360s are a predictor of things to come, hopefully we’ll be seeing 65nm technology in all Xbox 360s hitting store shelves soon. Lots more information and a guide to tell if your Xbox 360 has Falcon technology can be read over on the Xbox.com forums via the links below. You’re free now … fly Falcon, fly!

[Via Engadget]

Read - Falcon discovery thread
Read - How to tell if you have a Falcon 360

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

Filed under: News, Halo 3

Well, it appears that the mystery of the Halo 3 Hayabusa helmet has already been solved with persistent fanboys over at Halo3Planet.com figuring out how to obtain the “I Would Have Been Your Daddy” skull.

To refresh your memory, the IWHBYD skull was the only skull that needed to be found, because the Hayabusa helmet (as part of Halo 3’s armor permutations) can only be unlocked when all thirteen skulls have been found. Thus, IWHBYD is uber important. Anyhoo, like we said, the skull has been found and is quite the tricky little devil to get. Full instructions can be read over at Halo3Planet.com, but in brief you’ll have to make your way to “The Covenant” level and jump through seven Halo holograms in order to play the Halo theme song music. Crazy huh? We’re sure Bungie thought they could keep the wraps on the IWHBYD skull for a while, but never underestimate the fanaticism that is the Halo community. Now go, go get your thirteen skulls and unlock the Hayabusa helmet … your l33t status is in jeopardy!

[Thanks, to everyone who sent this in]

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

There are parts of the sites running really fast, and other parts running really slow. This is because we moved some of our database to a new storage engine to allow us to update things during the day and not impact the performance of the site… however an unanticipated consequence of this is that many of our queries are no longer optimized for this new storage engine… so we are monitoring the site… looking at the slow points, and then figuring out how to re-write it for performance and scalability.

If you happen to notice something that is consistently slow for you, feel free to send us an email about it at mail@360voice.com and we can dig a little deeper.

Blogs are running for 9.27.2007 right now and the games stats tables are almost done… I have to imagine we should get the entries for 9.28 and 9.29 as well as leaderboards and badges updated today.

(Click the title of this post and leave a comment if you have any questions!)

Originally Syndicated via RSS from 360voice

Forms are back!

Registration is back!

Comments are back!

Blogs are being generated starting with the missing entry from 9/26… I will be doing each as they complete…

Your GAMES LIST is NOT back! I repeat… your games list is NOT complete… but we are generating it from scratch, so it will take a few days… but we don’t want to hold back the whole site for that. So games stats, leader boards, and badges will recover over the weekend.

If you see something strange, feel free to email us at mail@360voice.com. We appreciate the help!

NOTE: It will take a bit for your DNS to refresh and point at the new server. If you want to know if you are on the new server, scroll to the bottom of the page and look for (rack1) instead of (www1). www1 is the old server, rack1 is the new one.

If you impatient, you can hit it here: rack1.360voice.com

Originally Syndicated via RSS from 360voice

Filed under: Halo 3, Fan stuff

Before Halo 3’s launch, IGN previewed multiplayer map Isolation and talked with multiplayer lead Tyson Green who hinted at a special “feature” that Isolation reveals after playing on it for a while. Well friends, the secret is out and it’s a subtle change. The Chief over at the 7th Columnist forums discovered the Isolation secret where after you play for a bit, the Flood infects the rest of the map making the ground all spotted and icky. It doesn’t affect gameplay in the least and some may not notice it (we surely didn’t), but it’s still something rather nifty that you can point out to your friends. Yup, it’s the little things in life.

[Thanks, Bowie]

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy

Filed under: News

It’s official fellow Rock Band enthusiasts, EA has announced that Rock Band will be hitting stores shelves on November 23rd (which is a Friday) and will cost a cheaper than expected $170 for the Xbox 360 version. This is of course great news seeing that everyone and their mother was projecting the price to be in the $200 range and the fact that it’s going to be $30 cheaper makes us smile from ear to ear. No other details have been confirmed, but we’ll take a concrete release date and official pricing any day of the week. Rock on!

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Originally Syndicated via RSS from Xbox 360 Fanboy