The 360 has done badly in Japan. Now that that is out of the way, perhaps we can explore why the piece of kit that is loved across America and Europe does such a poor job at selling consoles in the Land of the Rising Sun. Parappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura was on hand to explain why the Japanese simply don’t want a 360.
If you have made any modifications beyond cosmetic changes to your case, you might not want to connect your 360 to Xbox Live. You might get an unpleasant message from your friends at Microsoft.
It has been believed that those making firmware modifications were safe from the prying eyes of the software giant, but now that has changed. Apparently Microsoft is able to detect the presence of modifications to the Xbox 360 and is banning consoles from Xbox live.
It is no surprise that this comes around the same time as the Halo 3 beta. It is likely that Microsoft planned these two events near each other so that hackers wouldn’t have time to produce a fix before the beta ended.
So if you get the message up on your screen, you can forget about ever connecting to Xbox Live from it again. Microsoft has stated that the offending consoles will be permanently banned, no questions asked. Your Xbox live account will still remain active. So as long a you drop a few hundred bucks on a new system, there won’t be any hard feelings from Microsoft.
Blizzard disqualifies 5 of the 8 WoW teams qualified for their regional qualifiers in San Diego in early June, leaving only three full teams remaining. Did Blizzard just killed their first World of Warcraft tournament?
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Very VERY good news in the World of Vanguard:
Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.
Vanguards manager Brad McQuaid has been an absentee manager at Sigil for months. Not only has there been a leadership vacuum at Sigil, with the employees there left twisting in the wind, but I have been able to confirm that Brad hasn’t even bothered to be at the office for nearly 5months.
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From F13.net.
The axe finally fell. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. And while many of you may try to spin this to make SOE look bad, apparently this wasn’t really their doing. You see, SOE doesn’t own Sigil. It doesn’t own Sigil now and they won’t own them tomorrow. But they do own Vanguard. What fate awaits that game? I don’t know. Don’t particularly care either.
But I do know that at approximately 4:30PM today, Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.
I contacted SOE since I’m not in the business of burning bridges or spinning news and they had this to say:
“…an announcement is forthcoming tomorrow.”
I managed to find a good post on the MMORPG forums that cover this very well (original forum topic):
Virgin Media have announced to users that new “Traffic Management”, (or “throttling” as it’s called in the real World), will be enforced for “heavy” users of their Broadband Internet service.
There’s seems to be a large conflict growing in the online space at the moment. On one hand, you have the content providers wanting to push the rich Web 2.0 experiences, and on the other you have the ISPs slowing it all down.
It was the ISPs that provided the bandwidth that allows heavy content sites to exist and yet now they’re taking it all away after companies have invested billions in the area. As pointed out on other sites, the restrictions being put in place by Virgin Media stop even the ability to download one XBOX 360 Live Arcade game or a Playstation 3 legit download.
It’s getting out of hand - with so many high bandwidth legit uses of the Internet, there needs to be cheaper ways to transport all this data.
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Here is a very recent post reporting that Blizzard denying any new MMO besides WOW expansions. This is hopeful for us Starcraft fans. Just as most people realize that a non-RTS Starcraft would destroy the series, I think we can credit the guys at Blizzard that they know this too.
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The EverQuest II team have been busy chaps.
Later this month, we’ll be releasing the largest free content addition that EQ2 has ever seen. The complement to that experience: The city of Neriak, the large outdoor zone of Darklight Wood, and a new playable race, the Arasai, one of the races who will be able to start there.
These zones are another collaboration with our SOGA studio in Taiwan, the same studio that developed the characters and environments for The Fallen Dynasty. Their artists working in conjunction with our designers and artists have really brought Neriak back to life.
Excellent! Free content upgrade. Nice to see Sony Online Entertainment finally jump onto the bandwagon of free content.
I know i’ll be looking forward to it!