With just over twenty four hours until the next Xbox is revealed I’m surprised that there seems to be very few people discussing the possibilities of what might be announced. I’ve not worked very much in gaming for a while, but I do still have some meagre contacts, and since I’m no longer writing I have no editor breathing down my neck about hurting a relationship with a publisher, so I’m able to reveal what they can’t - exclusive information about the next Xbox. Find out what you’ll soon be calling it below.

When the Xbox 360 was redesigned, the name ‘Xbox 360 S’ was internal-only, and was and is still marketed as plain old ‘Xbox 360’. The new Xbox will simply be called the Xbox, with plans to introduce iterative versions as the market demands, with the same name but with varying specs to meet all sorts of needs. Xbox 360 will still be supported as a base version of the product.

The long-awaited remake of Halo 2 will be released this holiday season, along with the new hardware, with Halo 5 following the year after that, only available on the newer, more powerful machines. 2015 will see a remake of Halo 3 that will be compatible with the lower-end Xboxes, including the original Xbox 360 spec.

Kinect will no longer be marketed as a separate product. Instead, Microsoft plans to licence it to television manufacturers for inclusion in new sets going forward, allowing greater market penetration.

Windows Phone 9 phones will be branded as Xbox phones, placing more emphasis on the gaming and social aspects of the mobile operating system. The ‘always-on’ feature of Xbox much touted in rumour is in fact a persistent GPS connection, allowing games to be customised with data from the player’s life passively, and data shared with other players and Microsoft without the player’s agency or knowledge.

Xbox’s partnership with Twitch extends to a system level, with an Xbox Live Gold membership automatically setting up a live stream of whatever the user is doing at the time. This allows members to watch gameplay in real time, but also to share media being played. For legal reasons, audio from subscription services is available but video will be blacked out. As Live members build their personal brand, indicated by a ranking on their profile, members will want to see more of their activities, including the more benign things like removing inactive friends from their friends list or entering payment information.

Gamertags will be replaced with a more social profile, allowing for people to receive game invites, messages or chat requests from people that they’ve played with directly to their mobile phone. Some charges may apply and members are encouraged the check the rates with their carrier.

There will be some that doubt the legitimacy of this information, given where it’s coming from. To those people I say - wait until tomorrow. Then we’ll see how much of this was reliable.

thumbcramps:

hi guys! this is a comic i made for a final in my comics in literature class. we had to do a research paper on a topic we’d discussed in class and then accompany it with a comic with a relevant subject. my paper was about hyper-sexualization of women in comic books, but i decided to broaden it out here as well as personalize it and make myself the subject and discuss something i’ve been subjected to in the convention circuit and on the internet as well as thousands of other women, as well as give a cue to thought about how the comic book industry as well as the video game industry and even just media in general (all of which are male dominated) push such ridiculous pressures onto girls and women.

also, it feels kind of silly to have to add this since i hope it’s obvious, but i am very aware that there are men that don’t subscribe to this attitude, and am incredibly grateful that these issues are brought to light to people other than the ones that are subjected to it. 

anyway haha i have literally been staring at this for 9 hours i don’t even know which direction is up anymore. thanks for reading!!!

ohdeargodbees:

So, a good friend of mine recently witnessed a somewhat typical event for me: someone said some shitty gendered comments to me at a game gathering type thing. You can read about what happened here, but I want to talk about something slightly different because honestly, this sort of thing…

I have some friends like this but I’d never examined the relationship this closely. Food for thought.

sarakabiri:

Chicken Cottage x Chanel

T-shirt.

(via alijamieson)

wnycradiolab:

adrifts:

Andy Ellison works at the BU medical school in Boston where he frequently works with a research-only MRI scanner. Over the past few months he’s been sharing some fantastic animated gifs of his calibration and quality control scans using assorted fruits, vegetables and other plants.

Just plain delightful.

Five years ago today, the stars aligned for my first Halo Moment. Right place, right time, a lucky bounce of one of the grenades into a guy at the top of the gravity lift and two guys wandering into a power drain. Despite being largely due to my opponents’ incompetence I count it as one of my most memorable moments in gaming - something that solidified Halo multiplayer as the exhilarating pursuit it thankfully remains.

(Source: windows95tips)

This is apparently controversial to say on Tumblr, but I’m a big fan of Penny Arcade.

I like almost everything they create, and there’s a real sense of community behind their work - their forums catalogue a large amount of my misspent teenage years and beyond, and I’ll be heading to their event of the other side of the world at the end of the month for the fifth year running. So, you’d think that their Kickstarter project, Penny Arcade Sells Out, would be something I’d jump at supporting. But, I haven’t. And I don’t think I will.

Mike Krahulik (AKA Gabe), one of the founders and the artist of the strip, responded to this blog on Twitter, and I’d recommend giving it a read. It’s an examination of the fan response so far, and it hits a few things right on the nose - namely, that ads on the site seem like an odd thing to rail against. I am certain that it’s something that PA as a business feel is a burden, but I am surprised that they think that it’s a burden on their readers as well - in a poll a few years ago, Robert Khoo, the “Business Guy”, pulled opinions from readers about what they knew about the ad policy on PA, and the results seemed to show that the vast majority were aware that ads on PA could be trusted - that it was known that Mike and Jerry (Holkins, the strip’s main writer) personally vetted every game or product advertised and that its appearance on the site was an implicit endorsement. It could even be said that it added value - an advertisement seen on Penny Arcade was a recommendation, not a nuisance.

So, then, the article asks; is Sells Out backwards? If it’s a project for the fans, should the goals not line up with their wants? And if their don’t care about (and, even, enjoy) the ads, why fund to remove them?

So many of these stretch goals are content that I would love to see as separate projects on Kickstarter. I want to fund the return of the DLC podcasts. I want to fund a new Automata story. I want to watch Strip Search and I would get a Twisp and Catsby book for the little people in my family in a heartbeat. I don’t particularly mind or care about Jerry cosplaying as anything, though, and I can take or leave the Lookouts, and even the ads.

So, whereas I’d happily have given money to Penny Arcade for some of the individual pieces, now that the project’s been funded, it puts me in a very odd position as regards whether I chip in to it. The leaderboard ad will be removed, there’ll be a new Automata strip, and Jerry will cosplay as whatever. This is certain. Okay, great! So if I don’t fund it, that’ll happen. And if I fund it with the intention of putting money towards Strip Search, the advantage of Kickstarter falls apart - that’s no longer a pledge, it’s a simple donation with a goal, because my money will be taken whether the Strip Search goal is hit or not. And that’s not Kickstarter at all, as many people have pointed out over the last month.

I think this would have been a far better project both for PA and the fans if they’d listed multiple Kickstarter projects. The revival of the DLC podcasts was one thing to be pledged to, and that would be a certain amount. Maybe you’d get a CD collection of a season, or the previous episodes, or deleted content from the previous episodes. A stretch goal, then, would be ad removal from one page of the site. Then there’s be another project, that I could pledge to, for the Automata strip. And again, a stretch goal would be the removal of ads on another page.

If they fund every project, every project gets made. If they hit the stretch goal on one only, then only the leaderboard ad is removed. If three or so, all the ads on the front page, and so on.

I think I even would have paid more with this model. I’d have paid maybe $100 all-in for the projects I’d want to fund, whereas I’ve yet to fund Sells Out - because I’m not actually paying for anything I want.