Last night I finally got to put some serious amount of time into the Crackdown demo on the XBox 360. After playing a few solid sessions of Co-Op with a buddy I can honestly say this is a day 1 purchase.

The way the game plays out is as you do things, you’ll gain orbs that put experience into that ability. For instance, if you physically beat guys, you’ll get strength orbs. Throw lots of grenades and blow shit up? You’ll get explosive orbs. As you level up your abilities, obviously, they become more powerful. There’s no bigger rush than jumping 25 feet in the air over traffic, into a firefight, throwing a grenade and watching the entire area get destroyed in a blaze of glory.

The game seems to have tons of things to do, from agility races, car races, missions and just good ol’ fashion sandbox game fun.

Here are a few good YouTube Videos of the fun:

• Big ass explosion
• Co-Op Footage
• Another Explosions

It’s been a problem since day one with the XBox 360, the dreaded red ring of death. I personally knew numerous people, more than I can count on both hands and feet, that had the same issue. Myself I’ve been lucky. I receive my console from Microsoft a full week before launch, it came shipped in a box without any kind of packaging material, and the XBox 360 box itself beat up. Again, I was lucky. Besides a disc read error every now and again, my 360 has been flawless. But that all changed with Lost Planet this weekend.

After a 4 hour marathon session with the game I went to bed. I woke the next morning excited to jump back in and kill me some Akrid, only to find my game turn to a bright sky blue 2 minutes in. After trying to exit I was promptly greeted with a Black error screen and a big E74 error message. Fuck. Looking at the XBox showed the worse…a blinking red light. I powered off the console and immediately turned it back on to the same error. I left it be, running in a panic to my computer to look up the error code. E74, E74…ah here it is. “Problem with AV Cables.” Solution? Most likely not plugged in correctly. Well that can’t be. So I checked the connection, turned it on and it was working fine. Ah but not for long you tricksy XBox, not for long. 2 minutes into a game the same sky blue screen and tons of video corruption. After letting it sit for an hour I was able to play some XBLA games. I fired up Gears of War only to be greeted with insane video corruption on all 3D scenes, and crystal clear 2D menus. What. The. Fuck.

Needless to say the XBox 360 is dead.

The failure rate on the XBox 360 is totally unacceptable. To Microsoft’s credit they have been prompt to repair and replace consoles for users, even extending the warranty. But this entire thing should not be happening to begin with. Over at Evil Avatar we are showing over a 30% failure rate. 30 Percent!!!

I better get a new 360 soon, very soon. I need to get back into Lost Planet. And the new 360 better last until the next XBox comes out.

Consider the following quote:

Given different costs of living, the price of an Xbox 360 is not the same in San Francisco and Topeka. How do you deal with that?

Moore: It’s more expensive in Topeka. But we don’t just look at the console cost in isolation. We look at what it takes to be up and running and have the best experience. We call it “TCO,” total cost of ownership.

Now this is pretty interesting to consider. What if Game Consoles were priced according to cost of living in an area. I know some consumer electronics are SLIGHTY adjusted for this, but we’ve never seen it on consoles. The thing is now that console prices are so high there’s a huge difference between the cost for someone. $200 might not be a big deal to anyone, but $400 most likely is, and surely $600 is a big deal to everyone.

So why not adjust the price accordingly, even if just slight. I wonder if sales would increase in areas where it’s typically lower. I mean, cost is already different per region of the world and with a country as big as the US why not adjust cost per region in the country?

Building an empire, an Xbox at a time | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

technorati tags:why, do, consoles, cost, so, much?

Gizmodo got some inside details on Zune today. Zune is Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. Unfortuantely if this is their answer? They were asking the wrong question.

First off, that scroll wheel you see? That’s not a wheel. It’s just four buttons arranged in a wheel formation. That kinda sucks if you’re used to the scroll wheel, but it seems their engineers weren’t too fond of it, or Microsoft didn’t want to be accused of copying the iPod’s wheel. Either way, it’s just four buttons.But like the wheel, the scrolling speeds up the longer you hold down the button.

Exclusive Microsoft Zune Details - Gizmodo

technorati tags:zune, microsoft, ipod, mp3

There is this really cool technology from Microsoft Live Labs called Photsynth. What it does is take a collection of photographs and build it into this VRML type 3D enviornment for navigating and viewing photos. While not necessarily creating a 3D model to walk through, it’s sort of a simulation of positions of objects in the photographs. It even appears to find common objects across photos and remove the redundancy.

There is a pretty cool demo video here.

With Photosynth you can:

* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
* Explore a custom tour.
* Send a collection to a friend.

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth - What is Photosynth?