General gaming

General gaming

Entertainment Trumps Online Gaming as Xbox Live's Most Popular Activity

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 04:56 PM PDT

Xbox 360 HBO Go

For years Microsoft has been hoping to make the Xbox 360 into more than just a gaming console by adding more and more entertainment-centric features. Although it may still be looked at as a platform for playing games that also happens to do other stuff, a new milestone has been reached: Time spent watching videos and listening to music over Xbox Live has surpassed time spent playing multiplayer games online.

It may feel like Microsoft's entertainment push has been a more recent thing, particularly with the release of the many entertainment apps we've seen over the past few months. (Three new ones made it out today, including one of the most anticipated of the bunch: HBO Go, MLB.TV, and Xfinity on Demand.) But it's been something the company has been touting for years -- ahead of the New Xbox Experience's release way back in November 2008, Shane Kim described the NXE as "a big part of [Live's] transformation from a multiplayer matchmaking service to a social and entertainment network." It certainly was, though it still feels like a stretch for the launch of NXE to be compared to the release of the color TV in 1954; the press release sent out at the time was titled, "A New Dawn in Home Entertainment for Everyone Begins Nov. 19."

PSP Game Owners Caught in Crossfire of Sony's Vita Piracy Fight

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 12:45 PM PDT

Vita

One of the biggest problems the PlayStation Portable faced was piracy. It was absolutely rampant on Sony's debut handheld game system resulting in developers and publishers being scared off who might have otherwise supported it. With PlayStation Vita, Sony has gone to great lengths to avoid having history repeat itself, opting to use proprietary memory cards as opposed to SD cards or the Memory Stick Duos used by PSP. Sony's Scott Rohde described the solutions it had implemented as helping to protect the company "from piracy for the long term." But never doubt the ability of the collective hacker/modder community, as Ars Technica reports a way has already been discovered to run software on the system that Sony did not intend -- and Sony has not stood idly by while it happened.

Although it did not provide a way to suddenly run the sort of homebrew content you could on PSP, the Vita Half-Byte Loader is an open-source homebrew loader capable of running, among other things, emulators for NES, SNES, and Game Boy. This is done through a vulnerability discovered in certain PSP games which can be played on Vita (remember, not all digital PSP games are compatible with Vita at the moment). The first game announced to work with the exploit was Motorstorm: Arctic Edge; as demonstrated in the video below, it could be used to load up and play a game like Doom for PC.

Creating the Perfect Soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto V

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 12:14 PM PDT

When Rockstar unveiled the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto V back in November, the internet went into a frenzy trying to dissect as much information as they could from the short clip. We know that the game takes players back to Los Santos, GTA's version Los Angeles, though whether or not we'll be exploring all of San Andreas still remains to be seen. Our protagonist this time around is an older fellow who moved to Los Santos with hopes of retiring from, "you know...that." The trailer also alluded that the game taking place in present day by focusing heavily on themes of foreclosure and economic hardships.

Four months have passed since the trailer hit, and Rockstar has been quiet regarding GTA V. Because of this radio silence, I've decided to take matters into our own hands and begin theorizing about one of my favorite parts of any Grand Theft Auto title: the soundtrack. The series' began to put a major emphasis on music with the release of Vice City back in 2002, and since then, each installment has featured a growing sprawl of amazing audio spread across a wide variety of radio stations. In keeping with the variety of the past titles, I've compiled a list of ten songs that would be perfect to listen to while blazing through the streets of Los Santos. And be sure to check out the end of this article for details on how to listen to the full playlist through Spotify.

The Small Faces - "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake"
Posted by Shri Krishna

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