Posts tagged "xbox"

Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays

One of the things I’ve consistently heard on NeoGAF has been the recent dearth of content on Xbox Live Arcade, considering announcements made at GDC back in March and at E3 in May about what was in the pipeline. They were setting the stage for Xbox Live Arcade, and by association, Marketplace, to have a significant amount of content by the end of the year. Then people started to wait for when the Marketplace floodgates would open and they would unfortunately wait longer than they thought.

The good news is that after a bit of hard work, folks at Microsoft, along with some of my co-workers, put together the “Summer of Xbox Live Arcade” event in San Francisco that happened tonight. This event kicks off five straight weeks of Xbox Live Arcade releases, updated every Wednesday at 1:00 am PDT (0800 GMT), through August 2. Tonight, the updates start off with Frogger. After that, the schedule goes:

  • July 19 – Cloning Clyde
  • July 26 – Galaga
  • August 2 – Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting
  • August 9 – Pac-Man

I’m really looking forward to Galaga, that has been one of my favorite arcade games for a long time. Except this time I won’t have to put real quarters in it over and over again!

Forza Motorsport 2 Update June 16, 2006

Forza Motorsport 2 logo

I was able to meet Che Chou a couple of months ago while I was over Millennium Campus on Xbox business. He’s a great guy with a storied career in video game journalism which ended, for the time being, at 1UP after he was hired to be the community manager for Forza Motorsport 2Part of his work has been blogging regularly on ForzaMotorsport.net to chronicle the development of Forza Motorsport 2. He is definitely one lucky guy getting to sit in on things like recording engine sounds during dyno sessions of heavily modified cars. Being a driving enthusiast himself, with a nice Audi B5 twin-turbo S4 to boot, this must be an awesome job to have and I’m sure he can’t wait for the team to do a repeat of their Track Day.

Forza Motorsport 2 screenshotForza Motorsport 2 is one of my more anticipated games to come out later this year. I got into first Forza Motorsport some time after it had been released, but I still absolutely love it. I’m a big follower of (some kinds) of motorsport, specifically Formula 1 and World Rally Championship, although I do like some of the endurance races (Le Mans, ALMS, etc.) and assorted GT races as well. Because of the types of racing I like, Forza was a game that really spoke to me, covering a wide range of car types from all sorts of nations on road courses… it was just missing a great force feedback wireless wheel to complete the experience. That’s what is going to make this release of Forza 2 so great, because there will be a force feedback wheel released and it will be wireless to boot.

This week’s update on ForzaMotorsport.net followed Che down to watch and record audio of cars being crashed into all manner of barriers for the game. Must have been an incredible sight! Even though he couldn’t join Turn 10’s big guns who got to head over to France for Le Mans this weekend, Che is still going to witness some incredible stuff as part of the development this year. I’d keep an eye out on what he’s up to every week.

E3 2006 Recap

Hard to believe, but even though I started working in video games as far back as 2001, I never attended an E3 until 2006 and then I would end up skipping 2007. Regardless, E3 2006 was a solid show to be my first while working on behalf of Xbox. It was the last of the big E3 shows for a couple of years as the ESA scaled it back in 2007 and 2008. Here I detail what I did for E3 2006 and what I experienced.

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Microsoft Xbox 360 Community and Blogger Bus at E3 2006

Something pretty cool happened as part of the work I do with Microsoft on Xbox 360 (and of course, Microsoft Games Studios). One of the pieces of what I do, but really run by someone else at my job, involves maintaining relationships with bloggers large and not so large. As my introduction on Xbox.com and in posts on some of the message boards I work on, I get to know a lot of regular gamers and, especially in the case of NeoGAF, a few developers and journalists. Obviously we invite them to things like the San Francisco event we had in March and we’re doing a few things at E3 this year as well. One of the things we recognized at these events is that it has always been logistically difficult to provide Internet access to everyone that needs it to complete some sort of online communication, from journalists to bloggers to people on the message boards. This was especially true back in October 2005 when I attended an event in New York where all sorts of journalists came to preview the launch window game titles for the first time and, at night, we had PMS Clan members and message board members coming by to play and hang out. It would have been nice to give all of them some ability to go online.

Xbox blogger bus location at E3 2006Going into our planning for E3, we recognized the need for these very same contacts and friends of ours to have ready access to the Internet. As John Porcaro over on the Microsoft side of things explains on the Gamerscore Blog, determining and getting approval on where we could put aside some physical space to let people hook up to the Internet. We couldn’t put it anywhere in or near the Microsoft booth, there just wasn’t room left, nor did we want to take some place that was out of the way — even if it was available. After much talking amongst ourselves and with the E3 staff, we got ourselves a nice big parking spot right out front of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Not only that, but the bus is this huge coach which will be conveniently wrapped in Xbox 360 branding. Of course, if you’ve been playing attention to the maps linked earlier, the bus just happens to be right in the route many people will take to head to the West Hall when going to check out Sony’s and Nintendo’s respective booths. Hopefully the bus will serve to distract them a just little.

My schedule has not been finalized yet, but I will be spending some time in and near the bus over the full three days of E3. Ask for me if you happen to drop by, I would be more than happy to meet you.

More details on who will be there, who is invited and how to find out if you can get invited to the bus at the aforementioned Gamerscore Blog.