Xbox 720 release date, specs, rumours

The Xbox 360 is in its eigth year now and, in the West at least, sits comfortable at the top of the console gaming pack.
A follow up console is innevitable - and the name most have settled on is the Xbox 720 - no matter how spuriously that came about.
Although some of the Xbox 720 rumours doing the rounds are a little more speculative than others, as the eagerly awaited next-generation console edges ever closer to reality, a flurry of reports suggest it will emerge later this year.

Xbox 720 Release Date

Right now, there’s no concrete information about the release of Microsoft’s next-generation console but Sony’s PS4 reveal event in New York has set the rumour mill churning.

Industry analysts won’t make any solid predictions but the received wisdom is that Microsoft isn’t about to sit on its hands and let Sony steal the march on the next-gen.

One of the reasons the Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the West is because it was out almost a full year before the PS3 hit the market. Microsoft understands that getting to market first can be the silver bullet in establishing dominance.

Now that the Sony PS4 is off the blocks – with a scheduled release date of Holiday 2013 (that’s December in the UK) – the pressure is on Microsoft to step up.

Still, the only information that’s emerged thus far comes in the form a countdown clock that was posted on the blog of the director of programming for Xbox Live, Larry Hryb AKA Major Nelson.

The clock is counting down to E3 2013, where, if past history is anything to go by, Microsoft will likely unveil its next-gen machine.

Xbox 720 Price

If the PS4 comes to market in the UK this year, Microsoft are likely to make every effort to get their next-gen console onto retailers’ shelves at around the same time.
With the Xbox 360, Microsoft released several variants with differing onboard storage options, which in turn, dictated the retail price point.
At the cheapest end, the entry price in the UK was £209.99. Taking this as a ballpark figure makes sense in light of a 2010-dated document that surface last year, stating the planned RRP of the new Xbox console would be around £200.
If that ends up being the case, this would make the Xbox 720 the cheapest next-gen console on the market.

Xbox 720 Specs

In January of this year, VGLeaks, published what it claims were technical specifications of the next-gen Xbox console, originally leaked under the codename Project Durango.

According to the information published on the site - and this is by no means official - the next Xbox will be powered by an 8-core CPU running at 1.6GHz, alongside 8GB of DDR RAM.

The machine also boasts a custom 800-MHz graphics processor, which "can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second".
The console also contains 8GB of RAM and a Blu-ray disc drive, which can read 50GB discs, 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM, as far as its connectivity goes, it has Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct networking.
The full 'leaked' specs are as follows:

CPU:

- x64 Architecture

- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)

- each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache

- each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache

- each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources

- each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

- custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor

- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads

- each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle

- at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

- 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)

- 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)

- from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.

- Hard drive is always present

- 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

- Gigabit Ethernet

- Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

- Move engines

- Image, video, and audio codecs

- Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware

- Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

Microsoft has yet to confirm any of these specifications at the time of this writing.by nick cowen

Borderlands 2 has now shipped more than 6 million copies since launch in September, parent publisher Take-Two Interactive announced today. During a postearnings financial call today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed the new sales milestone, up from 5 million at the end of October

Zelnick added that the Borderlands franchise is one of Take-Two's most important long-term properties, suggesting the company may be planning a series release for future platforms.

Borderlands 2 was a key contributor to Take-Two's bottom line this quarter, helping the company post a profit of $78.8 million for the three-month period ended December 31, up 148 percent over last year. In addition, the game's digital expansions helped Take-Two digital revenue rise 244 percent year-over-year.by eddie makuch

Splinter Cell video game cuts controversial sequence

torture scene in which the player plunges a knife into an enemy’s body and twists it back and forth to extract information -- “move and hold to interrogate,” the game advises -- has been eliminated from the still unreleased game, following widespread complaints from gamers and fellow designers.

“I left the Blacklist demo sick and infuriated,” wrote Tom Bissell on Grantland in July, after the controversial scene was shown off at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles. “I spent a couple days feeling ashamed of being a gamer, of playing or liking military games, of being interested in any of this disgusting bulls**t at all.” (Bissell co-wrote “Gears of War: Judgment," a shooter from Epic Games set for release in March.)
 

A video trailer released for E3 showed the entire sequence. Following the screams of the man being tortured and the extraction of information, the player is left with a moral choice, according to Maxime Beland, the creative director for “Splinter Cell: Blacklist,” who narrates the video: Press the left button to knock him out or the right to kill him.
“Whether or not the enemy is spared or killed is a moral choice we leave in the player’s hands,” Beland said.

The moral choice comes after the torture sequence.
At a press event in Paris last week, producer Andrew Wilson said the scene had been stripped from the game.
"Definitely we are not going to see when the game's coming out that there are torture scenes in it. That scene is not there anymore. I've not really heard anyone say they loved it," Wilson said according to Eurogamer.neT
"We've scaled a lot of that back, and as we've gone through the process of development there are always things that you feel are not working as well,” he said. “Every game does this, and cuts certain things."
“Splinter Cell: Blacklist” will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC August 20, according to GameSpot.fox news


 

Aliens Colonial Marines Community Event

Aliens: Colonial Marines hits store shelves in a couple weeks, but why wait that long to play it when you can join IGN at a special community preview event and get hands on time early?
IGN and Gearbox are throwing a party at 4PM on February 2nd for IGN and Aliens fans in the Bay Area, and we want you to join us. Party hats are optional. We'll have the single-player game to delve into, multi-player matches to compete in for prizes, star Gearbox developers to chat with, pizza to devour, and tons of cool stuff to win.

Had other plans? Cancel them and come hang with us instead!
Here's how you can join the fun:

• Visit this link to RSVP - space is limited so get in quick!
• Lay out your best jeans and t-shirt
• On February 2 at 4PM (PST) join us at Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco
• ashley jenkins

 

Rumored Xbox 720 specs

looks like the next-generation Xbox is going to be a monster. It seems that website VGleaks has gotten ahold of leaked specifications for the Xbox 720, which it says will include an 8-core 1.6GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, an 800MHz graphics processor, a 50GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The leaked specifications are in line with previous rumors that also gave the next-generation Xbox an 8-core processor and 8GB of RAM, so there’s nothing overly surprising about VGleaks‘ report. The Xbox 720 will likely be announced at the E3 gaming convention this June and will be Possibly in the fall.

Favorite Games of 2012 Halo 4

 

the idea of proclaiming a single one as the best of 2012 strikes us as a little limiting. This year, and write about the experiences that brought us the most enjoyment this year-- and that's the point of playing video games, isn't it?

I guess it should come as no surprise that Halo 4 is one of my favorite games of 2012. The first entry in a new trilogy -- and helmed by Microsoft's internal developer 343 Industries -- does an admirable job of resurrecting everything I love about the series. Halo 4 consistently lives up to what I expect of a Halo game: polished gunplay, a unique visual style, and engaging offline and online features that makes the repetitive act of shooting feel satisfying hours, weeks, even months later.

 Halo 4 isn't the standout of the series. It tinkers with ideas which came before and assembles a strong overall package to fit modern shooter standards. To frame it as some second coming for the series seems a bit naive. Outside of some story beats involving a dormant forerunner threat and the fate of Cortana, nothing that happens in Halo 4 hasn't happened in some form before. But I say what's wrong with more Halo? What's wrong with more missions that tweak existing ideas and enemy counts to feel bigger and better over time? What's wrong with introducing new hardware and vehicles that continue to expand the satisfying combat? Halo 4 takes a slightly conservative approach to updating one of the most beloved shooters in video games, but the results still feel on par or better than anything else out there.

Shooters come and go every year -- with impressive efforts by Gearbox and Ubisoft in Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3,but few deliver the satisfying gunplay that keeps me coming back to Halo 4 months later. jose otero

Oculus team building immersive gaming goggles

Strap on the headset and adjust the goggle to your eyes. Look down and you'll see the floor of a space station. Look up and pipes weave above your head. Turn left or right and the tight walls of a dark corridor flank your sides. An alien bursts through a door. Look at the monster, pull the trigger and mow it down.
Palmer Luckey cobbled the headset together from spare smartphone parts. His partner Brendan Iribe is rallying the videogame industry to build the games. The result is a relatively affordable, next-generation headset that eventually will allow players to disappear into virtual worlds.

Virtual reality experiences have been the stuff of dreams for decades, with movies such as "The Lawnmower Man," "The Matrix" and the holodeck on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" popularizing the idea. So far, though, systems to take people to other worlds are expensive and built only for niche uses, such as military training.
Luckey and Iribe, the founders of Irvine's Oculus VR, have raised $2.4 million through online crowd funding to build a system that offers a virtual-reality experience to at-home gamers.
"It's the future," Luckey said. "It's the matrix."

The task facing anyone working on a virtual-reality experience is two-fold – create a device inexpensive enough so people will buy it and improve upon the current state of gaming.
"If there's not something additive or functionally better, it's not going to catch on," said Jesse Divinich, vice president in charge of analysis at video-game research firm EEDAR. "It has to do a better job than the market standard that existed before."

Luckey and Iribe are trying to tackle both problems and look to succeed where others have failed. Luckey is using low-cost smartphone components to make a headset – called the Rift – that costs hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

"A lot of things we're doing weren't invented by us," Luckey said. "They were invented by other people. And we happen to have the luck to be in the right decade to make it happen."
Luckey is the 20-year-old co-founder of Oculus. A passionate gamer from Long Beach, he's also obsessed with virtual reality. His workspace is covered in disassembled gadget guts, and he's like a walking encyclopedia of all things VR. He perused government auctions, hospital liquidations and university sales to add to his collection of headsets, which is now more than 40. He also worked for about a year under Mark Bolas, a leading researcher in head-mounted displays at USC.by ian hamilton