Xbox 360 News

Gabe Newell Still Blames Microsoft for No Free Team Fortress 2 Updates

It’s often easy to forget that Team Fortress 2 is also an Xbox 360
title, due to the fact that it has none of the free updates that PC users
enjoy. In a recent interview, Valve CEO Gabe
Newell once again bashed Microsoft’s restrictions on DLC: “The coding part is a one-time fixed cost. The much larger problem is
the restrictive nature of the customer relationship where the console owner
won’t let you try to discover the best value proposition for each customer. On
the PC we’ve done 150+ updates for Team Fortress 2, while on the Xbox 360 we’ve
done two. We have lots of content we’d like to give to our Xbox 360 customer
for free which we are precluded from doing given the restrictions under which
we have to operate.”

Syndicate – Dub Step Anyone?

For anyone that doesn’t know, the original Syndicate was a tactical shooter originally released in the 1993 with a few expansions released as well as a second game later in the 90’s. The third game, coming next year, tosses out the idea of a tactical shooter in favor of a first person shooter approach. The game is set in 2069 and the government is no longer run by politicians, but rather large groups known as Syndicates and everyone wants to be “Chip’d” by their respective Syndicate in order to gain access to everything and anything that anyone could imagine. EA has recently released a new trailer for the game and it seems to be shaping into a very interesting experience.

Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition Ver. 2012 Changes Detailed

Capcom has detailed its meaty changelog for the Version 2012 patch of  Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, which is quite a mouthful! If you’re not already on board with counting frames and pulling off Focus attack dash cancels into Ultra, you’ll probably want to skip this. Capcom also released a trailer showing some of the flashier changes.

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition Coming in February

The British Board of Film Classification, which contrary to what the name implies also rates games, has blown the lid off the existence of Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition. What, exactly, this package contains is currently unknown, but it seems safe to assume that this year’s Mortal Kombat reboot, including all DLC, will make the cut. It will come out in February 2012.

Mortal Kombat famously added Freddy Krueger as a DLC character, along with blind ninja Kenshi, purple ninja Rain, and lady ninja Skarlet, which is a lot of ninjas. Whether this is enough to justify a re-release remains to be seen. It’s possible the package will include the remade package of Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3, which came out for digital download earlier this year.

Capcom to Publish the Sour Patch Video Game

According to Sour Patch Marketing Director Sebastion Genesio, “Sour Patch is the #1 all sour candy brand in the U.S. but there is so much more to these iconic characters than just their sour exteriors and sweet interiors.”  To that end, the company have recruited video game giant Capcom to publish a game for the Xbox Live Arcade, which will put players into the role of “a lost piece of candy finding its way to its ultimate destination – the human stomach.”  I genuinely wish I was joking about this, but unfortunately it’s not April yet.

The press release goes on to describe the game, entitled World Gone Sour, as a platformer which will require “a combination of jumps, twists and puzzle-solving to negotiate and overcome larger than life obstacles” and pit the player against “unusual candy enemies”.  It will also feature a track by Grammy award-winning hip hop artist Method Man as part of the soundtrack, and narration by actor Creed Batton from the Office, all for just 400 Microsoft points.  The game could turn out to be quirky enough for low-level success, but at this stage the available screenshots simply leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Ezio Auditore’s Costume in Final Fantasy XIII-2?

 We’ve certainly seen some strange character crossovers before on certain Xbox 360 titles (the appearance of Yoda in the 360 version of Soul Calibur IV springs to mind).  However, Square Enix has issued a press release with an even stranger crossover: the costume of Ezio Auditore, as seen in the recently-released Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, will be available as an optional outfit for Noel Kreiss, one of the characters in the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII-2.  We don’t yet have any screenshots for how it might look, but there is a render of the costume available, which you can see below.
 
If there weren’t already enough hints that Final Fantasy XIII-2 might be returning to the over-the-top dress-sphere stylings of the last direct sequel in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy X-2, this seems like fairly strong proof that the game will allow players to dress up the characters in a variety of different costumes.  Ordinarily, this would be fine, but the recent news of the involvement of Japanese pop singer Oshima Yuko (part of the pop group AKB48) in designing some costumes for the main character suggests that FFXIII-2 might be going down the J-pop route once again.  Time will tell.

Skyrim Patch 1.2 Information

Skyrim performance patch v 1.2 details were released yesterday, and they include a number of fixes for both the most common and the rarest bugs in Bethesda’s 5^th installment of the Elder Scrolls series.

Among the big fixes are the texture loading issues for the Xbox 360 version of the game as well as the Playstation 3 bug that would cause the game to chug as the save file grew.  The Playstation 3 version of the patch is already available in Europe, with the Xbox 360 and PC versions expected to go live on November 30^th. 

Xbox 720 Will Have Two Models

Xbox 360 owners are familiar with the two different SKUs available for the console, with the only major difference between them is the hard drive size. However, if the rumor mills are correct, the Xbox Next will also have two different SKUs, but each will have considerably different options. There will be two different models of the next Xbox: a stripped-down version for the entry-level market, and the other will deliver “true hardcore gaming.”

Free Gears of War 3 Map Pack Out Now

Here’s something you don’t see every
day: Free DLC! Epic Games has just released the “Versus Booster Map Pack” for Gears of War 3, which contains five
multiplayer maps. Two of the maps are actually new: Bullet Marsh and
Clocktower, while the remaining three–Azura, Rustlung and Blood Drive—have
already been released in the previous “Horde Command Pack.”

Rumor: People Can Fly Making Gears of War Prequels

People Can Fly, the Polish developer behind the Painkiller games and the recent Bulletstorm, is rumored to be working on a prequel trilogy to Gears of War, according to the latest Official Xbox Magazine. It wouldn’t be the first time the developer got their hands on a Gears of War title, as they developed the PC port of the original game.

Bulletstorm failed to set the chart alight, and Epic’s President Mike Capps admitted that the game did not make money for them. Epic Games owns a majority stock of the development house, so it makes sense that they would put them on the series after the commercial failure of Bulletstorm, especially now that the main trilogy is done with.