The Xbox 360 press conferenced at this year’s E3 expo just finished, and there’s plenty of goodies to cover!  New games, new Kinect information, and a new Xbox 360.  And it’s all exclusive.

The games

• Metal Gear Solid: Rising is you and a godmode sword that cuts through anything at any angle, into any form.  There is no limit to the possibilities.  And how the physics engine will handle all the ragdoll pieces as it did in the video, I’m not sure.
• Kingdoms is the codename for Crytek’s project for the console.  Live action combat within the swords, shields, and sandals realm.  I’m talking about Rome, Greece, all that fun stuff.  The video was really vague.  I’m guessing a 2012 release…
• Fable III is on it’s way, and “it’s a revolution”.  Some king guy, who gets the crown, and has all the power, and you have to stop him…I never played the firsts one, so I feel like I’m missing some key information here.
• Gears of War 3 is looking just as good as the older ones.  But why not release it?  Just more campaign for us to play through.  They had a live stage demo, co-op, going on.  It looks just like the ones before.  It’s more of the old, more of the good.
• Halo Reach had some campaign shown to us finally, and it’s looking good, in good Halo fashion.  Visually pleasing, gameplay also looks nice, and I’m pretty sure there was a new RPG-style weapon…Halo is another game I never really played.

The Kinect

• Media is of upmost importance with the Kinect.  It seems anything that’ll get your media on the TV and your hand away from a remote is a plus in the market.  And Kinect definitely has you covered.  Full system interaction is there, with voice commands, as well as hand control.  You can go to various points in a movie, or play music from a certain artist.  Would I call it the best control method?  No, I’m still a huge Apple fanboy and love the way they give you touch-screen control, but what Microsoft had presented to us doesn’t seem horribly overblown (think Star Trek, talking to the Enterprise and all that).  It seems, to some extent, fluid.
• More services are coming to the Xbox as well.  Chat with your XBL buddies, or your MSN Messenger friends over video.  Share videos, news articles, music.  And the creepiest part: Kinect follows you wherever you move in the room.  It’s got a rotating base, so if you move around, it follows you.  Which is nice, but also makes the 360 feel like Big Brother.  Chills down my spine…Anyway, they’re also gonna give you ESPN.  Covers basketball, baseball, soccer…Pretty limited right now, but also has nice interaction, such as asking your 360 to show a replay of the last play.  That’s pretty nifty.  They also have polls and trivia questions, for the real intense sports junkies, all while watching the game, no interruption.
• Gaming with Kinect is growing, and we’ve got some good examples, such as (be disappointed) a Wii Sports clone, a Wii Fit clone, a Nintendogs clone, a Mario Kart clone…Need I say more?  The only two things that were remotely interesting were Harmonix’s dancing game, which could turn out good, and a Star Wars game involving wielding a light saber, playing almost exactly like a rail shooter.  Oh, and there was Forza 3 with steering wheel controls, as well as looking around yourself in the car by turning your head.
• Kinect’s launch date was also announced: November 4, and there will be 15 launch titles with it.

The New Xbox

• Slimmer design.  I guess companies love making miniaturized versions of giant game consoles or something!
• Built-in hard drive with 250GB of space.  That should take care of all your needs.
• WiFi is built in!  Something that was really lacking with the Xbox launch, now here.
• Same price? Yeah, still $299 for the shiny new Xbox.
• Shipping today to stores across North America. Go out and buy it this week if you’d like!
• E3 attendeed to the Xbox 360 conference got one for free.  Microsoft’s gift, from them to you!

Now, if you don’t wanna miss the upcoming E3 conferences, you can watch them all on G4 (Spike solely got the rights to the Xbox one, but G4 has all the others).  Nintendo does their conference tomorrow at 9AM PST, and Sony follows at noon the same day.

For more info visit E3′s official website

Here’s a guide showing you how to control your computer through twitter.

What you will need is…

-Computer with windows

-Twitter account (make a new one for security reasons but not necessary)

-Gmail account

IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR NEW ACCOUNTS TWITTER MESSAGING TO PRIVATE

To make them private go to settings in twitter and it should be all the way at the bottom

Head over to http://tweetmypc.codeplex.com/ and download it.

Run the “TweetMyPC Setup.msi”

After it finishes installing run the TweetMyPC program and simply fill out the settings needed.

Once all this is done just click save and hide and your done. Log into the twitter account and just type in one of these commands and post it.

NOTE you can make custom commands

To do so run tweetmypc go to settings Custom Commands

It was only recently that I have started to get into gaming. However, just an hour ago I got the dreaded ‘Red Ring of Death’. The XBOX itself has not been fully reliable as when I first got it a year or two ago, I had the ‘Red Ring of Death’ as well and sent it to Microsoft to get it fixed. They fixed it to free and all was well until now.

As the XBOX 360′s warrenty is past, I did not want to send it away again and wanted to find a potential home remidy to fix the red ring of death. I search the internet and found now and now my XBOX is fully working again. Here is how I did it.

I may seem random but this method involves using towels. The towels are used to insulate so the XBOX ‘cooks’ itself (not literally). I do not know how but having the device heating itself fixed the problem.

How to do it is simple. You need to get a bunch of towels and start of by laying down a towl on the ground and placing the XBOX 360 on top of it. Then wrap the towel around the XBOX and place additional towels around it making sure all the vents on the XBOX and covered.

Then, turn on your XBOX through the towels and leave it to run for 10-15 minutes (I did 15). After that, turn it off again and take it out of the towels. Let the XBOX cool down for another 10-15 minutes and then turn it on and it will work perfectly.

Trust me this method did work dispite it sounding a bit strange. It may not work for everyone but it has had a high success rate along with it working for me. And plus, there’s no harm in trying.

In fact, Microsoft themselves admitted that a hole in Internet Explorer was the reason for many GMAIL accounts being hacked into a few months back. All versions are effect including 6, 7 and 8.

Microsoft have they shall release a security update for Internet Explorer at 6PM GMT so make sure yo download that once it comes out or yes, simply move to another safer broswer.

The alternative browsers out there are:

• Mozilla’s FireFox
• Google’s Chrome
• Apple’s Safari

[Times]

More photos of the tablet PC both Microsoft and HP and working on together which was unveiled yesterday at CES. More photos and a video after the break.

The tablet PC was shown of at movie mode, ebook mode and PC mode:

Offical Video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIIjTDnX2Y0

[Gizmodo]

Rumors have been flying around for a bit now about Microsoft potentially releasing a tablet PC to compete against the Apple iSlate which is rumored to come out sometime later this month and now these rumors can be put to rest as yesterday at CES, Microsoft did unveil a prototype of a Tablet PC they are working on in collaboration with HP.

In fact, Microsoft are not only working on one Tablet PC. They are currently working on several with different companies such as Archos, Pegatron and HP.

The name of the device is still unknown and no real stats of the device have been released either. The device was merely shown on the stage as a prototype showing what they are working on in the background. However, we do know that the device will run Windows 7 and will be released during this year.

[Mashable]

Here are the reasons for that. First things first is the image quality. Let’s take a look at a famous locations such as the Empire State Building in both the Map programs.

Google Maps:

Bing Maps:

Which looks better to you? A cool new feature in Bing is something called Bird’s eye view which gives an even better satellite image of your location and from an angle so you can see the relief of the ground and 3D buildings.

That’s pretty cool hein?

Bing also offers a 3D service to see a 3D model of the earth but you do need to download a small additional patch to make that work.

Speed:

In my opinion (but it could be my computer) Bing seems to be much faster whilst scrolling around maps and getting to the location you want. When you move around in the Satellite mode of Google Maps, it is rather jumpy but on Bing’s its almost perfect.

Conclusion:

All I’m saying is that it is not necessary to go with the flow. Most people will only use Google because it’s what they know, it’s what is the most popular and well known however I believe you should give other products a change because they may just be better than the one you are currently using.

Check out Bing Maps today!

Apparently recently there was a mass cyber attack on hotmail accounts where 10,000  European user’s (so far) Hotmail, MSN or Live emails passwords were stolen and posted to the public on Pastebin.com.However Police do not believe that all the password have been released yet. They say that at the moment only @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live emails are affected but other email providers such as Gmail may have been comprimised as well. We will not know until the passwords/email are posted online because the hackers don’t actually change the password on the account so you remain unaware.

The password were apparently obtained by a phishing website which looks absolutely identical to the actual Hotmail website. So I’m assuming that if you haven’t come across any phishing scam websites (that you know of!) that you should be OK.

Even so, it is HIGHLY recommended that you change the password immediately on all your email accounts to avoid fraud.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pioAnwSZ8ew

Not only this but they also leaked their latest map pack. See some previews of it here (courtosy of AndrewnMartinez again):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X4beiY7FJ0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVogJ5t4qn4

They are going to be giving away a word processor, a spreadsheet processor, a presentation software and note-taking software.

This will probably decrease of Microsoft’s most popular version of Office, Home which sells for $150, which includes the exact same four programs as the free version will.

Microsoft will try and make money through it by directing users to their ad bases websites such as their new search engine Bing.

Microsoft are also supposed to be releasing two internet versions of Office for businesses. One being hosted on Microsoft’s servers for a small fee (yet to be announced) and business can also host it on their own servers for free.

I don’t know about you but I will probably get this. I am currently using Home so if I can get a free equivalent, I will most likely take it.

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