At the risk of sounding like a forum troll, I have to say, I'm not too impressed with the implementation of Netflix on Xbox 360. The service, which is available to Xbox Live and Netflix -subscribers, allows you to stream movies to your TV via your Xbox 360, and on paper, it sounds ingenious. Indeed, that's why I -- along with many others -- was so excited when Microsoft announced this forthcoming feature way back at E3 in July. Unfortunately, Netflix for Xbox Live users is now here, and it's not all it was cracked up to be.
For starters, the selection of streamable movies is lackluster. Netflix users who have used the service's "Instantly Watch" section know that there aren't an incredible variety of movies to pick from. There are few new releases available. Instead, the selection is composed mainly of films like Mission to Mars, The Abyss, Superman: The Movie, Batman Forever and Scarface. There's nothing necessarily wrong with these movies. Some of them are actually grea... More »
A couple days ago we reported on a few holiday adverts that are part of a “bigger campaign”.
Today Sony's Senior Vice President of Marketing & PlayStation Network Peter Dille detailed their PlayStation: Entertainment Unleashed ad campaign officially via PS Blog as follows:
This is one of the fun parts of my job, when we get to unveil our TV commercials and give you, our loyal fans, a preview of our spots before they hit the airwaves. This year’s campaign is dubbed “Entertainment Unleashed” and for good reason.
The campaign actually began quietly a few weeks back with three fifteen second “tease” executions. Hopefully, you’ve seen these by now. These initial ads depicted various people catching glimpses and reflections of beautiful PS3 game footage magically appearing ... More »
The new version of YDL was released. I think the most important new feature is that you can now use the memory of the RSX-GPU as a swap partition.
You should notice a great increase of speed while using linux.
The free version can be downloaded in four weeks. For now only owners of YDL.net Enhanced Accounts can access YDL 6.1.
Press Release: AUSTIN, Texas - 19 November 2008 - From the show floor of SuperComputing 2008, booth #1915, Fixstars today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.1 for Apple G4/G5, Sony PLAYSTATION3, PowerStation, and IBM Power Systems. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, YDL v6.1 offers several end-user and development tool improvements over the previous v6.0.
"This marks the final release of Yellow Dog Linux by Terra Soft and the first by Fixstars," states Owen Stampflee, Fixstars Solutions' Director of Engineering, "In my five years with Terra Soft we have made incremental impro... More »
Nintendo released a recent update that once again tries to secure some existing bugs on the console, breaks some things, deletes others. This time they’ve also gone around and modified the TOS. As usual, mass panic ensues.
The people who are panicking can be divided roughly into two groups (non exclusive):
- The pirates
- The clueless
This should go without saying, but we don’t want to have anything to do with the former group. Nintendo is obviously going to fight piracy (and that’s going to hurt homebrew). We’ll have to deal with the homebrew part, but don’t expect that to help piracy in any way. It may, or it may not. And if it doesn’t, pirates will have to deal with fighting nintendo themselves.
The usual messages about WADs, “backups”, and all that crap are going straight to /dev/null, and we’re seeing... More »
There's general agreement that Sony stumbled out of the gate with the PlayStation 3. Months of intense hype were followed by a late launch (fully a year after the Xbox 360) and a staggering $600 price tag for the deluxe model.
Even worse, the PS3 didn't initially have any real must-have exclusive titles, and despite the power of its vaunted Cell processor, multiplatform games from third-party developers didn't look appreciably better than the respective titles on the Xbox 360.
Since then, the company's been modifying the PlayStation product line to better fit the competitive market landscape. As of August 2008, a new "bargain" PS3 is available with a larger, 80GB hard drive, and a "deluxe" model is due in November, doubling the capacity to 160GB.
Both, however, lack backward compatibility with PS2 games and do not come with flash card readers. If those features are a must, it might be best to pick up the 80GB "Metal Gear" bundle version on eBay w... More »
A week ago,“An Evening With Kevin Smith 2″ through the Netflix streaming service on my Xbox 360 but didn’t finish. Now, I can’t watch the rest.
Joystiq broke word this evening that Netflix stopped Xbox 360 users from streaming movies distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
This restriction only applies to Xbox 360 users. PC, Mac and other Netflix-enabled on-demand devices can still stream Sony Pictures Entertainment films, and is not a glitch.
“In the case of Xbox 360, a few hundred titles are temporarily unavailable to be streamed via the Xbox game console,” Netflix VP of corporate communications Steve Swasey told MTV Multiplayer in an e-mailed statement tonight.
“Those titles are still available to be watched on subscribers’ computers and on TVs via other partner devices, and we hope they’ll be licensed for Xbox 3... More »
Here's a new one... rumor has it Datel, longtime developer and manufacturer of videogame enhancement products, has beat conventional PSP hackers in unlocking the PSP 3000 console.
To quote: The breakthrough was made by Datel, thanks to their newest tool battery that will put the PSP 3K into service mode. Okay, what does this exactly do? According to their post, service mode allows you to downgrade your PSP for you to do whatever you may want to do with it, basically.
So. Here's the deal. In order for you to enable the service mode on your PSP 2K and 3K models, you'll need Datel's new crypto processor based battery called the Lite Blue Tool battery.
It comes with toggle options between a service mode and normal mode, as well as a built in LED power gauge feature! Datel's Lite Blue Tool comes to your nearest store on November 28th for a mere US$ 19.99 (UK) and US$ 29.99 (NA).
A new Firmware update for the Nintendo Wii has been released, specifically System Menu version 3.4. In the update, the following changes have been made:
- Enhanced parental controls
- USB Keyboard support for Mii channel added
- System functions improvement (Improved SD card read/write speed, Improved disc reading)
- Twilight Hack version 0.1 BETA1 cannot be copied to the console.
Sadly, the update also removes any illegal saves (i.e. Twilight Hack) and any other homebrew channels you may have on your Nintendo Wii.
To quote: It's recommended that you do not update your Wii through Nintendo, as it disables some homebrew (DVDx, PatchMii, Twilight Hack). Recent reports suggest System Menu 3.4 removes all custom channels.
It is suggested that you disable your Wii from the Internet as their network service privacy policy has been updated so that they now have the right to auto-update your system without notification.
... More »