Xbox 360

Yesterday Microsoft has announced availability of update for a new Xbox 360 System. The update offers an auto-standby feature that places the console on standby if it’s idle for more than one hour that significantly reduces power consumption. This feature automatically gets enabled if the update is installed.  

The new survey into European gaming attitudes, compiled by the ISFE and ELSPA, two trade bodies, revealed that 34% of British men and 31% of British women consider themselves as gamers.

Their report notes the rise of the new gamer attracted to a more accessible gaming world, which is redressing the traditionally skewed male / female demographic.

Microsoft has unveiled its demo Project Natal at E3 in Los Angeles at Cirque du Soleil. The Redmond company announced the name of the controller free gaming device: "Kinect for Xbox 360". At the presentation the company staged enactments of how games would be played. Those included a track and field tournament, a driving simulation in which passengers rock their bodies to toss the car into cartwheels, and a Star Wars game with enhanced control of a Jedi knight - which drew cheers.

Microsoft describes the technology this way:

Finally! Microsoft has already started rolling out of its latest version of Xbox 360 firmware.

The updated Xbox 360 version will let upgraded consoles use any connected USB Mass Storage devices.

Up to 16GB of any connected drive can be assigned for the Xbox to use and allocating the storage to the console won't zap data already on the drive provided there's sufficient free space for the Xbox partition.

Novell is launching a new technology that will enable Microsoft Xbox 360 games to be translated into iPhone apps. The company is also working at the solution to allow the same for Android phones.

The new iPhone application developed by Novell is an open source derivative of an Indiana Jones games that Microsoft is showing off running on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. The game is built on Microsoft's XNA framework, which is based upon its .NET Framework.

Online gaming time has been increasing considerably as proves data from The NPD Group. Thus, the average amount of hours spent each week on online gaming has climbed by 10% since the last year, while an average of 20% of all games purchased were digitally downloaded up from 19% in 2009.

The average number of hours spent per week on online gaming has increased from 7.3% hours per week in 2009 to 8 hours per week in 2010. This means that, despite the decline in overall online game play, those who are playing, are spending more time playing than they did last year.

 US law firm Abington IP last week published a webpage offering affected users of Xbox 360 to come forward and launch a class action lawsuit against Microsoft. The website posting says:

 Xbox 360 owners banned from Xbox Live for allegedly modifying their consoles have begun fighting back against Microsoft, releasing a step-by-step guide to side-stepping the software giant’s ban.

The unblocking process is a mixture of software and hardware trickery, and also requires you to have a spare “unbanned” Xbox 360 handy.

While the process is described by website Xbox-scene as "technologically complex", the website promises that the method “does indeed work”.

 About one million users of Xbox 360 were banned by Microsoft for hacking their consoles in order to play pirated games from the company's Xbox Live service. As a result a great number of cheap Xbox 360 consoles is now being sold on sites such as Craigslist. The average price for such a console is now around $90, much under the normal market price of around $200.