Walmart will be selling Xbox 360 arcade units from Nov.  7 through Nov. 13 for the standard price of $199, but the deal is they are throwing in a $100 egift card with the console.  Before you run to the store thinking you are getting a Xbox360 for $100, let me explain something.  If you don’t already know, the Xbox360 Arcade unit does not come with a hard drive. You don’t need a hard drive to play games, but if you want to take advantage of the Arcade Market Place, stream movies, or use some of the other features of Xbox Live, a hard drive is required. Adding a [Read More]

Microsoft confirmed a list of the new features coming to the 360 Dashboard via the Xbox Live summer update expected to hit on August 11th. Curious about what this new update will be bring to dashboard? Here is a list of everything Microsoft is stating will be included in the Summer ‘09 update.

1up.com posted a story earlier this week (check it our here) reporting that Bungie President Harold Ryan, in an interview with the Seattle Times, expressed excitement for Microsoft’s recently unveiled motion control peripheral Project Natal. When speaking with the Seattle Times, Harold was quoted saying, “ I absolutely think Reach could be enabled with it.” After E3 we learned that Microsoft and Sony are working on getting into the motion control game that has made the Wii so successful.

The service offers hundreds of older movies but new releases are not usually available through the streaming video. Older movies are not a bad thing but most of the time when I think about renting a movie its because it just came out on DVD. Once I went through the list of movies I had never gotten around to renting the service lost its shine. I started considering scaling back my membership and writing off the Watch Instantly portion of Netflix as a wash. Then I got a gift that helped me find the hidden treasures the on demand library contained. My younger brother gave me a book titled “501 Must-See Movies”.

When the Xbox360 launched back in 2005 it changed the way I play games. The console itself didn’t really change things, it was the introduction of achievement points. For anyone who has been under a rock for the last four years, achievements are points that players receive for completing game-specific challenges. These challenges range from finishing a level to winning a certain number of matches against other players on Xbox Live. Every retail Xbox360 game has 1,000 available points and every Xbox Live Arcade game has 200 possible points. When points are awarded for completing challenges they are added to a players Gamerscore. A Gamerscore is an accumulative number that represents all points that have been unlocked in every game that has been played by that person. I have to hand it to Microsoft, the way they incorporated this score was ingenious, a players Gamerscore is displayed underneath their name on their Gamercard. If you don’t know, Gamercards are name tags that represent each player on Xbox Live. Every person that someone plays with during a Xbox Live match is able to see this card. In a way, the score is like bragging about how many games someone has played or how good they are at games without having to say anything. If a player looks at another players score they are able to see what achievements that player has unlocked and it shows them every game that person has played. It sounds harmless but if you dig in a little deeper there is a dark side to achievements. That brings me back to how these meaningless digital trophies have changed the way I play games.