News

The 13th title update for Happy Wars has been released. The upgrades and changes this time around include support items, which are consumables used to hasten the progress …
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The news comes directly from the digital mouth of Phil Spencer: Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition saves (worlds) will be able to be transferred to the Xbox One. This is …
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Major Nelson announced yesterday that Kuno Interactive’s tower defense game, Defense Technica, is now available for download through Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360.

Defense Technica …
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ID@Xbox developers now have access to Unreal Engine 4 tools through the subscription program announced by Epic Games back in March 2014. Previously, the program was catered to Xbox …
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This November will mark 12 years since the launch of Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service that currently boasts more than 48 million global users. Ensuring all of those Live members are constantly connected with each other and enjoying all of the service’s many features is paramount to delivering the Xbox experience gamers have come to expect. To pull it off, Microsoft has staffers working around the clock at its Xbox Live Operations Center (XOC) in Redmond, Washington, reports Total Xbox.

As part of their job function, XOC staffers respond to clear-cut problems. The majority of their time, however, is dedicated to ferreting out issues that no one knows about. Team members search for irregularities and investigate them to discover whether or not they are problems that need solving. They can’t guess at whether something is a threat to uninterrupted Xbox Live service or not; they have to know. They have to find out.

Microsoft Gaming Ninja (yes, that’s his real job title) Eric Neustadter informed Total Xbox that his team has to be ready for anything at all times. “It’s a bit like being in the fire department or police, where you have to think through what would I do in [a worst case] scenario. My boss was in the fire department for years, and he went from doing that to running services like this. In a lot of ways, it is a similar mindset.”

Redundancy is Neustadter’s go-to tool for preventing an Xbox Live doomsday scenario. “We have all the things you need to run 24/7/365, like multiple power grids connected into the campus,” he explained. “When that fails, we have diesel generators with huge tanks out there so that we can run for roughly 72 hours without power, and then we can bring in tankers with more diesel and refill the tanks while they’re running. We also have a disaster recovery site… somewhere else on a different power grid with almost all of this replicated so we can go over there and work instead.”

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The newest addition to the Star Wars Pinball saga for Pinball FX2 now has a release date. Star Wars Pinball: Heroes Within will release on April 29 for $9.99, offering four new tables for the price of three. Two of the new tables have already been highlighted in trailers: a table dedicated to Han Solo that takes place aboard the Millennium Falcon, and a table that runs through the major events of the original movie, A New Hope.

The Droids table stars R2-D2 and C-3PO after they’ve been kidnapped by Jawas. It’s up to you to navigate the perils and help them escape the massive Sandcrawler. Masters of the Force will pay tribute to the users of the light and dark sides of the force, from Yoda to the Emperor and everyone in between. Heroes Within marks the end of the Star Wars Pinball series, but considering how great the previous packs have been this last batch should be equally as epic. Check out the new trailers after the jump, and may the force be with you.

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Microsoft spokesman Larry Hyrb announced yesterday that Crytek Kiev’s promising free-to-play title Warface has completed beta testing and is now available to all XBOX Live Gold Members for the Xbox …
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In what is likely the strangest, most amusing case of life-imitates-art-imitates-life, it appears that the free-form, sandbox-y block-placing smash hit Minecraft will now be used to submit entries in …
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Xbox Wire recently posted an interview with Jason “6995” DeGroot, composer for Capybara Games’ highly anticipated downloadable title Super Time Force. DeGroot describes the soundtrack as based “around NES …
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Recently announced ID@Xbox brawler Wulverblade released its first trailer – a look at the premise behind the game’s story and some examples of the main character’s moves. The game …
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