Admin wrote: 

Filed under: News

Zatz Not Funny! is reporting that IPTV is going through “multiple carrier field trials” and that U.S. 360 owners may be able to get IPTV access through AT&Ts U-verse. Though, that’s only speculation. As far as Europe goes, BT is still the go-to IPTV carrier, but official launch details are still up in the air. All said, we wonder if anyone is still interested in IPTV functionality on the 360. Anyone?

[Via Gizmodo]

IPTV on the 360 still in test, not totally dead originally appeared on Xbox 360 Fanboy on Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today,  

Filed under: Store

• Flatout Head On demo (free)
• Four Warriors Orochi wallpapers (free)

Demos are always nice if you’re on the fence about whether to buy the game or not. If you play the Flatout demo and still aren’t sure then be sure to check out our review of the game.

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Today,  Happy Wednesday everybody! After the annoying events of last week when the Battle Bots were ripped from the fingers of European players, things have settled down and are back to normal. With that in mind, it’s maintenance time. All the realms are going down from 3:00am to 11:00am CEST.

As always, there’s plenty to do and read during this maintenance. There’s a nice round up of news for you to read if you are up. Hint: if you are reading this at 3:00am, go back to bed! Those aren’t birds singing but owls. Go. Back. To. Bed.

Edit: Our beloved Overlady and Editor in Chief has decreed I also link you to our tattoo, license plate and cake galleries. I don’t particularly care for the first two but the cakes are awesome and so delicious. The cake is so not a lie.

Filed under: Odds and ends, Blizzard, Europe

European weekly maintenance: 17th June 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today,  

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Rhythm

Rock Band wannabes have downloaded more than 2.5 million additional songs trumpets MTV, exceeding the game publishers expectations and opening up a new stream of revenue for a “challenged” music industry. The most popular downloads have been 3-song packs, led by the Metallica bundle, and The Police and Queens of the Stone Age collections. As for individually downloaded tracks, the “Juke Box Hero” cover has taken top billing, followed by the “Fortunate Son” cover and Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”. Not surprisingly, all of the top downloads except “Buddy Holly” were included in the first DLC release.

With more songs arriving each week, Rock Band has made Guitar Hero III’s sporadic DLC updates look like an amateur act (though Activision’s sequel has a considerable lead in total software sales) - and there are no signs that MTV and company are letting up. More than 200 downloadable songs are currently in the pipeline for 2008, including long-awaited full album releases and music directly related to gaming (similar to GH3’s Halo track), reports IGN. Paul DeGooyer, Senior Vice President of MTV Games, explained that this massive DLC commitment “changes the approach [for a sequel] from one that’s purely about new music to one that’s about new features.” This suggests that if there is a Rock Band sequel, we’ll be able to tote our millions of downloads along for a second tour. Rock on!

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: News items, Contests, AddOn Spotlight

Ever wanted to make your mark in the WoW community? Want to see your handiwork featured in our Reader UI of the Week? Or maybe you’ve always dreamed of an frameset with a Hello Kitty theme?

Well, WoW Interface’s new raffle might just give you that chance. WoW Interface is an addon download site, brought to you by the same folks that run Allakhazam, Thottbot, and Wowhead. They announced yesterday in their forums that every Sunday for the next five weeks they’ll be raffling off two copies of World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons.

And, no, it’s not some dusty old tome they are trying to unload because Mom wants them to clean up their rooms. The book was published May 5, 2008, less than a month ago. It normally lists for $39.99, so this is a great way to get started on your new addon-writing career and save some money at the same time. Or just get something for free and make some stuff.

The best part is, even though the book’s authors are addon pros James Whitehead II and Bryan McLemore, this book is written in such a way that you need no programming knowledge to get started writing your own WoW addons. To enter the raffle, all you need to do is register for a WoW Interface account and make sure your real email address is on your account. They’ll be pulling the winners from the list of members. For more details, see the raffle rules.

Good luck and write some good addons for us to review!

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Today,  A new attempt to recapture the former spectacle of America’s biggest video game show got off to a rocky start, with sparse crowds and the absence of many big-name game companies.
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Today,  

Filed under: Retro, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sports

We might as well have called this post “create your own baseball-pun headline!” An update to the ESRB website suggests that the classic Tengen baseball game R.B.I. Baseball might be coming to Xbox Live Arcade in the near future, delighting retro sports gaming fans everywhere.

R.B.I. was a MLB-branded game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, first released in 1988. Still notably absent from the Wii’s Virtual Console service, the game is being developed by new studio Six Degrees Games, according to the ESRB. We’re personally thrilled to see classic sports titled revamped for XBLA, and would love to see even more. Blades of Steel, anyone?

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Today,  

Filed under: Events, Odds and ends

With the Scourge invasion in full swing, there are a lot of large, pyramidal structures hovering around Azeroth answering to the name of “necropolis.” This has led to a certain amount of discussion in game and around the WoW Insider bullpen, as well as on the WoW Ladies community, on the topic of what you call more than one of them. Naturally, I had to go look it up.

And the answer is: necropoleis or necropoles. The first form comes from Greek, where the word originated (literal meaning: city of the dead), and is pronounced as if it were spelled “-ase.” The second form comes to us through Latin (as most of our Greek-derived words do), and is traditionally pronounced by English speakers as if it were spelled “-ese” (although in Latin it would have been pronounced as “-ase” again). Necropolises is also perfectly acceptable as an English-native pluralization, so don’t be too hard on your fellow adventurers who just want directions to the darn things.

There are a number of words that are not a reasonable plural of “necropolis.” Foremost among them is “necropoli,” which arises by mistaken analogy to words like “cactus.” Although the -is ending in “necropolis” is pronounced more or less the same (depending on your dialect of English) as the -us ending in “cactus,” it does not come from the same category of Latin words (third declension as opposed to second, if I’m not mistaken), and thus does not pluralize the same way. Just say no to “necropoli” — kill that urge and fight the Scourge.

Edit: Yes, I know that languages evolve, and that M-W likes “necropoli.” I still don’t like it, though, mostly because it’s based on a bad analogy. Now get off my lawn, you crazy kids!

The plural of “necropolis” originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Admin wrote: 

This past week saw a massive resupply of ammunition for both the Sony and Microsoft fanboys on the treacherous European front of the current console war — first of all, the highly anticipated Killzone 2 nabbed the top spot in the ELSPA GfK ChartTrack Top 40, and became the fourth fastest-selling Sony-published title ever released in the UK. Its first place finish in the Top 40 charts gave it an edge over number two finisher Halo Wars. You read that right, people. Killzone 2 has become, as many of its zealous acolytes claimed it would, a “Halo killer.”

However, the situation isn’t exactly grim for said murdered Halo title — within its launch week, it became the UK’s best-selling console RTS to date, beating out former leader Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars by a three-to-one margin. So … we guess Halo is a “Command and Conquer killer,” now? We’re not sure. All this inter-franchise homicide is hard to keep track of.

Killzone 2 is UK’s 4th fastest-selling Sony title, Halo Wars is best-selling console RTS originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today,  

Filed under: Fan stuff, Assassin’s Creed

If you watched last night’s Guitar Hero South Park then you know the amount of commercial product pushing that went on. After getting through only half of our (deeply loved) South Park we could only think one thing … holy Assassin’s Creed commercial abuse Batman! Seriously, there must have been a solid ten minutes of Assassins commercials that aired during the 30 minute episode, so much so we don’t think there were any other commercials played besides Comedy Central’s own. So many commercials, we were starting to wonder if Ubisoft bought a stake of Comedy Central or lined Matt and Trey’s pockets with the other half of Assassins’ marketing budget. But after the episode concluded and our commercial intake ended, we couldn’t complain. We’d be lying to say that we didn’t enjoy all ten minutes of the Assassins footage. We’d also be lying if we didn’t tell you that later we hopped into our car, headed to our local retailer and picked up a copy of Heroin Hero. It was an interesting night.

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