Xbox One is brimming with cool tech, but Microsoft must put it to better use

The Xbox One is overflowing with the kind of electronic magic that can supposedly sense your heart rate from a distance, track the smallest movements of your smallest limbs, and tell your voice apart from all the other folks in the room.

But somehow, what one Microsoft exec called “space-aged technology” will only glue us that much more firmly to our couches.

Congratulations, future Xbox One gamers. At the moment, a key feature of one of the next decade’s tentpole consoles will be its ability to let you run your entire living room with your voice. Forget pressing buttons and digging around for remotes on the couch.  Aside from twitchy controller movements and the grab for the next handful of nachos and in-game bathroom breaks, you’ll barely have to move once the Xbox One is in your life.

And that’s just the slightest bit concerning.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of the technological advances that Microsoft is making. Similar features are baked into today’s Smart TVs, but they only work with mixed results. Menus in even the newest Smart TVs are laggy, voice controls inconsistent, internet browsing a rollercoaster experience.

If Microsoft can solve these issues in the Xbox One, building on the first-generation Kinect’s voice- and motion-sensing technology and delivering a snappy, speedy experience, it could easily become your go-to living room device.

But there’s irony here, too. From the original Nintendo Wii to the first run of Kinect games to the PlayStation Move, current-generation consoles made a truly valiant attempt to get gamers up and moving. This round of consoles, at least for the moment, seems to have scrapped that plan, led by the Xbox One. With this console, Microsoft’s initial presentation seemed to indicate, you’ll never have to move at all.

By nature, gaming’s a sedentary pastime, with the gamer relying on minute finger-twitches to control much broader motions on-screen. Gamers don’t necessarily want to get up and move; they want to sit back and live vicariously through on-screen characters.

RELATED: ANALYSIS: XBOX ONE MAY CHANGE GAMERS’ HABITS

I’m the same way when I game, but I’ve never been too lazy to find any of the remotes for my home theater setup, and I’ve never had an issue pressing a button to change the channel. Did such simple actions really need that much extra simplification? Really? Granted, technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but could some things be getting too easy?

I can’t help but wonder. And I can’t help but hope that Microsoft will put all this “space-aged technology” to far better use than what it’s already shown. The tech seems wasted as a voice-enabled web surf and voice-commanded power on function. What, was it that hard for me to pick up the Xbox controller I was going to use anyway and press the big button in the center?

My hope is that Microsoft integrates all this technology into its games, creating a richer, far more immersive gaming experience. If these voice and motion controls are so potent, then they should permeate each and every title, giving new rise to more potent games.

On current-gen consoles, we’ve seen a large divide between motion-controlled games and “regular” games; there are dance games and fitness games for your Kinect, and RPGs and first-person shooters for the Xbox. But a marriage of both brands of gaming – something we’ve seen all too rarely despite all the motion tech – could create a far richer experience.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen only a handful of titles even bother to execute such things. No console had a finer Mass Effect 3 experience than the 360, in large part because you could yell to responsive teammates to use their Biotic abilities while you handled your own character. And Madden 13’s voice-controlled audibles was a good idea, although latency issues prevented this from being truly groundbreaking.

Still, it’s these ideas that must be built upon, and it’s here that developers must utilize the Xbox One’s capabilities most. Imagine hacking in Watch Dogs taking place with a detailed touch cube on your TV. Or imagine yelling to a teammate for a pick in NBA 2K15, and pointing to the spot where you want it, then changing your mind and (literally) waving the pick off.

Of course, for these ideas to work, the motion detection must be pinpoint, the voice recognition flawless. And it’s entirely possible that, for all the hype surrounding the Xbox One’s new high-tech Kinect, the technology simply isn’t quite that accurate yet.

That’s something we’ll learn in the coming weeks and months. But for now, just get comfortable on your couches.

RELATED: SPIELBERG TO PRODUCE LIVE-ACTION ‘HALO’ TV SERIES

If things hold form, you may be sitting there for a good long time.

FIVE QUESTIONS WITH CC SABATHIA

Yankees ace CC Sabathia dominates the mound, and he dominates video games, too. Here, he answers a few of our gaming questions:

DN: So word is you and your kids are into Skylanders?

SABATHIA: Yup. Playing with the kids and stuff. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been awesome. It’s something that the whole family can play, all our kids. My youngest, Carter, is two. My oldest, CC III, is nine. He wants the stories. He wants to do whatever obstacle is next.

One of my friends had bought (Skylanders) for my son for his birthday. We’ve got all the second-generation characters. I don’t know how many we have floating around the house.

DN: What else do you play these days?

SABATHIA: I play (NBA) 2K13. I play (MLB 13) The Show. Call of Duty. I stopped playing Madden when The Show came out. I usually play Madden until the baseball game comes.

RELATED: ORDER PIZZA HUT FROM XBOX GAMING CONSOLE

DN: Do you play on the road too?

SABATHIA: I have a truck, a case where I bring a PlayStation, my TV, and all my games. I play a lot on the road. I play a lot on PlayStation.

DN: What’s your all-time favorite game? Give us your top five.

SABATHIA: Man. For me, I would have to say . . . man . . . I like the old Tecmo Bowl. R.B.I. Baseball. Madden. God of War, I like too. And Call of Duty.

DN: And we have to assume that a baseball player is the master at baseball games, right? So give us one piece of advice for pitching in MLB The Show.

SABATHIA: They’ve done a good job with guys’ motions with how their pitch action is. You have to pitch inside. You have to really have a real pitching thought process. The key is you gotta throw in a little bit. Always throw in, get them off the plate.

TURBO BOOST

Downside to the downloadable version of Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Nintendo 3DS? It’ll eat up loads of space on your memory card . . . Underrated tablet to watch this summer: Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z, the slimmest 10.1-inch tab on the market . . . Warner Bros. has announced Dying Light, an upcoming first-person survival horror actioner with serious potential. It’s worth watching for on next-gen and current-gen consoles in 2014 . . . PC gamers, get ready for Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition on your machines this summer, a full MK release with all the DLC trimmings . . .

Source: NY Daily News

First Xbox One Box Arts Revealed

Reblogged from Lane's Games:

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Earlier today, a tweet from the Forza twitter  revealed the box art for Forza Motorsport 5, and a look at what the Xbox One boxes will look like, assuming that the image is accurate. Also, the tweet confirms reports that Forza 5 will in fact be available as a launch title for the new console, though a specific release date has not yet been revealed.

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PS4 CURRENTLY BEATS XBOX ONE IN POWER

Asked how the two consoles compare, he told Edge: “It’s difficult to say, as it’s still early days when it comes to drivers. With each new driver release, performance increases dramatically in some areas.

“The PlayStation 4 environment is definitely more mature currently, so Microsoft has some catching up to do. But I’m not too concerned about that as they traditionally have been very good in that area.

“The specs on paper would favour the PS4 over the Xbox One in terms of raw power,” Blomberg added, “but there are many other factors involved so we’ll just have to wait and see a bit longer before making that judgment.”

Avalanche founder and chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg said the studio received early access to Xbox One and that he was impressed with Microsoft’s console.

“It’s a fantastic piece of hardware offering a huge range of possibilities for developers to connect with players in ways that have been close to impossible to date,” he said.

“Next generation to me has always meant more than nice graphics. I don’t really see any big negatives at this point. For me, the success of the new consoles will be determined by how much freedom developers will have to make our gaming experiences customized for our fans.”

Microsoft took the wraps off its new console at an Xbox One reveal event on Tuesday, when it confirmed that the system will launch around the world “later this year”.

Sony revealed PS4 in February, when it confirmed a PS4 release date of “holiday 2013″ in at least one of Japan, Europe and the US. The company didn’t show off the console’s form factor, but it did release a list of PS4 specs.

Source: Computer and video games

Nerd Wars! Xbox One vs PS4?

Reblogged from What's Your Tag?:

Microsoft and Sony have both officially unveiled their next generation consoles. So far it seems like the specs are almost identical. We haven't yet seen the PS4, but we can be sure the reveal isn't too far off. It's still quite early in the console race, but we want to know which side you're leaning towards. Are you going green with the American…

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Farewell Xbox 720, hello Xbox One. Microsoft reveals its next gen home entertainment console

While we’ve been speculating about the next Xbox gaming console a lot of potential names have come up, but for me at least, the actual name took me completely by surprise: Xbox One.

Yesterday Microsoft did their initial reveal of their new home entertainment system. And I chose those words deliberately since MS seems determined to move far beyond what we think of when we think of a ‘gaming console.’ In fact most of the presentation was devoted to the hardware itself and its media capabilities, with just a few games shown (many more will be seen in a few weeks at E3).

The Xbox One is a fairly large black box. The new controller is a refinement of the existing Xbox 360 controller though Microsoft says there are 40 innovations in it, including feedback in the triggers. Every Xbox One comes with Kinect 2; a version of Kinect that has much higher input fidelity than the old one did.

Kinect is a required part of this system (the Xbox One won’t work without a Kinect plugged in) and for the most part yesterday’s presentation focused on voice commands, starting with powering on the system (or really, taking it out of standby mode I imagine) by saying “Xbox On” and then navigating around the system using primarly voice, but we also saw gestures like doing the equivalent of pinch and zoom using two hands. Gestures were done by standing presenters and I always wonder how well they’ll work while sitting down.

As rumored, Xbox One does have HDMI pass-through and the on-stage demo was very impressive as the presenter used Kinect’s voice commands to switch from a running game, to live TV, to music, and back to TV just by voice. There’s a guide for the TV service and you can change channels by saying “Watch SyFy” or bring up the guide by asking “What’s on HBO?” There seemed to be a few ways to issue commands, making it feel more like natural language than the current Kinect supports.

Really the TV integration reminded me a lot of Google TV, but that in itself had me feeling a little skeptical. There were few details about how all this is going to work. Will the Xbox One have cabled IR blasters that you have to tape to the front of your cable box? Let’s hope not (and I’d be very surprised if it was that low-tech of a solution). And the channel changes during the demo happened very quickly. As a friend pointed out, IR Blasters tend to be much slower.

So how will Xbox One control your cable box, and will it require a partnership with your cable provider? Will it know what’s on your DVR? Why isn’t the Xbox One itself a DVR? I assume that Kinect can search live TV as well as Netflix and other services, but there was no mention of this kind of feature (it exists on the current Xbox 360 though). There are a lot of questions here. Remember that Nintendo TV looked pretty nifty during early presentations.

If it works as advertised, though…well that’s going to be pretty neat. There’s a Snap Mode that let’s you, for instance, run live TV on most of the screen but have a narrow window with IE running on the rest of the screen. When you’re watching live TV or a movie, and you return to the Xbox One dashboard, your content keeps playing in a window on that dashboard.

[Update: After I finished this post, The Verge shared some info on how TV integration will work on Xbox One and the news is not good. There's an IR Out port on the back and most of us will have to use IR Blasters at least for now. Newer cable boxes can accept channel changes upstream via HDMI and presumably over time more and more of us will get this kind of cable box, so the situation should improve some. The Xbox One has no DVR functionalities nor any way to control your existing DVR, so it's mostly of use for channel surfing, if anyone still does that.]

Yesterday’s presentation was really sports-heavy and they talked a lot about integration with ESPN and fantasy sports, so if you’re watching a game and one of “your” players scores you’ll get a pop-up and can then quickly open your fantasy sports listings to see how you’re doing.

Skype was a big deal too, and again, you can video message someone at the same time live TV is playing. It was all very flashy though I always wonder how much these features are actually put to use with the average consumer.

The Xbox One does play games of course, and we saw a few. EA Sports says Fifa, Madden 25, NBA Live and UFC are all coming to Xbox One in the next 12 months. Microsoft Studios is working on 15 games for release during the first year of Xbox One’s life cycle, and eight of them are new franchises, which was very encouraging news.

We saw some video from Forza 5 which is a launch title. We also saw a teaser for Quantum Break, a new IP from Remedy. And of course the presentation ended with a lot of talk about Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts.

As far as specs, details are still a bit sketchy. The presentation itself had little to say butEngadget uncovered some facts: as rumored there’s an 8 core CPU based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture, 8 GBs of RAM, a 500 GB hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, USB 3 ports and built in 802.11n with WiFi Direct support. It’s running, they say, 3 different OS’s: the Xbox operating system, a Windows kernal, and an unnamed third OS that marries the two.

First, the Xbox One will not be backwards compatible with either Xbox 360 or Xbox Arcade titles. I don’t think most of us expected it to be, but now it’s official.

Second, Microsoft has debunked the “always connected” requirement pretty clearly, but there’s still a lot of confusion about whether or not the system has to connect on a regular basis. Kotaku interviewed Microsoft VP Phil Harrison who said that the system has to connect at least once every 24 hours to do…something (refresh licenses?). In the meanwhile over at Polygon Microsoft is refuting, or at least downplaying, what Harrison says. So for now we can be confident that if your Internet connection goes down on a Saturday afternoon you’ll still be able to play single players games. We’re not yet sure if you can take your Xbox One to that cabin at the lake where there’s no internet connection.

Now let’s talk used games. It sounds as though every game you buy will be installed to the hard drive, after which you won’t need the disk in the system in order to play. But that means that somehow that game is registered to your account. Microsoft isn’t completely forthcoming about this situation, but they told Wired that if a disc was used with a second account, that owner would be given the option to pay a fee and install the game from the disc, which would then mean that the new account would also own the game and could play it without the disc.

Wow. I’ve long dismissed the idea that Microsoft (or Sony) would prohibit used game sales, but this sounds very close to them doing just that. Depending on how much this ‘fee’ is, and if this information is accurate, then they have, if not blocked used game sales, at least dealt them quite a blow.

But that’s not the end of the confusion. Check out this post at VentureBeat that quotes Microsoft reps saying you won’t have to pay a fee if you borrow a game from a friend. Then it quotes Harrison as saying you will have to pay a fee:

“You can purchase a game in two ways,” Harrison told Eurogamer. “You can purchase it from a retail store or you can download it. So the act of putting the bits on the hard drive — the Xbox One doesn’t really know or care what method the bits got into the machine. If it was from a disc or downloaded from Xbox Live, but obviously the users will then have to purchase that content.”

Clearly there is some conflicting info out there and I can’t for the life of me understand why, just 3 weeks from E3, Microsoft can’t just give us clear answers to these questions.

We still are waiting to hear a specific launch date (they’re just saying ‘this year’) and price, too.

I wasn’t over-whelmed by the presentation, personally. I’m not a huge sports fan and I don’t play many military shooters so I didn’t feel there was a lot there for me to get excited about. But I’m reserving judgement until E3. I do say if Microsoft can nail the connected TV experience, I’ll be very interested. Something like Google TV but less fiddly would be very welcome in our household.

Source: ITWorld

Temple Run: Brave v1.1.3 APK

Reblogged from Breekoy's Computer Tips, Tricks and Tutorials:

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Download : 33Mb APK

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TEMPLE RUN: BRAVE IS AN OFFICIAL APP WITH AN ALL NEW LOOK AND ARCHERY FEATURES!

Temple Run: Brave v1.1.3 play.google.com.disney.brave
From Imangi, the makers of Temple Run, and Disney comes a new take on the most exhilarating app.

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Game on: Xbox 720 and PS4 go head to head with Microsoft set to launch console today

Tomorrow night Microsoft will unveil the latest generation of its Xbox console in Redmond, Washington.

Expectations are high after Sony’s dispiriting launch of the new PS4 back in February (a tweaked controller design was on display but little else), and although there seems to be a consensus regarding the hardware specifications, Xbox spokesman Major Nelson is still promising that the Tuesday release will “mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment”.

Most analysts agree that the new console will sport an eight-core CPU from AMD running at 1.6ghz. This will be supported by 8GB of DDR3 RAM, supplemented by 32MB of ‘ESRAM’ – specialised RAM connected directly to the graphics unit. A Blu-ray drive also seems a given, as well as USB 3.0 connections and a 500GB hard drive as standard. Oddly enough, the interesting point about these specs is how unremarkable they are.

The set-up is very similar to what’s known about the PS4 and it seems that the differences between the two consoles will be more focus on media services and extras, rather than raw processing power.

Potential names for the new console have been varied, with each backed by credible-but-inconclusive proofs. ‘Xbox Fusion’ has been suggested after a slew of domain registrations; the codename ‘Project Durango’ was supported by an early leak last year, and ‘Xbox Now!’ (exclamation mark mandatory) has been the most recent suggestion.

The Now! moniker comes via an employee from Rare (a Microsoft owned games-studio) who posted the rumour on the online forum 4chan, with the name supposedly referring to the new console’s range of internet-enabled, always-on services.

The ‘Xbox Now!’ suggestion also supports the argument that the battle for supremacy amongst the new generation of consoles will be fought through media services.

A long-held rumour that the new Xbox would be ‘always-on’ has been quashed by the leak of an internal email, but no-one doubts that internet-based services will stand front-and-center tomorrow and Redmond.

Major Nelson’s promise of “TV and entertainment” suggests that Microsoft will be aiming to position the new console as a media-hub, most likely consolidating their current partnership with Netflix.

Sources at The Verge have also reported that the Xbox will receive a direct line-in for TV signals, allowing the console to overlay Xbox Live functionality during normal TV viewing.

Such a move would put Microsoft in a good position in the battle for our sitting rooms, as Google and Apple’s TV ‘solutions’ continue to stall. And all this speculation is without even considering possible games (though this will probably just be the march of the franchises – one definite reveal tomorrow will be the latest instalment of Call of Duty, ‘Ghosts’), which just shows how the console’s position in the entertainment industry has evolved, mirroring the development of the smartphone as a hardware solution absorbs different software functionality.

Source: Independent