geekosystem

Quick recap if you missed it last week: Henry Gribbohm lost his $2,600 life savings at a carnival game trying to win an Xbox. He did not win the Xbox, but he did win a giant banana. CollegeHumor offered to buy the banana off of him if they got 26,000 Facebook likes on their video. They did. CollegeHumor has purchased the banana from Gribbohm, and even gave him an Xbox. Sigh.

Dreading the prospect of a next generation Xbox that has to be constantly connected to the Internet to be of any use? Yeah, so were we. We can all breathe a little easier today, though, as a Microsoft memo obtained by Ars Technica suggests the new Xbox -- codenamed Durango -- won't need to be connected to the Internet to play one player games. That's right, folks -- no always on for us!

The dark ages of eating pizza and playing video games are coming to an end now that Pizza Hut has released its official Xbox ordering app, sparing us all the grim fate of putting down the controller to order a pizza. Truly, we live in the future. Now we get to find out how long the future will put up with this kind of crap.

For those of you waiting with bated breath for the next iteration of the Xbox, your long wait is...well, not over. But it at least has a date set that it will be over, so that's something. Signs suggest that a May 21st Microsoft press conference will represent the first sighting in the wild of the next-generation console. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, prepare to start complaining about a new system...now.

Because recent news stories haven't been crazy enough -- or maybe because we just needed that extra push to cross the point of no return -- here's one that makes sense only if you've watched like thirty Harlem Shake videos back to back. Snoop Dogg -- or the Lion formerly known as Dogg -- is making a video game called Way of the Dogg for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation. In it, you will learn to fight at his temple. I mean, duh.

There is a new batch of rumors about the successor to the Xbox Kinect that give the specifics on the updated device currently operating under the name "Durango". The rumors are detailed down to the specs of the 3D camera sensor, but nothing is official yet. The specs being reported seem pretty believable though -- most categories are getting a slight bump in specs, but nothing so crazy as to raise any doubt. Let's look at the numbers.

With Sony's big Playstation 4 event yesterday, and details continually being rumored about the next Xbox it looks like the next round of console wars is heating up. Sure, it doesn't actually matter whether Sony or Microsoft come out on top, but it's still something people love to speculate on. Now you can get a little skin in the game by betting cash money on which console is going to come out ahead.

Rumors abound that the next Xbox will be unable to play used games, and some people aren't happy about it. GameStop is clearly against that because of the business they do in buying and selling used games, so to try to show Microsoft that maybe this plan is a terrible idea, they surveyed customers and found that 60% of them said they would not buy a console that doesn't play used games.

The rumor that Microsoft will eliminate the second-hand market for games on its next Xbox console has popped up before, but we dismissed it as sheer lunacy. New details point to that rumor possibly being true, as well as a few other details about the new system. Could this be the end of second-hand games?

Good news for Chinese gamers! China is thinking about lifting its ban on game consoles. The news is just speculation right now, and it's based on the Playstation 3 receiving a quality certification from the Chinese government, but even that speculation has been enough to bump up stock prices for Sony and Nintendo, both of which are champing at the bit to enter the Chinese market. Obviously, a lifting of the ban would help those companies greatly. It might also destroy the mental and physical development of Chinese children, since that's what the ban was trying to protect.

Having fun playing Halo 4 on your good ol' Xbox 360? You are? Good, good, enjoy it while it lasts because by Thanksgiving of next year, Microsoft is planning to launch the latest iteration of their game system just in time for the holiday shopping season. That and the company wants to relish watching you squirm over the knowledge you're currently playing on a console soon to be out of date within the year.

Early next month, the 2,000 pound Curiosity rover will finally touch down on the surface of Mars and just doing that will require one of the most ingenious and daring landings that NASA has yet attempted. Now, Earthlings can try their hand at conquering the "seven minutes of terror" with a new Kinect game for Xbox. Unlike the space program, this one is completely free!

There's some potentially bad news for Microsoft in Germany; the Mannheim Regional Court has awarded Motorola an injunction that could effectively block all sales of Windows 7 and the Xbox 360 in Germany. The whole case revolves around a pair of patents that Motorola Mobility holds, concerning "adaptive motion compensation" and "adaptive compression of digital video data." The court found that Microsoft's Media Player, Internet Explorer, and Xbox 360 all infringe on the patents held by Motorola, and the resulting injunction blocks the distribution of the infringing products and allows Motorola -- in theory -- to order the destruction of all physical copies of Windows 7 and any Xbox 360s currently for sale in the country. Whether or not the injunction will actually be enforced, however, is another point of contention entirely.

Not much is currently known about the forthcoming Xbox console being cooked up inside Microsoft, but a new rumor recently surfaced about the console's controller. The story goes that Microsoft engineers are taking a page from the WiiU and adding a touchscreen to their controller in addition to the traditional buttons and triggers. 

It's official, Verizon is teaming up with Microsoft to provide live TV on the Xbox, a first for the console. The rumors were accurate. It appears that the service will work like this: Verizon FIOS TV and Internet subscribers who have Xbox Live will be able to download a Verizon app designed specifically for the Xbox. Yes, it has Kinect functionality. The app will provide users with as-yet-ill-defined "collection" of content in HD right through their Xboxes.

This is a first for the Xbox -- and consoles as a whole -- and represents a step in a new direction for consoles that are trying harder and harder to market themselves as out-and-out media devices and not just expensive, shiny boxes for man-children with disposable incomes who like to get yelled at by unbelievably foul-mouthed 10-year-olds while playing Modern Warfare. Not that that depiction is right, but it does exist to some extent. Having TV content will make the Xbox more like a DVR (or VCR for you neanderthals) and hopefully open up its market. Of course, this all leads to one big, looming question. Why?