Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 On Tour In Canada

Hey Canadians!  Want to try out Kinect?  It’s on tour in Toronto and Montreal right now.

The deets:

Toronto – At 207 Yonge Street

Montreal – At 677 Rue St. Catherine O. (That’s St. Catherine Road West for those of you who don’t speak French.  Which in Canada I think is two of you.)

Schedule and further info here.

Source: Kinect Central Canada

Major Nelson Reveals Xbox.com Makeover Releasing Tomorrow

Larry Hyrb, Xbox Live’s Major Nelson just blogged new screenshots of the makeover coming to Xbox.com.  Per Major Larry, “Tomorrow, Xbox.com will be getting a massive facelift and I want to give you a preview of what you can expect.  In addition to support for the 9 new Xbox LIVE regions that will happen next month, Xbox.com will get a brand new look as well as some new features.”

Here are some highlights:

Browser based Avatar editor: Edit your avatar and preview avatar items before purchase

Combined views for messages, friend and game requests

Improved notification of your account subscription

Leverage Family Reports to understand what your family is doing and how they are using LIVE

Play web games with your Xbox LIVE friends on the web or on Windows Phone 7

Marketplace: More powerful search and more intuitive ways to browse and filter

Direct linky to screenshots are here.  Looking very nice if I do say so myself.

Avatar Editor Via Web Browser – Credit: Major Nelson’s Flickr

Per Major Nelson, the changes will begin to take effect at 0500 ET/0200 PT/0900 GMT tomorrow, October 20th.  While they make the updates, access to Xbox.com and the forums will be unavailable, but the Xbox Live service will not be affected.

Source: Major Nelson’s Blog

News for Tuesday, October 19th

AT&T Offering Free Month of Zune Pass With Win7 Phone

AT&T Wireless is offering a 30-Day trial of Zune Pass with the purchase of a Win7 Mobile Phone.  Dubbed the “Entertainment Pack”, you also get access to 30 days of AT&T’s Uverse services, as well as ilomilo, a new, cutesy Xbox Live game.

Source: AT&T; ilomilo

Best Buy Still Doesn’t Have Any New 250GB Slim/Kinect Bundles?

Apparently Best Buy is still having issues with procuring the $399 Xbox 360S Bundle with Kinect for pre-order.  With Microsoft stating that this is a bigger launch than that of the 360, you have to wonder exactly how many units have been pre-ordered, since the 360 only had 400,000 units available when it launched in 2005.

Source: BestBuy

Kinect To Launch With 17 Titles This November

Looks like the guys over at Wired UK have gotten the up-to-date launch list for Kinect this November.  Not much has changed with the exception of a couple more games from Konami.  With all of the sports and fitness games releasing at launch, there are going to be a lot of skinnier geeks this coming spring.

Source: Wired UK

Call of Duty: Black Ops Stolen From The Presses?

Apparently, some guy (or gal) in Alabama swiped a few copies of COD: Black Ops from the presser not too long ago.  Shortly thereafter, the enterprising thief sold the copies to a few upstanding gentleman on some of the forum sites dedicated to cracking and copying software.  One person in particular, “Ungodly Leaker”, who was responsible for the leaking of Halo: Reach apparently had posted that they received a copy as well. 

With almost 1.8 million pre-orders placed, this looks to be yet another very hot download for the less than ethical gamer.

Source: Escapist; VGChartz

Halo: Reach Stats Updated By Bungie

Bungie released updated statistics on gameplay and matchmaking this last Friday.  Some interesting numbers:

If only the real world economy was based on Halo dollars…

Source: Bungie.net

Interesting Issue – KMS Count Not Incrementing Over 6 Machines

So Windows 7 licensing has a requirement that 25 machines must be up and running on the network in order to allow the KMS (Key Management Service) Server to activate those Windows Machines and be recognized as Genuine Windows licensed machines.  This is well and good for a company that leases their own machines and can roll them out en masse to a large number of users simultaneously.  However, for the smaller company, this can be a bit problematic if you’re rolling out to just a few users everyday over a period of time.

To combat this, one would instead use the MAK (Multiple Activation Key) license to these machines.  Furthermore, if you’re hellbent on using KMS, you can use this as a temporary fix until you can get the required 25 machines online, and then “flip” the machines to the KMS license.

Doing so is fairly simple, and extremely simple if you’re using SMS 2003 or SCCM 2007.  If you follow the instructions found on Microsoft Technet, you can simply use the following commands in order to flip the key.

slmgr.vbs /ipk <KmsSetupKey> – Allows you to change the MAK key to what is called a Generic Volume License Key.  Microsoft is nice enough to list the GLVK’s for you in the references KB Article.  Next,

slmgr.vbs /ato – Allows you to force the machine to go find the KMS server and activate it’s license under your agreement.

By the way, for you to use SMS or SCCM 2007 to perform the above functions, you have to fully qualify the path of the vbscript in question, (cscript C:WindowsSystem32slmgr.vbs /switch) else the SYSTEM account which is usually what is running the app won’t know where to look.  Also, make sure you qualify it as cscript, or else it’ll default to wscript and hang up because it’s waiting for the non-existent user to click OK to terminate the script.

Simple enough, eh?

Well.  Not Exactly.

We did just the above steps, and our count did not increment over 6 for some reason.  Did some googling around and I couldn’t find anything online, so I went to the awesome gurus at Technet to see what they would say.  Darrel Gorter at MSFT brought up and awesome article regarding looking at the CMIDs of the clients to see if they were the same.  Interestingly the article mentioned that this typically happens when you sysprep the image without using the /generalize switch, which I used.

Armed with this new information, and downloading the recommended Volume Activation Tool v2.0, I set about my work.  First I downloaded the tool and installed it and ran it against my machines, finding that sure enough, only six were activated listed in VAMT as “Out of box grace” with the remaining machines all marked as “Notification”.

Problem.

So I go back to the article regarding the CMIDs and it shows how to parse your KMS Server logs to sort out the machines by CMID and take a look.  And I’m seeing all of the machines have their own unique CMIDs.  Until the day that I implemented the KMS to MAK flip.  All of the machines when flipped picked up the same CMID.

Odd.

So I do a little bit of researching, and I find that supposedly running the slmgr.vbs /rearm switch allows the CMID to be reset (albeit according to MSFT, this is not supported).  I run this on my machine and find out that the machine does in fact need to be restarted in order for this change to take effect.  Also, even though it’s not specified, the user has to log back into the machine in order for it to call into the KMS server after the reboot.  However, after this is all said and done, my machine now has a new unique CMID and is showing with its “Out of box grace and Genuine” status messages in VAMT.  As well, my KMS Server count incremented by 1.

So, I go into SCCM and set up a new package to run the (cscript C:WindowsSystem32)slmgr.vbs /rearm.  Then I set the package to only install if there is no user logged in, and then set the package to have SCCM reboot the machine after the command has finished running.

I then instructed my users to reboot or log off of their machines at the end of the day before they leave.  And guess what?  I’m now watching my KMS Server increment just fine.

So in short, if you have a problem with your KMS server incrementing, do the following:

– Download VAMT and see what’s going on.

– Check this article and look at your CMIDs.

– Perform a rearm on select machines to see if it fixes the CMID problem if you have one.

– Talk to the guys on TechNet, they are the bomb.  And while they may not necessarily just toss the answer on a platter to you, they’ll get you pointed in the right direction.

~W75

Console News For Monday, October 18th

Weekly Sales Update: Microsoft Pulls Ahead of Sony for Year On Sales

Microsoft this week finally pulled ahead of Sony in sales for the year by 1,000 units for the year last week.  This comes after Sony managed to have a commanding 1 million unit lead before the 360S was released last June.  While it’s still anyone’s game with the Christmas season looming, things are looking well in Microsoft’s favor.

By the numbers:

Console	Americas	Japan	EMEAA	Worldwide
	118,030	51,427	92,225	261,682
	92,079	2,700	68,995	163,774
	70,156	18,659	69,405	158,220
	61,067	12,266	57,356	130,689
	21,449	34,747	29,503	85,699

Source: VGChartz

Total monthly sales for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 stand at 269,067, 308,145, and 343,265 respectively for October.  With a few weeks to go, it looks as though console sales are starting to warm up for the Christmas season.  Unfortunately for Nintendo, it doesn’t look like the Wii will be doing well this month, being behind number 2 placeholder Sony at 269,000 sales for the month so far.  This is a shortfall of almost 40,000 units behind Sony and a little over 60,000 units behind Microsoft.  This may turn out to be the first October that Nintendo has failed to sell more than 1 million units since launch.

Konami Dates Kinect for Xbox 360 Titles

Konami recently released a presser announcing the dates of their upcoming Kinect for Xbox 360 titles.  Konami, not to be outdone by upstart Harmonix in the dance ring is releasing Dance Evolution on November 10th along with CROSSBOARD 7, a racing game with animals.

On November 25th, Konami will release Sports Island Freedom under their Hudson Soft brand.  This title will add a few unique sporting events to the already sports packed game line-up including: Archery, Paint Ball, Beach Volleyball, Dodge Ball, Kendo, Mogul Skiing, Snowboard Cross and Figure Skating.

Source: GamersHell

Microsoft Spending $1 Billion on Kinect, Windows Mobile 7 Marketing

Microsoft is shelling out a lofty billion dollars on their marketing campaign for Kinect and Windows Mobile 7 to make sure it stays in the game of…gaming…and…phoning.  Money spent includes Ads on Nickelodeon and Disney (presumably for Kinect.  Unless they’re marketing phones really early nowadays),  product placement ads on Glee and Dancing with the Stars’, a Times Square Event and ads in various magazines.

What really makes me angry about this is that there are plenty of innovative products that Microsoft comes out with that just get thrown at the wall just to see if they stick.  Perhaps if they gave the Zune team a bit more than enough to cover money for lunch, they’d see more ZuneHD sales.

Source: TheNextWeb

Nintendo Wii Getting NetFlix Without A Disc

Following in the footsteps of the Xbox 360 and PS3, Netflix and Nintendo have announced that you will no longer be required to use a disc to stream your multimedia goodness on the Wii without the use of a disc.  Which is great, if you like watching your hi-def shows in 480p.  Good future proofing Nintendo.

Source: Business Wire

Fallout: New Vegas DLC Announced Before The Game Even Releases

Bethesda Softworks recently announced that Xbox Live will be getting the first New Vegas downloadable content before the PS3 will.  Now, call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t we be talking about the game before it launches?  And not its DLC?

Could The Gran Turismo 5 Delay Hurt Sony Sales This Christmas?

Recently, Sony came out and stated that Gran Turismo 5 would be yet again delayed from it’s November 5 release to “Holiday 2010”.  With just three weeks to go, there is speculation aplenty as to what is causing this many times delayed game to be pushed back at the last minute.

According to VGChartz, Kazunori Yamauchi posted on his Twitter, “Apologies for the delay, It’s because time and labor were spent ironing the kinks out of [the game’s] complex system. I’m really sorry. Everyone, it’s inexcusable… Wait a little longer.”

Gran Turismo 5 Is A Very Highly Anticipated Christmas Release

It kind of sounds like they found a pretty critical issue with the game at the last minute.  But only time will tell.  But what does this do to their Christmas lineup?

VGChartz has listed over 200,000 pre-orders for GT5, so while it’s not a blockbuster game for the PS3 like Call of Duty: Black Ops, it’s still a flagship title with a lot of anticipation and buzz about it.  And with any flagship title, any console maker can be guaranteed that many of those pre-release orders will also come with game sales.

Sony’s 2010 sales lead has been precipitously slipping ever since Microsoft released the Xbox 360S this last June.  And while the Move has already garnered 460,000 sales in it’s first month, the highly anticipated Kinect sensor is expected to do far better, even more so with the recent news that major retailers globally have been selling out of their allocated pre-orders.  Sony needs to bolster their holiday lineup if they’re going to maintain the ever so slight sales lead that was at one point over a million unit gap.

Looking at the presales charts so far, Sony could very well lose out to Microsoft at the end of the year if it’s only exclusive in the top ten pre-sales is pushed back too far.  Those software sales may be reduced with people opting to purchase different games instead, or even worse, forgoing the purchase of a PS3 altogether for one of its competitors.

Hopefully we’ll hear some new news soon.  But if Sony doesn’t get GT5 out of the door by Black Friday, I think it could very well have an impact on their year end sales.

Console News For Thursday, October 14th

Playstation Move Moves 470,000 Units In The First Month

VGChartz is reporting that 470,000 unique Move units have been sold in the first month since it’s release with over 600,000 individual Move controllers (including bundles and standalone) having been sold.  Doing the math, that means 130,000 second, third or fourth controllers have been purchased for the 470,000 new Move users worldwide.

While this does seem like an impressive number, I think that the momentum from Microsoft’s ad campaign, and recent reports of retailers actually selling out of pre-orders might indicate that as far as launch goes, Kinect will have a major advantage over the Move. 

With the information available to us right now (which isn’t much since everyone seems to be keeping a lid on Kinect pre-order numbers), I would not be surprised to see Kinect ship out well over 1 million units in it’s first week.  Only time will tell, and November is rapidly approaching.

Source: VGChartz

Crazy Taxi Coming To Xbox 360 and PS3

Sega is remaking the Dreamcast hit Crazy Taxi and putting it out on XBLA and the Playstation network in 720p goodiness.  Sega’s site is currently reporting that it’s available now.  But we know that’s not right because everyone else is reporting a release date of November 23 for PS3 and November 24 for XBLA.  Those crazy kids at Sega…

Now if only they’d release Shenmue.  And a Seaman remake for Kinect would be quite exciting.

I’ll let you all think about that one for a bit.

Track List for Dance Central Released

And it looks to be a doozy.  CVG reports 32 intial tracks for us to sweat and boogey to in our living rooms, bedrooms and parent’s basements are being packaged for delivery.  Of course, we know that Harmonix probably has quite a stockpile of audiophile ammunition in store to release as DLC on day and date of release as well. 

Source: CVG

Gran Turismo 5 Delayed…Again

Can’t say I didn’t see this coming.  Looks like GT5 is pushed back to “sometime around Christmas”.  If Duke Nukem comes out before GT5 does, I’m officially calling it Vaporware.

Halo Waypoint Announces New Noble Map Pack for Halo:Reach

Halo Waypoint has just released some screenshots of the up and coming Noble Map Pack for Halo: Reach.  The new maps are Tempest, Anchor 9, and Breakpoint.   Release price is to be 800MS Points and will have the opportunity for you to add an additional 250 gamerscore to your tally.

Personally I think that ten bucks is a bit stiff of a price to pay for new maps.  But i’m sure that sales of this will do well.  According to Bungie.net, the map pack will be released on November 30.

Source: Halo Waypoint; Bungie

Follow-up To Yesterday’s Best Buy Pre-Order Stoppage

Best Buy has managed to wrangle some additional allocations for the standalone Kinect package.  However, the 250GB 360S Bundle is still not available.  The only word that I’ve received from Best Buy is that they have requested more from Microsoft and should hopefully have some soon.

Netflix App Finally Available On PS3 On October 18

Joystiq has just confirmed that an app for Netflix will now be available for the PS3 starting on October 18.  Users will no longer be required to insert a disc to run the Netflix application on PS3.  Video details here.

Source: Joystiq

As always, comments are welcome.

~W75

Halo: Reach – Forgeworld: Forge For Dummies

Bungie’s swan song in the Halo Universe is here.  And while I’m not going to bore you with how epically awesome the gameplay is.  How fantastic the new additions such as the armor abilities, new weapons and vehicles make this final chapter, or how cool it is that your character updates in the game with every new piece of bling you slap on your your guy (or gal) in the Armory is, I will cover one awesome feature that I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with.

Forge.

Not for the uber Halo pros anymore.  Gone are the days of stacking items on top of each other and deleting the bottom pieces to get that bridge piece to hang in the air on it’s own.  And gone are the days of spending hours upon hours building a map to find that the last piece joining it all together is about a foot off and having to scrap the entire thing and start over.

Nope.  Built me a map in two days.  And it’s pretty damned fun.

It’s Like Shake and Bake!

Bungie took the ideas that the community had and ran with them like the wind.  Objects now can be placed in a Fixed, Phased or Normal.  Objectives can be added and game types such as racing, stockpile, and king of the hill are available to set up from the go.

Fixed maintains the object in the physical world.  If you bump another object, things will get knocked around.  But once placed, either in the air or on the ground, it will maintain that position at all times.

Normal behaves like the original Forge in Halo 3.  If you pick up the object and place it in the air, it will fall to the ground.  But the stacking glitch works just as it did before.

However, the really cool addition is the Phased option.  This gives you not only the ability to place objects wherever you would like, but you can embed them in other objects.  You want a terrace on the side of the cliff?  Done.  You want to splice multiple pieces together that wouldn’t normally fit the way you want them to?  Done.  I used the Phased option quite a bit for my map.

You also have the ability to fine tune your positioning.  Click the left analog stick and a normal bump becomes a miniscule nudge for those super precise alignments.  Click the right stick and you can zoom in for even more precision.

Bungie has also released a list of what you need to be able to create maps for the newer gametypes such as King of the Hill, Stockpile, and even Territories and Invasion on their newly established Forgeworld Fan Page.  My only complaint is that Firefight was not included in the list of gametypes you can build maps for.

As I mentioned, I am not an experienced map maker in Forge.  But for me, it took two days of layout, placement, and testing before I came up with my first good map, Longshot.  Which of course, you can download here if you so wish.

And then there’s Forgeworld itself.  The level is super huge.  Travelling from one side to the other takes a few minutes by Falcon, and to show off how resilient it is, Bungie even provided some out of the box maps they designed themselves for you to play with.

In all honesty, I could probably go on forever about Forgeworld.  But what I can tell you is this, once you start building your own maps, it becomes just as addictive as the rest of the game.  Give it a whirl.

Kinect Selling Out All Over The UK. What about US?

Reports that Play, Amazon, and other retailers in the UK are selling out of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 are big news on the web.  But what about at home?

A quick websurfing does show that online retailer Newegg is sold out of the standalone device (stock# N82E16874103199), the 4GB Xbox 360S bundle (stock# N82E16868105044) and the 250GB Xbox 360S Bundle (stock#N82E16868105045).  However, Gamestop, Amazon.com (not to be confused with Amazon.co.uk), and most other major retailers are still offering pre-orders.

What does this mean?

While it’s fantastic news that the Kinect sensor is doing so well in the UK, this most likely means that the number of Kinect units that have been allocated to the UK was significantly lower than what has been allocated in the US.

Newegg is not a huge retailer of Xbox items in the United States.  And thus, they have most likely not received a large portion of the units allocated for the launch.  So they most likely have just hit their limit.  However, the larger retailers who make up the bulk of Xbox console and software sales should be granted the largest share to hand out to the consumer.

A twist!

However, after surfing BestBuy.com.  I found this:

Updated 1:18PMEST

I called Best Buy and verified that they have indeed stopped taking pre-orders for the Kinect 250GB bundle, and the standalone unit.   They did say that they have gone to Microsoft and requested additional units to be allocated.  So while this is not likely a long term issue, it does look like for the time being they are out of stock.  However, the 4GB units are still available.

Continued checking does show that Gamestop is still accepting orders.  More news forthcoming.

While I was going to say that it’s most likely just going to be the smaller retailers that would sell out, it would appear that Best Buy has thrown a monkey into my wrench.

Update 7:04PM – Best Buy now has the standalone unit available for pre-order, however the 250GB consoles are still sold out.

Console News for Wednesday, October 13

VGChartz Releases Sales Numbers For Week Ending Oct. 2

Wii – 138,378 PS3 – 149,925 Xbox360 – 179,491

Sales figures are in and they aren’t looking pretty for Nintendo.  The Wii lost more ground against both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 last week by 11,000 units and 41,000 units respectively.  This is part of a continuing slide in sales that began with the Xbox gaining ground in July after the release of the 360S line, and recently became worse as the PS3 vaulted over the Wii by 22,000 units in September.  Trends continuing the way they are, it’s very possible that Nintendo could find itself being left in third place for 2010’s total sales.  The tally so far (Beginning from 02-January):

Wii – 7,162,858 PS3 – 5,614,468 XBox 360 – 5,610,057

Source: VGChartz

The other surprising twist is Microsoft closing in on Sony after packing in almost a million unit lead through June.  Microsoft has since seen a massive boost in sales as older units were marked down to make way for the 360S, and the subsequent sales of the newly styled unit.  The gap for the year is now only a paltry 5,000 units.  If this trend continues, Microsoft is poised to come in number one for home console sales for the year.

NPD Discontinuing Public Disclosure Of Console Sales

An article posted yesterday by VG247 states that as of now, NPD will not be releasing monthly hardware unit sales figures to the public, leaving the console manufacturers to do so. 

According to Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter, “I pay a lot for access to the data, and probably could have skipped the hardware piece and gotten from the manufacturers directly, so they don’t want paying customers like me to turn off their subscriptions.”

The question I have to pose is how can he pay so much money for all that data and still be so horrible at predicting stuff?

Source: VG247

AT&T Uverse coming to Xbox 360

Documents leaked to Engadget show that not only is AT&T Uverse coming to the Xbox 360 for real, but real soon.  November 7th actually.  Just in time for the holidays and coinciding with the release of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, this should be quite a booster on its own. 

The question is, will it be enabled with a Kinect friendly menu as was demonstrated with the upcoming ESPN app at E3 earlier this year?  Only time will tell!

Unfortunately, I see this as being a mutually exclusive deal.  Meaning, that other big name providers such as Comcast will likely not be able to participate in releasing their own version, leaving people to either go without, or forcibly switch over to AT&T for their service providing.  Perhaps Sony will work out a deal with another player?

Source: Engadget

So far this Christmas season is looking to be quite lively in the console world if your name doesn’t have ‘end’ in it.  I’ll be making my console sales predictions at the end of the month.  You may want to stay tuned.

~W75