New Halo 2 Facts

We have just learned that the PC version of Halo 2, will have a max a 16 players, and will excluded voicechat,  only allowing for text chat.

Yeah, that’s about it.

Bill Gates Steps Down

Bill Gates is fading out of his full-time role at Microsoft, the software giant that’s been under pressure due to a sagging stock price, competition from Google, and nagging delays in the Vista operating system.

He will officially quit on June 2008 and Microsoft’s chief technical officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect. In addition, chief technical officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will assume Gates’ responsibilities for the company’s research and incubation efforts.

Take2 News

Take Two Interactive has announced a $50.2 million dollar loss due to fines for their violent games they released (no names were said though). T2 stock has went down by 17.53 percent which is now currently at $13.74 dollars.

Other news about TT:

Take-Two and 3D Realms are trying to renegotiate the original contract for Duke Nukem Forever, which was originally made in 1997.

Under the original deal, 3D Realms was to receive some $6 million from Take-Two to develop the title. Now, the Texas-based developer will receive only $4,250 for the continuously delayed game, when it is completed (who knows when).

The game is said to be for these systems: PS2, PC, XBOX and maybe XBOX360.

Microsoft wants money

How they want to make it?

Ads.

No surprise really, considering that EA, Atari, and SEGA are all doing it.

So how did this post start up?: A Microsoft general manager brought up that Microsoft wants to be the company that brings  In-Game Advertising Market Profits to the predicted $700 million mark by 2010. So Microsoft plan is to set standards for signs, video, audio, 3D objects, and file formats to be used across multiple games and a variety of platforms. He advocated developing tools that would put the burden of the work on the ad agencies. Not only are they more used to handling the entire creative process end-to-end when working in other media, but it would also resolve other significant issues. For example, with ad agencies handling the grunt work, there wouldn’t be different artists on each development team trying to create 3D models of the car while juggling their regular duties on already-tight schedules.

Basically, sit back and let the advertisers make the all graphics for the game

I bet Thompson set it up

Last week, an investigation was going down because of the murder of a 55-year old man. Jack Thompson (that nasty man) advised police that a 16 year old must of done it because he believes that the killing mirrored a scenario in GTA. So the police went to a 16 year old’s house (who they believe is the suspect) and seized rated M games from the kid.

“Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you’re a hit man or a video gamer,” Thompson said (how does he know? what if you were a crazy ninja man and shoot people in the face?).

While the police did seize the games, it’s unclear exactly what role they will play in the investigation.

Xbox Live new dashboard update

Crazy! Tomorrow is 6/6/06 and most people are not going to leave their house because they are superstitious. But anyway, Microsoft is updating their Xbox Live dashboard tomorrow and I would advise you to check out what it covers by going to this site:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/

It features about 125 new upgrades.