Junko Yoshida, writer for EETimes.com, put together an article entitled The truth about last year’s Xbox 360 recall. The article is wrong from the title on down. Microsoft never once issued a true “recall.” They offered extended coverage for a single well-known and wide-spread issue.

Yoshida continues his inaccuracies when he says that Microsoft developed their own graphics processor, and that’s where the problems came from. He says that only after the “recall” did they call up a “United States” based company, which he assumes was the former ATi. First: ATi is/was Canadian based. Now part of AMD, the graphics chip division still resides mostly in Canada. Second: the Xbox 360 has used the ATi R500 “Xenos” chip since it has launched.

Microsoft has admitted there is a problem, isn’t that good enough? Let’s not beat this dead horse anymore, people. Especially not with hit-grabbing tactics filled with inaccurate reporting.

As you can see from the picture above, I have added to my collection. After getting my hands on everything, I have to admit that I am still an Xbox 360 fan, by far. The experience the 360 gives Xbox Live members is unmatched, and the games are exactly what I’m looking for. But I cannot be fair without examining multiple platforms. Even though I’m a lowly blogger, I want to do my best to give fair feedback about all games.

If you want to meet up with me on any console, in any game, let me know!

Xbox Live: NuAngel or WinBreak
Playstation Network (PS3): NuAngel
Wii Console Number: 2267 0984 0014 5123
Mario Kart ID: 3007-9168-8206 (NuAngel)

This is an old floppy drive - could it be the basis of the new 360?
No. No it couldn’t.

According to unconfirmed sources, the SeattlePI is reporting that the “Opus” motherboards are shipping on replacement 360’s from the Xbox service department.

These boards are the ones designed to replace RRoD’d consoles that do not have HDMI. Rather than being nice and giving us free upgrades, Microsoft decided to spend their R&D money on a mid-range solution to the RRoD replacement issue. Sorry folks!

It’s officially the first day of spring, and even though people have been begging for a new dashboard update since January, little is known about what we can expect from the Spring 2008 dashboard update. Some people think this time around may be just a few clean ups and tweaks… simply tidying up after all of the major overhauls of the previous pair of updates (adding the entire marketplace blade, integrating with LiveMessenger, Friends of Friends, Profiles…). Perhaps some attention paid to the “Achievements” button on the games blade (which, after enough games played by an individual, becomes an almost painful browsing experience). Some people think that this update (as rumored with the last several) will finally include some form of formal clan support. Some people think there will be a way to hide YOUR name from showing up on someone ELSE’S Friends of Friends list. Some people think there will be the ability to add a custom background to individual blades of the interface, rather than selecting one picture for all of them. Still, others, expect larger friends-list support.

The list of suspected dashboard features goes on, but we’re keeping our ear to the ground for anything even semi-official. Some “very” cool (according to Major Nelson) features have been in the works that didn’t make it into the last update may be included in this one. So cool, in fact, that he had to take some time to explain the coolness effect to “e.” All of this can be found in an older podcast… but who cares about all that… we just want the meat’n'taters. I’ll keep my eyes and ears wide open for you all, you keep checking back here.

Until then, feel free to start a discussion about what kinds of features YOU would like to see in this or future dashboard updates. We all love filling out a wishlist!

By way of Investor’s Release, 2K Games officially announced Bioshock 2 for “release in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009.” Who’s excited? This guy.

WinBreak Central Command suggests that this game will hit a Holiday ‘09 release because the projection is SO far in advance of the game’s release. You see, announcing that Gears 2 may make a November ‘08 release is believable, because they’ve already been working on it for a while and have a time frame established. But with this announcement, it seems like they’re in the very early stages, and we all know that delays are inevitable. With a projection this early, even if 4Q Fiscal ‘09 ends September 30th, 2009, if there IS a delay, seeing a November / December ‘09 release would be quite likely.

Be sure to come back in 2009 and let us know if our predictions were right.