It's time for an update on the upcoming Map Pack for Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The variety pack is currently in the process of certification with Microsoft. Also, we got further details on the other builds for other platforms. Read more after the jump!

Halo 3 players will definitely have their hands full with the newest set of updates from the developers at Bungie Studios. This week's list of changes includes a lot of bug fixes and some adjustments made to the Ranked Big Team Battle's party size. You can read the complete list of changes, as well as the other updates from Bungie in our full article.

Team Fortress 2 (Xbox 360, PC, PS3) fans may have noticed that Valve has recently released a patch for the Xbox 360 version of the game. While the patch doesn't introduce any huge changes to the game, you might want to check out a list of the included updates in the full article.

Nick Button-Brown, director of business development for EA Partners, recently commented that European game developers are more creative than American devs, saying that teams from the US are "all about the money" and so take less chances in the creative process.

Not that this means he doesn't have respect for American studios, as he recently praised US-based Harmonix for their creativity in making Rock Band. Read more in the full article.

We played the demo and we loved it; just imagine our excitement now that Sierra Entertainment announced TimeShift has gone gold and is ready for shipment. October 30 marks the highly anticipated release of the title developed by Saber Interactive to the Microsoft Xbox 360 and PC, while the Sony PlayStation 3 version is expected to appear on shelves this December.

Apart from futuristic weapons, legions of enemy soldiers, and next-gen graphics that are present in most first-person shooters of late, TimeShift gives players the ability to control time. Your usual Hollywood-esque run-and-gun experience will be littered with puzzles that can be solved by slowing, stopping, or even reversing time.

In battle, making things go slow proves to be a lot more effective than going bullet time since you still maintain normal speed while everything lags behind. When you freeze enemies on their tracks, it's also possible to steal their weapons and knock them out before they know what hit them. We can't even begin to enumerate the many ways to exploit time reversal, but it sure is cool to see things unwind while you're unaffected.



Buy: [TimeShift (Xbox 360)]
Buy: [TimeShift (PC)]

 

For you naughty folks who used the exploit in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare(PS3, PC, Xbox 360) beta for the Xbox 360 (and subsequently got banned from accessing Xbox Live), here's a news update that should get you back in high spirits: the ban itself is only temporary, and not a complete and total lockout like the ones they meted out on those who had illegal modifications on their consoles.

This little nugget of good news comes from an official statement recently released by Microsoft, stating that the ban itself is a penalty for violation of the Live Terms of Use, and should be considered as a warning for heavier, more drastic penalties. This means the big ban hammer - a complete console ban from Live.

So for those of us who got the slap on the wrist, let's use every bit of those Xbox Live-free 24 hours to think about what we've done, and what could be in store for us if we do that again. Don't want a permanent lockout from Live, you say? Well, now we know what not to do, don't we?

The whole Internet community is reeling with the issue concerning Digital Rights Management (DRM) and user-generated online sites. As you all know, a software key that could break the encryption of HD-DVD format has been unleashed online and thousands of websites published the key.

DRM groups say the bloggers just crossed the line this time. The said key was published on Digg and needless to say, it was picked up by God knows how many websites. An executive from Advanced Access Content System (AACS) said that they are considering to confront those who published the exploit with "legal and technical tools."

The bloggers, on the other hand, commented that they are protected by the First Amendment. Digg management, for a time, removed the entries containing the key. However, the users posted an even more number of websites containing the exploit and Digg eventually acquiesce with its users. A part of Founder Kevin Rose's statement reads,

After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

AACS Chairman Michael Ayers seemed amused by this as he referred to Digg's decision as an "interesting twist." Ayers added that people can talk about the pros and the cons of the matter but publishing the software key itself is a different matter. When you do that, he explained, you leave the "realm of protected speech." He also released a statement telling the users that the key is already invalid,

We will take whatever action is appropriate. We hope the public respects our position and complies with applicable laws. There has been a lot of misunderstanding. The key that has been leaked has now been revoked. This is the first round and will not be the last.

AACS, reportedly, is now employing stronger tools and copy protection system that have been designed to counter these breaches.

The team of tmbinc, Cpasjuste, stonersmurf and the rest of free60.org, who've been furiously at work porting Linux to Microsoft's Xbox 360 have just made two big releases getting us closer to the dream of having a full-blown Linux distro on our 360.

First, the Free60.org team released X.org drivers for the Xbox 360 hardware called xenosfb. X.org is the implementation of X Window System, the software used by Linux to render graphical user interfaces. This means that once distros incorporate these drivers into themselves, you can run these distros with better graphical compatibility, including higher resolution support.

And the second release is what I just talked about. Cpasjuste has released a Gentoo LiveCD (Full version - 608 MB) with these new drivers built into it. This means that you will be able to run the LiveCD with the GUI and with a lot more compatibility. The livecd uses the xenosfb drivers, plus it includes a powerpc toolchain so that you can compile and build applications on the 360 itself, without having to cross-compile applications on your PC and then transferring them to the 360. The Gentoo LiveCD contains the Gnome Desktop Environment.

Firstly, here's what the Free60.org team had to say about their new drivers:

X.org driver and a new LiveCD No April Fools' Day joke. We have released a preliminary X.org driver and Cpasjuste has built a new LiveCD which makes use of it. Unfortunately, support for Samsung drives and sound drivers are still missing.

The full article awaits after the jump!

In the short time between the first usable exploit for Xbox 360 consoles and today, we've already seen a lot of great achievements by people like tmbinc, Cpasjuste, and others. A few hours ago, a new shader exploit using the King Kong game was announced which will allow people to load XeLL and subsequently, any Linux distro without needing a serial connection with a PC.

This patch will modify the King Kong ISO to include a modified shader which will trigger the exploit. Once triggered, the exploit code will automatically eject the King Kong DVD. Just insert Cpasjuste's modified version of the Gentoo minimal LiveCD. Wait for a few seconds and it should boot right into a minimal Gentoo environment. While its only command line mode for now, you should expect a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu to be released after the necessary patches are applied.

In short, these are the things you will need:

• An Xbox 360 with an older kernel (4532 or 4548). Anything above that will not be affected by the exploit.
• A hacked DVDROM drive in the Xbox 360 so that burnt discs can be run.
• An ISO of the game King Kong (dumped by yourself hopefully, we don't encourage the use of warez)
• An ISO of the Gentoo minimal LiveCD (gentoo-xenon-minimal-2006.1.iso)
• The patcher to patch the King Kong ISO.

All in all, these things will make sure that you have a usable Linux environment on your Xbox 360. Finally, I'd personally like to thank everyone involved in this effort to make it what it is today (Felix "tmbinc" Domke, Cpasjuste, stonersmurf, xorloser and the whole free60.org team), we love you!

Anyways, here's the links for the relevant stuff. If something is considered illegal, it won't be hosted on our servers. Same goes with stuff which is in the grey area concerning its legality. As for the Gentoo ISO, we feel that we should link directly to sourceforge since the ISO will be updated quite frequently.

Download Link: King Kong Shader exploit for XeLL
Download Link: Gentoo Linux Xenon minimal LiveCD (Sourceforge Link. Click on gentoo-xenon-minimal-2006.1.iso on that page to download)
Link: King Kong Shader Exploit for the XELL Loader readme
Link: Gentoo Linux Xenon minimal-2006.1 readme

Felix Domke, the man who made the news a little while ago when he released kernel patches for Xbox360-specific hardware, has just released a bootloader which sets up a Linux environment on your 360. While the stuff available currently isn't very exciting for the common Linux user, the future holds a lot of promise if applications get ported to the 360-specific architecture. Here's what's in the readme:

This is XeLL.

XeLL is the Xenon Linux Loader. It's a second-stage bootloader and is usually run by an exploit. The method of booting this is not a part of this project.

XeLL catches CPU threads, sets them up (basically setting HRMOR to zero), loads an ELF file from either network (tftp) or CDROM, and launches it. It also contains a flat device tree for linux.

cdrom.c includes a very simple ISO9660 parser, which tries to boot the file named ""vmlinux".

lwIP (http://www.sics.se/~adam/lwip/) is used for networking. Network config is currently hardcoded in network.c (and main.c). XeLL also contains a HTTP server. It is not really used.

XeLL is licensed under the GPL v2, and no other version.

Xenon-specific stuff of XeLL was written by Felix Domke , other parts where taken from other free sourcecodes. No non-free hardware documentation was used for developing XeLL.

XeLL is in a very early stage, but is (most of the time) fully working.

In case you're wondering, you need an Xbox360 with a buggy kernel (version 4532 or 4548). Unfortunately, if you've been on Live or tried out new games, you probably have the latest kernel update (4552) which doesn't have any known exploits currently. If you're one of the lucky ones, grab the source from the cvs repository, compile it, and use it with the Crawler360 loader to load the linux environment on the 360.

Personally, I can't wait for more great stuff from these guys. With the speed at which these things are moving forward, you can be sure that the next few weeks will bring a lot more exciting stuff. It's gonna be a great ride, and we'll be there to cover every bit of it!