Capcom's platinum level release of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Windows, Xbox 360) will soon be hitting shelves. That's what we hear from a press wire straight from the company, who also claims that the Colonies Edition will be served to both Xbox 360 and Windows PCs. Unfortunately, it won't be ideal for those with Windows XP. More at the full story.

Wondering what ever happened to Microsoft's original plan for Live Anywhere? For some, it's been taking the company a while to fully finish the integration of the service across many platforms. Xbox Live Executive John Schappert said that the service is till going to push through. Know more after the jump!

If you've been playing around with JoyToKey for your secret "controller fix" on PC games that otherwise didn't have such support, you might want to try Blue Orb's Switchblade. The free software is loads heavier than the little joystick to keyboard utility but is more inclined for use with the Xbox 360 controller. Plus, it just got more download mirrors.

Between Gears of War on the one end and Unreal Tournament 3 on the other - not to mention Square Enix - Mark Rein (vice president of Epic Games) must be one jolly soul. Very jolly, very happy, one interview with GameInformer during Midway Games' Day 2007 is all you need to see why. Hey, he describes himself as "Mr. Optimism," and that's bound to be a good thing.

For example, when GI asks him, and we quote, "Do you think Sony is in trouble?" Rein replies, and we quote, "No, god, no. Somebody asked me that earlier, and I was like, 'What a ridiculous question.'" And it's not just because he feels confident about UT3's chances on the PS3 - which is why Epic Games is also looking to move copies of UT3 for the 360, too.

"So as long as people are willing to pay the price for the machine - and I’m sure lots of people are - I think they're hopefully in a good situation." If you ask him, PlayStation Network works fine, the games are of "high quality," and he thinks Sony's gonna be fine. Hey, he likes Resistance and is looking forward to MotorStorm.

And the Wii, for that matter. It seems that comments he made on the Wii and its games may have been misunderstood. Replying to impressions that he may have said some negative things about the Wii, he replied:

It wasn't a statement about the Wii itself, it was about the games that will come out for it and how people will bring games on it that are just there because of the controller, and I wasn't exactly wrong, was I?... I always said, "Nintendo will make great games." And, sure enough, Wii Sports is frickin' awesome. So I think they'll do well, too. I bought Wario—it's fun, I like the games they made for it.

If Mark were to make an essay on today's attitudes, it might be on the ugliness of negativity. "I've really noticed this over the last couple of years. It's really turned a corner from positivity to negativity, and it's overwhelming sometimes. It makes you want to kill yourself." He may have been misunderstood as (overly) critical in the past, but when you hear this guy heap critical praise for all three consoles, it kinda makes you realize what a big heart he actually has. He's one honest fellow, and he's well-known for his honest assessments about Epic Games.

Anyway, on to the other important stuff.

• For PC owners, Unreal 3 will support D3D10 right out of the box. Don't worry about future-proofing your rig, though: Mark says elsewhere that Epic will continue supporting Windows XP for quite some time to come.
• Too early for Epic to talk about Xbox-PC multiplayer or Windows Live-specific plans. (We're wondering, with THREE platforms running UT3... er...)
• Because GI asked - again - the question. No immediate plans to bring Gears to PC. To clarify: it will run on a PC, no problem there, it's just a question of "when." And "when" ain't now. Also, Epic's busy supporting Gears, so no word on potential sequels for now.

The PS3 has the PSP, the Wii has the DS, what's the Xbox 360 have? For the guys looking for a butter-and-peas partner for their console, Microsoft's new product may be just the thing. The Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows will allow 360 fans to hook their wireless accessories for the console over to a Windows-based PC. It's now featured on the Xbox main site, and if you're wondering what it does, here's the details:

• Will work with future Xbox 360 Wireless Accessories.
• Provides up to a 30-foot range for complete wireless freedom.
• Use up to four Wireless Controllers and four Wireless Headsets simultaneously with one Wireless Gaming Receiver.
• Easily integrates with PC gaming scenarios and utilizes the same binding technology as Xbox 360.
• Provides a great value by eliminating the need for additional accessories for Windows-based gaming at an attractive price point.
• Plugs into a PC USB port and has a six foot cable.
• Future drivers available for Windows Vista™ and Force Feedback for the Wireless Racing Wheel.
• Wireless Gaming Receiver is coming soon!

The bad news is that it doesn't mention what games will work with the unit, but since it's not yet out, we'll probably be hearing from the Microsoft people again regarding this new adaptor. On the lighter side, the thing currently goes for USD $19.99, which is a pretty good price for a unit that makes sure we don't have to buy a new set of controllers just for desktop consumption.

Epic Games' Mark Rein had a few interesting things to say over at Planet Gears of War. Here's his words:

The first update we do will be some housekeeping to take care of a few things we need to adjust. We hope to have that in the pipeline before too long,

Unfortunately the certification group at Microsoft shuts down relatively early in December so we're racing against the clock to try to get it finished and certified for release through the Xbox Live update system.

Rein says that one of the things that the patch will do is sort out the bug that results in a squished image on non-widescreen VGA monitors. Unfortunately Rein doesn't want to go into too much details about the update as they have not yet finalized it, but he assures that he'll put news up on their forum.

As for the topic of GoW making its way to the PC, here's what Rein had to say:

There's nothing to announce at this time. We've said all along that, at some point in the future, we could adapt Gears of Wars for PC.

Based on past experience we've learned that it takes approximately five years for an [operating system] to fully take hold among the gaming population.

So unless it takes us five years to bring Gears of War to Windows, we certainly expect to keep supporting Windows XP users.

The year should end in 20ish days or so, so expect the patch to show up by then, that is if they manage to get it done in time. We'll update you folks accordingly.

TVersity Media Server v0.9.9 (beta), which features on the fly transcoding to WMV for the Xbox 360, is now available. The TVersity Media Server allows the management of Internet and home media. It can also be used to create Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG) - personalized lineup of channels. It then serves this media to networked devices in the home as well as mobiles, making the media available anywhere, anytime and from any device.

Some of the features contained in the latest update are:

• On the fly transcoding to WMV for the Xbox 360
• Xbox 360 users can now play their entire media library with no need for MCE.
• Users of other devices that can play WMV can use this target format as an alternative to MPEG. While this will require faster machines to achieve the same quality, it allow for a higher quality per bitrate meaning that a slower home network can be used. This is important mainly for HD content streamed over wireless connections.
• Upconversion of videos to WMV HD can be done (on a fast machine) by tweaking the minVideoInfo in config.xml.

• Bug Fixes
• Bad Internet URLs no longer cause the server to hang for a long period of time (during which no other media could be played).
• UPnP connections from different networks or different subnets are now accepted when the server is configured to accept remote connections. This is as opposed to the past behavior where this configuration only affected the web based interface.
• The XML results returned by the server are now guaranteed to place the item/container title first as required by the UPnP standard.
• Some issues related to playing flash video files (FLV) that were downloaded by the server automatically were fixed.
• Temporary files that were mistakenly placed in the wrong folder are now stored in the Windows temporary folder.

To run TVersity Media Server you need the following minimum system requirements:

• Pentium III 700 Mhz or better (Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading is recommended)
• 128 MB of memory or more (512 MB recommended)
• 50 MB of disk space (At least 1 GB of free space is recommended for cache area of transcoded media)
• Windows XP or Windows 2000
• DirectX 9.0 or higher
• Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
• Audio enabled on the computer running the software
• Flash version 7 for the GUI (MSIE version 6.0 required for full GUI functionality, other Flash enabled browsers such as Firefox will have most but not all of the functionality.)

If you want to try this free app, click the link below and you'll be directed to the TVersity site where you can get more details about TVersity Media Server v0.9.9 (beta).

Download: [TVersity Media Server v0.9.9 (beta)]

Perhaps HD-DVD Emergence Day emerges twice - but for reasons not covered in Microsoft's End User License Agreement (EULA). On the same day as Microsoft unveiled the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360, BluePrint found a way to make the add-on work on a Windows XP PC.

Xbox-Scene reports on the "XBOX360 HD-DVDRom UDF Reader v2.5 Windows XP BluePrint". It's essentially the Toshiba driver used in their first generation of HD-DVDs, and which allows the PC to communicate with the HD-DVD reader. These are unmodified by BluePrint, as they didn't create them themselves, and there are some issues with "there (sic) availability... limited to specific machines which were (sic) familiar with from our places of business".

The drivers mean that PCs can now read HD-DVDs as HD-DVDs, using the Xbox 360 add-on. Which means, says BluePrint, you can copy the contents of the HD-DVD into your PC. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. This isn't a clear-cut rip of the HD-DVD movie for starters ("you will not be directly copying any hd-dvd's as of yet" due to the dual-layer, 30GB format of HD-DVDs), and second, Xbox-Scene ain't hosting the drivers as they could be a violation of the EULA, and for that neither are we.

XNA Game Studio Express by Microsoft">XNA developer Leif Dehmelt makes his way to the homebrew scene with his game, Chaos. How do you play it? Basically, you use the the left Xbox 360 controller thumbstick to move your circle, and the right thumbstick to repel enemy circles. To proceed to the next stage, you must slow down enemy circles to velocity 1.0 or lower. To enter the highs cores, just use the D-Pad.

This XNA game needs a Windows XP-based PC with one or two Xbox360 controllers attached to it. How do you run it? Well, if you got the XNA Environment set up, just extract archive. You can then load the game by double-clicking on Chaos.bat. Press the start button on the Xbox360 controller to start the game, and after that, you're all ready to fire away. Oh yeah, if you want two-player action, just press the start buttons of both controllers.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your best bud and check this game out. Just click the link below to download.

Download: [XNA - Chaos]

On the eve of release of rivals' next-gen consoles, big computer corporation, Microsoft, attempts further to widen its market grip by announcing its wireless controller for Windows. It is expected to come out in the latter part of December this year with a price tag of $59.95.

Actually, Microsoft can boast about a lot of  things in this particular release. With a 2.4GHz power of wireless technology, the controller allows up to 30 feet of wireless range. There are two built-in vibration feedback motors, that players can scale down for a longer battery life.

Also, Microsoft made sure the button layout is identical for both platforms. This effectively eliminates the hassle of learning a new controller. The company was also wise to integrate a jack for PC headset connection.

The Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 or later should be installed in your PC to be able to enjoy the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller. You will need a minimum hard drive space of 150 MB as well.