Swedish breakfast.

Swedish people seem to make a very good impression …

Xbox 360 gets Twitter and Facebook before Christmas

As the internets reported last week, the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook functionality for the Xbox 360 is not included in the upcoming dashboard update. But now we have information on when to expect such features to arrive.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft’s James Halton revealed that the company plans to release the Twitter and Facebook applications as standalone downloads instead of including them with this dashboard update. The Microsoft executive said that the company is targeting a Fall date for the integration of Twitter and Facebook to the Xbox 360.

Trying out Linux Mint on my old laptop

Since I’ve been all in favour of Windows on the desktop, a colleague of mine has been bugging me for quite some time about Linux Mint, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian, and Debian, I love!).

Well.

I gave it a test spin on my old laptop. It found all the hardware, and it’s working as expected. Feels quick, except when I do something involving flash – but that’s closed source and anal behaviour from Adobe rather than a specific problem with Linux.

Enough said. If you have not yet given Linux a test spin on your desktop, the Linux Mint distribution is probably what you want to be looking closer at.

Click the beautiful logo to get you to their site. Choose “Download” from the drop down menu, burn the ISO to a CD and boot into the live CD enviroment to give it a test run so you can see what you think about it before you wipe your current installation!

Xbox LIVE Activity for week of July 20th

Xbox 360 Top LIVE Titles (based on UU’s)

1    Halo 3
2    Call of Duty 4
3    Call of Duty: WaW
4    Gears of War 2
5    Battlefield 1943
6    GTA IV
7    1 vs 100
8    FIFA 09
9    Left 4 Dead
10   UFC 2009 Undisputed

Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions purchased)

1    Battlefield 1943
2    Splosion Man
3    The Secret of Monkey Island™: Special Edition
4    Castle Crashers
5    Worms 2: Armageddon
6    Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers
7    UNO
8    Hasbro Family Game Night **
9    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1989 Classic Arcade
10  Sonic The Hedgehog 3

The above arcade list is based on full versions purchased.
**Combined sales of all Hasbro Family Game Night titles

Original Xbox Top Live Titles (based on UU’s)

1    Halo 2
2    Star Wars: Battlfrnt 2
3    Counter-Strike
4    Fable
5    Splinter Cell Chaos
6    Conker: Live Reloaded
7    Doom 3
8    Star Wars: Battlefront
9    SW: Republic Commando
10   SW: KOTOR

Top Community Games (Full Versions purchased)

1   RC-AirSim
2   Fireworks HD
3   myFishtank
4   Kodu Game Lab
5   Gamerbots:Third-Robot Shooting
6   A Perfect Massage
7   Physics Sandbox
8   3D Magic Images
9   Cyborg Mice Arena
10  A Morons Challenge

These lists are based on global unique users connected to Xbox Live or in the case of Arcade and Community Games, full versions purchased during the week.

First ever Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer Video

The first look at Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, introducing the AC130 killstreak reward.

The Xbox Live Avatar marketplace

The Avatar Marketplace, unsurprisingly, will allow 360 owners to download new apparel for their Avatars. Players will be able to browse game specific storefronts. Yes, storefronts, so don’t expect all the apparel to be free.

In addition, Microsoft has announced Avatar Awardables. Awardables, as their name implies, are articles of clothing that can be awarded by Xbox 360 games for completing certain tasks.

Here’s a preview of what it’ll look like!

Xbox 360 Netflix update preview

The new and improved Xbox 360 Netflix is tempting me to actually setup a VPN tunnel to the US, aswell as getting an american postal address so I could sign up. Shouldn’t be too hard, people has been doing this for ages to bypass region locked content – even before the Internet became an important part of our world …

ANYWHO, screenshots’n’video review below – enjoy!

Call of Duty – World At War update coming early

Josh Olin has revealed the intentions to release an earlier than planned update to Call of Duty: World at War because of cheaters ruining the online experience for many players – you don’t really expect see a soldier jump 60ft in a WWII game with unlimited ammo!

Quote from Call of Duty Intel Announcements:

Over the last week, we’ve received a number of reports from the community regarding issues that range from matchmaking difficulties to strange Nazi Zombie co-op behavior. These incidents have been caused by some users who are hacking their consoles and ultimately damaging the online experience of their fellow gamers. This is not isolated to Call of Duty – incidents of similar hacks have been reported across several titles.

We and our 1st party partners have been working diligently on countermeasures to these security breaches, and these will be going live in a Title Update early next week.

Important note: As a result of accelerating the release of this Title Update, users will see menu changes that were not intended to go live until the release of Map Pack 3. In short, you will see the Map Pack 3 levels in Private Match, Split Screen, & System Link. When you select these maps, you will be brought to the Marketplace blade to download them; however, they will not be available until they are released in August. This is only temporary, and you will be able to download the maps as soon as they are released.

Thank you all for your understanding and continued support, and we look forward to seeing you on the new maps next month.

No release date for Map pack 3 yet, price is expected to land at 800 MSP, just as the other map pack DLCs.

New Xbox 360 Dashboard Preview

This morning Microsoft sent the much-anticipated Xbox 360 dashboard update to a group of game writers to check out before it hits officially on Aug. 11.

In this video, kotaku.com gives you a quick overview of the dashboard’s main screen, looking the new look for achievements and the ability to drop into a Xbox Live Arcade game directly from the achievement screen.

We also get a taste of load times and how little much of the service has changed.

New Nightmare on Elm Street in 2010 !