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We have just entered into the month of March and that means another two free games to download from the Xbox marketplace with the "Games With Gold" program. First up to download for free is Civilization Revolution. Civilization Revolution is a 2008 turn based strategy game, developed by Firaxis Games, were you take control and build civilizations from as far back as 4,000 B.C. and right through the different era's of history to an advanced world. The game will be available to download for free until March 15th along with the multiplayer map pack "The Elemental" and single player map packs "Brave New Worlds and "The Surreal". The second free game this month is Dungeon Defenders. Dungeon Defenders is a 2010 tower defense/action RPG game, developed by Trendy Entertainment. The game allows players to chose between four different classes to fight of wave of enemies, the game supports four player local co-op and online sessions on Xbox Live. The game will be free to download from March 16th - 31st. Source: majornelson.com

Microsoft's gaming studio Lift London has confirmed that there will be three new games they are developing will be shown in the "not too distant future". Lift London's studio head Lee Schuneman spoke with OXM, he said "We've got a high bar for innovation" he also said "We have three cool titles in development that we'll reveal very soon". Nothing is really known about these three new titles other than they are free to play and will likely follow in the footsteps of Remedy's Quantum Break OXM stated, which is another upcoming exclusive title for the Xbox. Further talking with OXM Lee Schuneman pointed out the need "to build universes that will grow with the audience and follow them unto any device that they own" this does suggest to hint at cross platforming but how much of it will be implemented has not been clarified at this moment. That's all we know of what Lift London and Microsoft Studios have up their sleeves but more info will arise in the near future.

Microsoft has acknowledged that government snooping - moreover, the monitoring of internet data - is an "advanced persistent threat" in a blog post written by the company's General Counsel and Executive VP of Legal and Corporate Affairs, Brad Smith. “Many of our customers have serious concerns about government surveillance of the internet,” Smith writes. “We share their concerns. That’s why we are taking steps to ensure governments use legal process rather than technological brute force to access customer data. Like many others, we are especially alarmed by recent allegations in the press of a broader and concerted effort by some governments to circumvent online security measures in order to surreptitiously collect private customer data. “If true, these efforts threaten to seriously undermine confidence in the security and privacy of online communications. Indeed, government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat’ alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.” As a response, Microsoft has declared that it will be offering safeguards, boosting its encryption services and bolstering the legal protection for customer data. The company also promises to be more transparent about its own coding in an effort to ensure consumers are better able to understand how Microsoft handles their data. “Ultimately, we’re sensitive to the balances that must be struck when it comes to technology, security and the law,” Smith continued. “We all want to live in a world that is safe and secure, but we also want to live in a country that is protected by the Constitution. “We want to ensure that important questions about government access are decided by courts rather than dictated by technological might. And we’re focused on applying new safeguards worldwide, recognising the global nature of these issues and challenges. We believe these new steps strike the right balance, advancing for all of us both the security we need and the privacy we deserve.” <via MCV>

Another month is just about over and another is about to begin. February's games with gold kicks off with Dead Island and will end with Toy Soldiers : Cold War. Dead Island is an open world horror survival game that takes place on a fictional tropical island "Banoi". You can pick from four characters to play as and fight your way through zombie hordes. The game is available to download for free for Gold subscribers from Feb 1st - Feb 15th. Toy Soldiers: Cold War is an action strategy game where you take control of an army of toys to stop a soviet invasion from taking over. The game is available to download for free from Feb 16th - Feb 28th.

A rumor has risen that Halo 2 anniversary edition is set to come out this year according to neogaf member "ntkrnl", a newly mod verified source. Now rumors for a Halo 2 anniversary have come up before but neogaf is known to be reliable as it is a very exclusive site and holds a heavy verification process to all members and posts, any posts that are unreliable results in the member getting banned pretty quickly, it is also a site that many game devs post on. Ntkrnl has went through the verification process and he has been allowed to continue posting after the Halo 2 anniversary post. Here is what he said "What has me excited right now is the revisiting of Halo. So later this year we're gonna get Halo 2 Anniversary edition WITH ALL SORTS OF ****. On Xbox One. November 11th! Halo 2 Anniversary Edition - Halo 5 beta access Halo real time show... think Forward Unto Dawn (not the Spielberg stuff) Someone told me there was going to be an alternative f*cking ending. " http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=98866107&postcount=1 Not only does he speak about Halo 2 anniversary he also mentions that it will come with access to a Halo 5 beta and will see another live action series similar to forward unto dawn. What is also interesting is that we had recent tweets from Major Nelson that seemed to be a little suspicious talking about how he's fascinated by bee's. This led many people to speculate that another I Love Bee's ARG was coming thus leaving many people to believe he was teasing at Halo 2 Anniversary. https://twitter.com/majornelson/status/421676373443239936 What was even more interesting is that 405th Infantry Division (the company that made the viral campaigns for Halo 4) tweeted "HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE - Truth?" two day's after Major Nelsons tweet. That is a direct quote from ilovebees.com. https://twitter.com/405thSource/status/422566604690685952 So could this rumor hold some value this time around? Either way it should still be taken with a grain of salt. Other Reports http://www.scified.com/site/halo-universe/rumor-halo-2-anniversary-2014-halo-5-2015 http://www.neoseeker.com/news/24516-rumors-suggest-halo-5-delayed-to-2015-halo-2-anniversary-coming-november-2014/ http://www.examiner.com/article/rumor-halo-2-anniversary-for-xbox-one-this-fall-halo-5-2015

Microsoft has bought the rights to Gears of War from Epic Games and has given their game studio Black tusk the task to continue making new games for the franchise polygon has reported. Rod Ferguson who was executive producer and director of production at Epic Games has joined Black Tusk to aid them in further production of the Gears of War franchise, he will be working along side the studios manager Hanno Lemke. Ferguson spoke to polygon about this new turn of events. "I'm extremely excited to be joining Black Tusk Studios to oversee development on the Gears of War franchise," Ferguson said to polygon. "I've been privileged to work on a lot of great games with a lot of great teams, but Gears has had the most impact on me professionally and personally, so this really feels like a homecoming. I can't wait to share more with you all soon." Polygon also spoke to Microsoft Studios corporate vice president, he stated that they are not planning to talk about the franchise yet, but will be making announcements this year. Most likely we will see something regarding it at this years E3.

Reddit user CitadelSaint has set up a site called xboxie.com that has a collection of HTML5 internet games that we can play on our Xbox using our controller. After he learned that these types of games work on the Xbox Internet Explorer using the controller he searched for games and put together the site. "The name XBOXIE is (Xbox + IE) but pronounced “Xboxy”. As most of HTML 5 games are designed with Keyboard in mind it means there is very little with controller support. After googling for hours to find working games I decided to put together a site with every game I've test and I know that works." There are a total of 38 games on the site at the moment but there are more on the way say's the reddit user in his post "Over the next week I will be adding hundreds of games to the site (But I've been programming all today so I've decided to give myself a break)" He states he will be contacting indie dev's who make these types of games and ask to put in controller support so that they are playable on consoles. We can also submit games to the site, if anyone has discovered any other games that work on the Xbox's IE and that are playable with the controller we can submit games to the site by clicking the submit button at the top if the page and he will add them to the database. Check out the site xboxie.com

To kick of 2014 with games with gold Sleeping dogs is up first to grab for free until the January 15th then Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light will be up after that for remainder of the month. Sleeping Dogs is an open world game developed by United Front Games, it takes place in Hong Kong and involves the organized crime of the Triads Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a platform action game which was developed by Crystal Dynamics. The game follows Lara Croft to Central America as she searches for ancient relics and battles ferocious beasts.

I've recently stumbled over an interesting excerpt from the latest edition of Xbox Official Magazine that I'd like to share with you all: Having fun hacking people's arms off in Ryse, or getting stamped on by Aoife's (she claims) unstoppable Drivatar in Forza Motorsport 5? The best is yet to come, you may be unsurprised to hear. Speaking to OXM as part of a lengthy piece on the future of Xbox One you'll read in our latest issue, Microsoft Studios exec Phil Harrison has promised that future Xbox One games will make use of the platform's various capabilities in far more interesting ways. "When you've been around for a long time, you know what platforms are like," he began. "The games you celebrate and are proud of in the first year, when you look back at them from the perspective of ten years from now; you'd be amazed at the difference. It's a combination of the tools getting better, developers beginning to understand the unique architecture to work with." The claim that developers are able to do more with hardware they're used to is hardly electrifying, of course. It's already been suggested by CD Projekt's lead engine programmer Balázs Török that Microsoft will unlock "hidden" performance boosts for the Xbox One - a prediction he bases on Microsoft's sharing of new techniques for development on Xbox 360 across 2007 and 2008. This probably won't amount to anything as dramatic as the discovery of another gigabyte of RAM, but Harrison insists that there's less of a "glass ceiling" for eking more juice out of the Xbox One, thanks to the much-touted and still largely ethereal benefits of the Xbox Live cloud. "Crucially this time around, there's the power of the cloud and what that means for game design. That can grow and scale indefinitely - of course there is a practical limit but in effect you're uncapped. And I think, from a player's perspective, that's the most exciting part; that it's not just about the chips in the box under the television or wherever you position your console of choice, it's about what the platform will provide you with over time. We've not had that in a console generation before." This growing process ostensibly applies to both performance and features. There are, Harrison told us, plenty of ideas Microsoft has yet to fully implement - whether couched as part of a game, or in the form of an app, or in some other form entirely. "There are more ideas and vision for what games can be than available time to build them into the launch games. "So for every feature you've seen in the launch titles - SmartGlass, GameDVR, use of voice with Kinect - there are five features in the queue waiting to come out, either in an update or a sequel or in a future version of a game. The kind of creative and technical innovation that we're seeing in the industry - it's a really good time." Source

At a time when Microsoft (MS) is planning to unveil it's next generation XBOX it may be just the time to reflect on the past. Some companies will, seemingly, will unabashedly promote their newest products well beyond any realistic measure in order to get the biggest sales return possible. A story I recently read by Andrew Groen of Wired took a look back at all the hype offered by Microsoft surrounding the XBOX 360 and he provided an interesting retrospective of sales versus reality. These insights may better help the gamer to weed through the onslaught of hype, as experienced most recently with Halo 4, and the reality, as seen by the current population that still plays the game. The reality there is an unfinished game was sold to the consumer to hit a sales period for the holidays instead of taking the time to finish the product, which without a doubt, would have given the playing population a fully functional game that met the standards spoken to by it's producer and maintained a much stronger presence in the gaming world. The jubilation they thrived in briefly about sales was soon darkened by the reality of the disenfranchised fan base. This decision also affected a supporting company, Certain Affinty, whose reputation, and most likely income, depended on DLC content and their work on forge for Halo 4. Hopefully these companies will see this reality for themselves in a manner that will allow them to continue to produce quality products and experiences for their consumers without loosing sight of the consumers need to be able to trust in the very products and services they provide. The story as offered at wired.com 7 Years Later, Has Microsoft Kept Its Xbox 360 Promises? BY ANDREW GROEN - 04.25.13 - 6:30 AM Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wasn’t shy about predicting that Xbox 360 would change the world of entertainment as we know it, but has the company delivered on its huge promises? Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com Microsoft was more than a little bombastic when it began hyping up the Xbox 360 before its 2005 launch. “In the next generation, Xbox 360 will transform the way people play games and have fun,” said Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, at the company’s 2005 press briefing at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Certainly it did, but not necessarily in the ways that Microsoft promised. Xbox 360 was a great gaming device, one that Microsoft continually improved upon in a way that was unheard of in the game business until this generation. It constantly added significant new features, upgraded the user experience and moved from an also-ran to a major player, forcing the competition to follow suit. The PlayStation 2 you bought in 2001 was the same exact machine in 2005, but the Xbox 360 you bought that year would be unrecognizable now. Xbox 360 did change everything. But many of the things Microsoft talked about at the beginning of the generation turned out to be so much vaporware. And often instead of pursuing them, Microsoft allowed the competition to. It’s pretty clear Microsoft was shining us on about… well, a lot. On Wednesday, Microsoft officially announced what all of us have known was coming for years now: It will unveil the next generation of Xbox hardware at an event in Redmond, Washington on May 21. This follows the sort-of unveiling of PlayStation 4 by Sony in February, at which it made grandiose pledges such as saying that PlayStation 4 will “make you feel emotions that you have never felt in real life.” Sure it will. As we pointed out at the time, Sony made many similar promises about PlayStation 3, many of which failed to materialize. What about Microsoft’s hype about Xbox 360, back in 2005? Here’s what executives said, and what really happened. “A product with games at its core, surrounded by limitless connected digital entertainment.”— J Allard, then Xbox chief experience officer, at the 2005 E3 press briefing. “Limitless” was obvious hyperbole, and yet it ended up being truer than even former Microsoft evangelist Allard probably believed at the time. At the time, “connected digital entertainment” meant people would use their vast knowledge of 2005 technology to plug in an iPod to hear songs through the TV. Today, 360 users can access the internet, Twitter, Facebook, ESPN apps, live presidential election coverage and thousands of movies, TV shows and songs. Verdict: True ^ “For us to say we’re going to go through a whole generation without an HD capacity drive — I think that would be naive to assume that we’ll be sitting here at the end of the Xbox 360 generation and no such device will have shipped… We’re not going to be sitting here in five years saying, ‘Oh jeez, we don’t have HD DVD-type storage.’” – Steve Ballmer, Engadget interview, published May 2005. We suppose that Ballmer was technically correct: After launching Xbox 360 with a standard-capacity DVD drive instead of a high-density disc, Microsoft did release an HD-DVD drive that plugged into an Xbox 360 via USB. This was only for watching HD-DVD movies, not playing games, and Microsoft hastily discontinued it when HD-DVD lost the format battle to Blu-ray — a battle that may have been won solely because Sony put Blu-ray into every PlayStation 3. Had every Xbox 360 played HD-DVD discs, Blu-ray might have gone the way of Betamax. Seven years later, Microsoft is sitting here saying, “Oh jeez, we don’t have HD-DVD type storage.” Just call him Naive Steve. Verdict: False ^ “On the [Xbox Live] Marketplace… she might never pick up a controller, never take a run in the halfpipe but she’ll be able to design and sell stickers, shirts, boards, soundtracks and even design her own skate park for those hardcore gamers.” — J Allard, 2005 Microsoft E3 Press Briefing. The “she” in this particular statement was the infamous “Velocity Girl,” the online screen name of a hypothetical young female non-gamer who would use her Xbox 360 as a place to create and sell her own designs and products. Microsoft promised an online modding community where users could sell their digital wares for cash on the Xbox 360 marketplace, but the company never really even tried. Throughout the system’s lifespan Microsoft never implemented any large-scale programs that would have brought about the non-gaming hipster-design revolution that it prophesized. We’ve seen a couple small attempts over the years, though. The Forza Motorsport storefront, for instance, allows players to create car designs and other goods to sell for in-game credits — but not real cash. Players creating items and selling them at a profit has actually has become a reality — but it’s Valve doing it on the Steam service, not Microsoft. Verdict: False ^ “It’s a future where my games are always personalized to match my desires.” — “Kim,” the ultra-hip introduction presenter at Microsoft’s E3 2005 press briefing. In the early days of its marketing campaign, Microsoft used cringe-inducing statements like this to brag about how much Generation Me was going to be able to “express themselves” through their Xbox 360. While Microsoft has done some great work in making the console itself more flexible to the user’s interests (you can even still buy those staggeringly pointless faceplates that Microsoft abandoned years ago), the games themselves have rarely fit that description. Downloadable content has provided an avenue for players to somewhat personalize some games, but giving a company more money for new digital character outfits hardly counts as “personalization.” Verdict: False ^ Microsoft executive Robbie Bach had to walk a careful verbal tightrope when he talked about Xbox’s backward compatibility. Photo courtesy Microsoft “We will make money, and a lot of money in this next generation!” — Steve Ballmer, interview with Engadget published May 18, 2005. Microsoft spent four tough years with the original Xbox in which it operated the division at a big loss — reportedly $4 billion over four years — in order to try to gain a foothold in the videogame market. So investors wouldn’t have been pleased if Microsoft said they’d have to wait another generation for the profit to begin flowing. Though Xbox 360 also operated at a loss for its first few years, Microsoft’s fortunes finally turned in late 2008 when it posted the first net profits for the Entertainment and Devices division (which includes Xbox, Windows Phone, PC gaming and Zune) since its entry into consoles. It got off to a rough start, though. Xbox 360 faced a $1 billion setback when Microsoft extended the system’s warranty to three years due to the dreaded Red Ring of Death error, resulting in a disastrous $1.9 billion operating loss for the division in 2007. It will take more time for Microsoft to erase the massive multi-billion dollar loss accrued in the early years, but the division is now profitable and Microsoft is now a major market player. Verdict: Somewhat true ^ “Tonight we are pleased to announce that Xbox 360 will be backward compatible with the top-selling Xbox games.” — Robbie Bach, E3 2005 Microsoft Press Briefing. This is Microsoft’s most infamous statement prior to the launch of the Xbox 360. When Bach made this announcement, the crowd went wild before he finished his sentence, allowing him to mumble the “top selling” bit. It seemed, at first, that he had just said the Xbox 360 was backward compatible with original Xbox games, and anybody who purchased a 360 would be able to catch up on the first Xbox’s library of games. We soon found out that you really have to parse every single word of Microsoft’s statements. It indeed only intended to make the top-selling Xbox games backward compatible with Xbox 360, not the entire library. And it didn’t even do that, not at first: Less than a third of the Xbox’s library worked on Xbox 360 at launch, and the emulation software that ran the games was often glitchy, sometimes to the point where the game played much worse than it did on the less powerful machine. Many of the “top-selling” games were actually missing, since they were harder to emulate than the cheapo games: Splinter Cell didn’t work, but Barbie Horse Adventure was good to go. Over the next two years, Microsoft did work to add more games, eventually getting about half of the library emulated and adding most (but not all) of the biggest games on the platform. Verdict: A sneaky half-truth ^ “Microsoft will inevitably succeed in Japan.” – Takashi Sensui, general manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division in Japan. The worldwide videogame business was a much different industry in 2005. Though Japan’s influence has recently begun to slip, in 2005 it was seen as a major key to success, and the original Xbox tanked miserably there. With Xbox 360, Microsoft devoted considerable resources to changing that, but not even two exclusive RPGs from one of the most famous designers in Japan (Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi) could overcome the widespread apathy toward Xbox 360. In June of 2011, Microsoft announced it had sold 1.5 million Xbox 360s in nearly six years. To contrast, the Nintendo DS has sold over 33 million consoles there to date. Hardly a good showing. Verdict: False ^ “We’ll get there by making games more approachable for people who didn’t grow up with a game controller.” — Robbie Bach, 2005 E3 press briefing, on expanding the market. Microsoft didn’t manage to do this when it launched Xbox 360, but Nintendo did the next year with the Wii’s motion controller. It was later revealed that Microsoft had turned down the rights to the underlying core technology of Wii. After Nintendo’s success, it was much more receptive to the idea for Kinect, a different type of motion controller. Kinect has brought about some of the most wretched games in the history of the console. But it did have a couple of highly successful, demographic-expanding, controller-free games like Dance Central. On the other other hand, Kinect has mostly been successful at selling to small kids who can’t yet handle a controller, not grownups who never learned to use one. Verdict: Half true ^ “Wouldn’t it be cool to have the game that has the person on the PC being the general who is driving the strategy, and the person on the console on Xbox Live executing the strategy? That is a completely new genre… and it leverages everything that Steve [ballmer] talked about that we’re putting in place.” — Robbie Bach, interview with Engadget, published May 18, 2005. Seven years later, no game even remotely approaching this type of PC-console cross-play has been released. There have been some instances of console and PC players being able to play the same game together, but unfortunately for Microsoft they were mostly on PlayStation 3. The only game that seems somewhat similar to this dream is Dust 514, a multiplayer shooter which is bound to the outer space MMO EVE Online. In Dust 514, players can coordinate with groups in EVE for funding and even artillery bombardments which can help them win battles. But this, too, is a Sony exclusive. So yes, it would absolutely be cool, but Microsoft hasn’t bothered to do it. Verdict: False ^