Just a quick note to apologise for the dodgy stability we are having today. Unfortunately our hosting providers hosting provider is under attack… they are working on the problem and some script kiddie will be shot soon enough… Once again we apologise for the inconvenience. Last Updated: October 10, 2008

With Gears of War 2 just around the corner, a lot of excitement is brewing in the minds and thumbs of Xbox 360 owners. This latest developer diary is going to get the hype meters to hit the red . This video reminds us what all the fuss is about by showing little snippets of some of the new maps and multiplayer modes. After we had the chance to give Gears of Wars multiplayer a good go at rAge it became awfully clear that Gears of War 2 is going to blow our minds and keep us playing and playing until our poor little Xbox 360's disappear into a cloud of smoke or red rings. With so many people still playing the original Gears of War a whole 2 years after it's release then all the new modes and maps are sure to keep us all busy for a very, very long time to come. In the wonderful words of Marcus Phoenix: "Bring It!"

Microsoft has announced that since it cut the price of the Xbox 360, worldwide sales have shot through the roof. In America sales have doubled, over in Europe sales have increased by 62% and in Japan sales have skyrocketed 500%… Obviously the release of all those JRPG’s in Japan also made a difference but either way sales are up and …

EndWar has promised to change the way that we play real-time strategy (RTS) games on console and was built from the ground up to work on our little controllers with the aid of voice commands as opposed to the classic setup of a mouse and keyboard. While the Command & Conquer controls were pretty decent on console, it still didn't have me completely sold on the idea of an RTS console game. As I was not too clued in on EndWar's features (except knowing it had voice commands), I asked him to demo the game for me and show me what's what.... Romain (Who sounds an awful lot like Borat) starts explaining how the entire game can be controlled with the use of only the right trigger (to activate voice commands) and your headset. Lo and behold he starts issuing orders into the headset like "Unit 1, move to Alpha" and "Unit 2, attack hostile 2" and you know what, they all went off and did their thing.... For one, I do not trust voice recognition or commands, I have always thought that they were nifty but never really accurate or useful.... What happened next (and due to the fact that I spoke slowly) is that a menu popped up showing that I had selected Unit 1 and then rolled out into a secondary panel of options.... Within only a few minutes I was calling in units, attacking the bad people and grouping squads together and by that time, I was talking at the same pace as I would in normal conversation, if not faster.... A great decision in the games development is that your camera is attached to your units, so you can only see what your units see by calling their name and saying "camera" to move to their view. Your camera is fairly low in the battlefield, which means that you rely heavily on your squads to recon areas before you move in, adding a wonderful element of strategy into the games dynamics.... We are talking Ghost Recon, Rainbox Six and Splinter Cell units, and if that's not cool then I don't know what is.... Your chosen faction will duke it out with the others for they day, with the end result of the day showing who won what and where. A campaign may take up to three weeks to complete and once World War III is over, it all kicks off from the beginning again.... I left the interview convinced that EndWar is definitely one to look out for, especially if you are into RTS games. If you aren't an RTS fan, do yourself a favour and check it our anyway, the accessibility of the voice commands may just change your mind.

If you are one of the people who bought the original Core or Arcade then you are fresh out of luck with the New Xbox 360 Dashboard. You see the new Dashboard requires a minimum of 256 Mb storage space to install and the original Core came with no storage space at all and the original Arcade only came with …

It was always going to be tough for Microsoft to live up to the Summer of Arcade’s Castle Crashers, Braid, and Geometry Wars 2. But with a step in the right direction they revealed a slew of new Xbox Live Arcade titles at last night’s Tokyo Game Show keynote. Read more after the jump. Last Updated: October 9, 2008

Halo 3: Recon ‘Debut’ trailer HD Remember all the chaos caused over the fact that the trailer Bungie released for the Halo 3 expansion pack – Recon, really didn’t show much? Well now we have a proper trailer, the first half (and change) of the video is what we’ve seen in the past, with a city being bombarded, pods falling …

That’s right, Namco Bandai announced last night at TGS that Tekken 6 would be making it’s way to the Xbox 360 as well, Infact Microsoft announced it first at their press conference which sent alot of fanboys into a whining frenzy before Namco Bandai quelled their fears later by announcing the game would still come to PS3 aswell. Last Updated: …