ZuneScene reprints a conversation it had with what it says is a trusted source, who confirms they are shooting for an October 16 release date for the next generation Zunes. The new Zunes will come in green, pink, black or red, and in both larger sizes with an 80 gigabyte hard drives, and smaller sizes with 4 and 8 gig flash memory.
The most interesting thing might be the new center control button will not be the old circle button, but a new control called a “squircle”, a half-square, half circle, which has a dome underneath so you can push it from the sides. Sounds like the new button might be the sort of unique touch that forces people to give the Zune a second look. I can’t wait to see the new Zunes in person.
The new homepage for Windows Live Search, which LiveSide told us was coming last week, has gone live, a whole week before the Searchification event. The search results pages haven’t taken on the new interface, but you can see the new page at live.com (or search.live.com if you use the personalized homepage). One wonders why this launched now, and not at Searchification. What are they holding for next week?
Mass Effect, an upcoming Xbox 360 action role-playing game, has submitted information to a games rating board that it will feature a sex scene that players can initiate. While I am glad to see games willing to take some risk and try things that would be completely acceptable in movie theatres, everyone is puzzled by the nature of the sex.
See, you can be a male character or a female characters. Males can have sex with human women or alien women. Women can have sex with a human man or an alien woman. Apparently, the game is okay with male/female sex (human/human or human/alien), woman/woman sex (alien only), but not man/man sex. I can think of several possible reasons:
Alien men are extremely unattractive, and no one, man or woman, would ever have sex with them.
Alien women are extremely attractive, causing the woman character to “switch teams”.
They are balancing the scales after Bully, which featured man/man kissing.
Commonly, the opinion is that man/man sex is not considered “hot”, while woman/woman sex is considerd “very hot”.
Alien men don’t sleep with other alien men, they just eat their brains.
What do you think? I think the censors are going to go nuts, and the game may never ship with this scene, but we’ll see.
Mary Jo reports that Microsoft is planning on releasing some new developer tools in November that will make it easier to develop applications on Windows Live platforms. The Windows Live toolbox kit will work with the company’s Visual Studio developer software and look and work like Microsoft’s Facebook developer toolkit. Developing apps on the cloud is an important part of how Windows Live will become Microsoft’s next big operating system, and since an OS is only as good as its developers, these tools will help it along the way.
Kotaku has the story of a guy that proposed marriage to his girlfriend during a game of Viva Piñata. He sent her an in-game message along with a diamond he found in the game, then when she laughed at it from across the room (yeah, they were playing on different systems in the same room), he presented her with the real ring. Here’s G4 briefly talking about it:
There’s anotherapplication for synchronizing your Facebook friends with Outlook contacts. Sadly, this one may look pretty, but it is less effective (1/3 as many matches) and has less features than Fonebook. Read my article on Fonebook here, and download it instead.
ZuneScene reprints a conversation it had with what it says is a trusted source, who confirms they are shooting for an October 16 release date for the next generation Zunes. The new Zunes will come in green, pink, black or red, and in both larger sizes with an 80 gigabyte hard drives, and smaller sizes with 4 and 8 gig flash memory.
Mass Effect, an upcoming Xbox 360 action role-playing game, has submitted information to a games rating board that it will feature a sex scene that players can initiate. While I am glad to see games willing to take some risk and try things that would be completely acceptable in movie theatres, 
