Duncan Mackenzie .NET

A new father-son activity for Connor and me […]

Adam Kinney, Silverlight dude and my colleague at work, has released an updated version of his Xbox Friends Watch gadget and a new standalone gamercard gadget for your website that uses Silverlight 2.0. […]

Trixie had all of us Xbox.com column writing folks answer a bunch of holiday themed questions recently, and I noticed tonight that the answers are all up on the site! Check out some interesting Q&A with Trixie, Major Nelson and others (including me, Xbox Dad). […]

I've obviously been busy, I never even posted a link to these articles here... I've written two new Xbox Dad article in the past few weeks, one all about Xbox Live (to coincide with the Xbox Live is Five event going on) and one that I wrote this week about Viva Piñata Party Animals. Viva Piñata Part […]

If you or your kids are all excited about the upcoming Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld, then you should definitely check out my latest article on Xbox.com. Along with the movie, an Xbox 360 game is also on its way.... and a demo is already up on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Not the most representative d […]

In Halo 3 multi-player you can customize your SPARTAN or Elite's armor, with different variations unlocked by various achievements/activities in game (including one that can only be unlocked by being a Bungie employee). You can find out more about the different variations here, but it turns out that […]

For the price of $280, you can now get a new edition of the Xbox 360 console. This one is similar to the original core system, but with HDMI output, a 256mb memory card (so you can play and save your games right out of the box), a wireless controller, and five full arcade games. Perfect if you […]

I was a bit surprised to find that I enjoyed this game, although I enjoyed the last few books in the series and the latest movie, I really figured the game would only appeal to kids. The pace is slower than most adult/teen games, but that makes it into more of an exploration instead of just quickly […]

My latest kid-focused game article, which happens to be yet another movie tie-in, is about the upcoming Pixar film Ratatouille. Cool game, very nice looking... and it has entire missions around making recipes by spilling ingredients... just like how I cook at home! […]

I sat down to chat with Tina from Channel 10 to chat about my Xbox Dad articles, gaming with your kids, etc... […]

Family Gaming with the K-6 Crowd […]

A few people have emailed me or posted comments wondering how I grab the Xbox Info for the Twitter app and for my services. It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support […]

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here: […]

My profile page... not sure if you can find out, but I've lost the last 3 games of Halo 3...

UPDATE: I've updated this application since the original version, addressing most of the 'known issues' listed below […]

Halo 2 on Vista: We've got the new maps, features and achievements […]

My 2nd column is up on Xbox.com, covering the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. […]

I own a lot of Xbox and Xbox 360 games... some good, some bad... but the hit/miss ratio is much better for all my 360 games, mostly because of game renting. Starting around the time the 360 launched, I signed up for Gamefly and I've alternated between the two and three game plans. It is […]

<random musing>It seems like an online article, but I wonder if it wouldn't be just easier for them to publish these articles as blog entries?</random musing> […]

I think it was playing Chargeball in Meet the Robinsons, but for whatever reason I started thinking about this […]

On Wednesday, a new Xbox Live Arcade game from Rare will be hitting the Marketplace... Jetpac Refueled. I have to say, from the moment we started shipping retro games onto the Xbox 360, this is what I've been […]

I captured some footage of Viva Piñata to test the quality of capturing the analog video out from the 360 into a miniDV camera... worked out pretty good I think. […]

Including backgrounds from Gears, Alien Hominid, Bullet Witch and more... grab them now! […]

I'm far from having used up all the gameplay in the initial release of Oblivion, and I haven't even gotten into the expansions, and now they've annouced an additional expansion with a ton more gameplay that I can jump into on the 360... amazing. […]

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty […]

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Both are my style... but I had to go with the Star Trek Legacy one for now... […]

Normally I do video for 10, but in this case I had a bunch of questions and I decided to see if the team behind Superman Returns would be up for answering them via email. They were, and the whole conversation is up as a post on http://on10.net […]

From Major Nelson: […]

Probably not the best plan in the world, but we sent Laura out with Pizza and a Premium Xbox 360 to try and win the hearts and minds of a line up of PS3 buyers at Target... watch the video on 10 (download only right now)... and maybe we'll do the same for the Wii? […]

I flew to Boston a couple of weeks ago and interviewed some folks at Mad Doc Software, and the first part of that interview is now up on 10. […]

 Last night I jumped on a flight at around 11pm in Seattle and flew to Boston, getting in around 7am, then I drove up to the offices of Mad Doc software... makers of quite a few cool games, including Empire Earth II, Star Trek Armada II and now Star Trek: Legacy for the Xbox 360 (and for the PC […]

As I mentioned before, I had a chance to chat with the PM for the Xbox 360 Wireless Headset and now that interview is up on on10.net. Remember, the headset is releasing just in time for Gears of War (November 7th). Coincidence? I think not! […]

Have you seen this list of features? […]

Interesting news, content that is only for Xbox Live Gold members... which even Tycho thinks is understandable, but I agree with his comments about what kind of content is being restricted. they made a serious misstep with the content they chose to inaugurate Silver's descent into squalor: a traile […]

Fairly mixed response over on MajorNelson.com to this game, mostly either people who love it or people who are wishing we'd stop with the 'retro' games already... I'm a bit on the fence here myself, I […]

Sometimes it is hard to know what you are getting on the marketplace, especially with themes and gamer pics, but in general there is a lot of content and it isn't always easy to find what you are looking for. Well, it seems that will be less of a problem, thanks to the launch of the "Xbox Live Pipel […]

I loved this email from Xbox Live today: […]

TotemBall, the gesture-based game that works with the Xbox Live Vision camera, just shipped to the Xbox Live Marketplace. It is a free download, but you need to have the camera to play. While you are waiting for it to download, check out my video demo of TotemBall up on 10. […]

Wow, very cool stuff. Another fun example of how little Microsoft employees know about Microsoft products (I learned about this game from gamespot!) but still, very exciting. Another RTS for the 360 too; I'm playing Battle for Middle Earth now so I'm looking forward to the idea of a second RTS to […]

I went over to 360Style.net today to find that it has been totally redesigned... same great content, much easier to find your way around. While I was there I picked up a new background for my Vista box. The wallpapers that ship with Vista are beautiful, but they can't compare with this... […]

(also available via the Xbox Live marketplace on your 360) […]

With the release of Scramble today, I noticed something odd on the game detail page on Xbox.com. Along the left hand side is a listing of the specs of the game (# of players, does it work with Live, etc.) and it includes this interesting line: "HDTV 480i"   Hmm.... while I've never subscri […]

These aren't from an official source, as far as I know, but they look pretty legit to me :) […]

Now that the site appears to be stable, I wanted to mention that my ultra-cool green banner was done for me by Chris from 360Style.net. If you haven't seen his site yet, check it out... my desktop wallpaper is always one of Chris's images

As I've mentioned before, I have a Gamefly subscription and I get new games every few weeks... a great way to play a lot of games without the risk of paying $60 for a stinker (OverG Fighters for example... oh so happy I rented that instead of buying). Anyway, my most recent game is Chromehounds and […]

And the general geek-focused music world in general I suspect... but I only see Frontalot's name on there now. […]

Sampy and I were looking at some photos of the MC Chris concert from PAX05 and I had to go dig up the song. Easy enough to find the MP3 on MC Chris's site, but I remembered a video ... not this one, but close enough. […]

Check out the first day of PAX 2006, including some footage of the first Penny Arcade Q&A session (learn about the new Wii60 console, coming to a store near you this year), some talk about women, and Tina's dirty dirty camera lens. […]

That is really all that needs to be said, yes?

PAX was a blast, I went back for day 2 and spent almost all the day at the exhibition hall... tons of cool demos and people! I was able to stop at the Xbox booth and chat with Trixie (as Brian mentions here), which was great because she is one of those people that I've emailed quite a bit but ne […]

So I've been wanting to go to PAX since it started a couple of years ago, and every time it has come around I've been out of town... until now... and, by some interesting twist of fate, I know have a job that actually required me to attend :) So Tina, Sampy, Adam and I headed over there today, snuck […]

Sampy and I stopped by the main doors of PAX last night around 1am and there was already two groups of folks waiting. Some guys from Detroit were first in line, having come in by train earlier that day, and they covered the full range of video gaming interests (although no one in their group was int […]

I'll be hanging around outside a bit tonight, to check on any folks who are that excited to be there already, and I'll be around after 2pm tomorrow... a lot of Saturday... some of Sunday... in general, I'll be there :) […]

Teaser sites are all the rage these days, but this one ended pretty quickly to reveal a new product from our hardware division. I don't really do much PC gaming, but I think this mouse might end up on my desk anyway... I love the blue lighting!! […]

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I've been stoked for some time by the completely black case replacement for the 360, but now I've found out that I can potentially switch my controllers (even the wireless ones) to custom colors as well... very very sweet. […]

Met with Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team today to talk about Microsoft Gamefest. If you are going, drop me a line... I'll be there with a camera along with one or two other folks from on10.net. […]

I was surprised early to hear that God of War II was a PS2 game... and now this? I think it just the price that is scaring developers... scary to develop for a console that seems out of the price range of your target audience. I say "seems" because despite my own (biased) negative thoughts about the […]

Yesterday, Laura and I headed over to the offices of Penny Arcade to interview them about... well, about a variety of things, it was a very interesting interview. […]

Ok, so I have to admit something... when I saw Assassin's Creed in the various E3 videos, I was sad. The game looked amazing, but I'm not going to buy a PS3 ... you can see my dilemma. […]

Update on the bricked PSP... So I spoke to a someone at the local Sony retail store... $120 (CDN) to fix the PSP. Keeping in mind that all that my nephew did was turn it off when he saw a dialog he didn't understand, that is a lot of money. I'm especially unhappy because I know that this must be a c […]

I’m at my nephew’s place for a bit and he just ‘bricked’ his PSP. He put in a game and it started to do a firmware update... he didn’t understand what it was doing and was worried it was going to mess up his PSP, so he turned the power off. […]

Sometimes I don't like being just the guy behind the scenes :) […]

I'm certain I can't enter, being a MSFT employee and all, but you can! […]

I've recently taken a little break from playing Oblivion, which had been the only disc in my 360 for the past couple of months, and I decided to try a range of games. While working on our book, Xbox 360 for Dummies, I added every single 360 game to my Q on Gamefly.com, so I end up getting a random s […]

If I told you that I was a recovering alcholic, would you offer me a drink? I doubt it, unless you are a real bastard. Well, Adam Kinney (my boss at on10.net) and I have been having many discussions […]