PC Pro has an article paraphrasing Chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach as saying he believes the Xbox 2 can beat out Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3, possibly even in the Japanese market.

The previously mentioned $30 drop in the retail price of Microsoft's Xbox takes effect in the U.S. and Canada on Tuesday, March 30, according to News.com. There's no mention of any price change for Halo. Analysts are already speculating about whether Sony will also cut the price of the PlayStation 2, and about whether or not this cut is deep enough to spur additional Xbox sales.

Personally, I think the biggest boost that Xbox sales will get this year will be the released of Halo 2 and possibly Fable.

GarageGames, which licenses the Torque engine that was used to make games such as Tribes2, has lifted a restriction from their Independent Developer license, and changed the Commercial Developers license as well.

This time, no less a source than the Wall Street Journal is being cited in association with the story that Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will drop in price to $149, and a bundle with Halo will be $169.

Ryan Bryant, founder of Take Two Interactive, the company made more famous recently by its involvement with the Grand Theft Auto series by developer Rockstar Games, has resigned as chairman and director amid an investigation into accounting violations, according to the Associated Press.

Deimos Fawkes of Subnova writes that their file and game hosting activities may have to be curtailed in the future due to financial considerations. More detail if we get it.
Emil at CobaltNova seems to be retiring-- we saw this a few days ago but weren't sure it was for good, since the news post was so short. However, it looks like it is.

This tidbit popped up on the web recently on the page of a game development studio called Pi Studios LLC in Plano, Texas:

News.com's David Becker is reporting that M-Systems, a maker of flash memory, is announcing that they've signed a contract with Microsoft to provide memory systems for future Xbox products.

If you look at Randy Pitchford's .plan file through Blue's News, the project listings there are the same as they've been for some time:

1. Halo PC
2. Secret Sauce

"Secret Sauce" might have been the Halo Editing Kit before that was announced, but it might be something else all together.

Long proponents of the PC as the proper platform for gaming, Devon "Calvin" Welles and Frank "WyldKard" Torkel at game.ars are coming around to the idea that console games are where it's at, at least for now, and our own favorite game gets part of the credit:

The technological supremacy of PCs compared to consoles is no longer as great as it used to be, and though one might argue about resolution and framerate, there are few titles anymore that can be distinctly called inferior on a console. Mark it up to society's ignorance concerning the beauty of the keyboard/mouse combination for first-person shooters, or to their ignorance of streamlined, customized hardware. The fact remains that console gamers are more secure in their gaming decisions than ever before. And really, why shouldn't they be, given that a first person shooter with modern features (Halo) has become legendary (despite the fact that it requires a controller to play)?

The article also discusses the recently rumored Xbox 2 specs, and both think that removing the hard drive and not bothering with backwards compatibility are OK ideas:

[WyldKard] I'm with Calvin when it comes to backwards compatibility and profit, and I have been shouting this from the rooftops for some time now. Despite arguments to the contrary, I simply do not think lacking backwards compatibility will hurt Microsoft's console business. This will be the case even if Sony and Nintendo decide that supporting an older library is worthwhile. Given the resources required to implement backwards compatibility, I am not sure the difference in cost is justifiable, especially when a console needs to push a new library to make money on new sales.

Personally, I'm still not convinced. Tell the two of them that Half Life 2 will require a new PC that, oh, by the way, can't play any of their old games, and maybe you'd get a different answer.

1UP has put on their site an article by Dean Takahashi, author of Opening the Xbox and other recent articles about the successor to Microsoft's Xbox gaming console.

Corey Tamas posted an editorial at MacGamer at the end of last month that commented on the software piracy issue underlined by MacSoft's decision to require the Halo CD to be in the drive in order for Mac Halo to launch. It's entitled Back When I Stole Games, although "back when" seems to be not that long ago, as the most recently-copied game Tamas cites is the original Unreal.

As if to underscore some of the points in the recently rumored Xbox 2 specifications, Eurogamer has put up an article showing that the Xbox's lead over Nintendo's GameCube in Europe is still healthy, although both lag far behind top dog Sony and their PlayStation 2.

MacCentral's editor Peter Cohen has put up an article at MacCentral on piracy in the Mac games market, drawing on give-and-take from MacSoft's Peter Tamte, Aspyr Media's Michael Rogers and MacPlay's Mark Cottam.

The thrust of the article is poking holes in the arguments that pirates use to explain why they steal software, and explaining why all future MacSoft titles will have copy protection.

Microsoft announced earlier this month that the installed base of Xboxes worldwide has reached 13.7 million, and the Xbox Live service now has 750,000 subscribers.