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#dancecentral The motion tracking dance game that made Kinect seem so interesting turns three-games-old this fall, as Harmonix announces an October 16 release date for Dance Central 3, the only game to combine "Ice, Ice Baby", the Macarena and time travel. More »

Harmonix announced today that Dance Central 3 will be available in the Americas on October 16, with Europe, Asia and Australia hitting the dance floor October 19.

Along with the release date, Harmonix also shared several tracks that will be included in the game and are set to instantly activate our sense of empathic embarrassment when played. They include, but are not limited to: Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)", Los Del Rio's "Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)", Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" and the staple of bar mitzvah's and weddings everywhere: "Y.M.C.A." by The Village People.

Thankfully, there will be less cringe-inducing tracks available as well, along with the ability to import tracks from the first two games. Harmonix tells us it hasn't announced an export price yet, but it's "looking to stay in the same ballpark" of $5.

#kinect This is the V Motion Project, designed by some Kiwis as a means of creating "music through motion". It uses Microsoft's Kinect to capture the body movements of the "player", and then recreates them in giant-size up on the wall, adding a futuristic overlay to let you see what you're doing. More »

Despite Microsoft working to ensure the security of its Xbox Live network, the company has encouraged users to check their security information and update their passwords in a community blog post today. It's a cruel (virtual) world out there, folks.

It's all part of new security measures that Microsoft is employing, measures that began with the spring update issued last month. The update helped Microsoft "build on security enhancements for the near future," says Xbox Live general manager Alex Garden.

Xbox Live took its share of security lumps this year, including claims of a FIFA hack and purported Windows Live ID problems. In the community post, Microsoft also provides some general internet security tips - in case you didn't know it was a bad idea to use the same password for every site you've ever logged onto.

#kotakumelodic Yes, Kinect is played out. Yes, Dubstep is is the cliched soundtrack for everything we're supposed to think is cool. But when you combine the two, you get something like this, a Kinect-powered full-body instrument called the V Motion Project. It may remind PlayStation 3 gamers of the Move-powered Pixeljunk 4AM. Why not? Body controlled instruments can make interesting music and, more importantly, look damn cool. More »

#nasa Hop on Xbox Live and search for Mars Rover Landing. You'll find a Kinect game made by NASA and Microsoft that's meant to simulate the tense experience of landing Curiosity, NASA's rover that will land on Mars on August 5 after eight and a half months of travel. More »

The first Dance Central 2 DLC track for the month of July dropped yesterday: Selena Gomez & The Scene's "Round and Round." This upbeat number is available for download right now for 240 MS Points ($3) either through Dance Central 2's in-game store, or directly through Xbox Live Marketplace.

Dance Central 2 is getting a trio of new tracks this month. Next week on July 17, Demi Lovato's "La La Land" will be available for download for 240 MS Points. Patient beliebers will likely want to save up their pennies until July 24, when Justin Bieber is added to the catalog with his number, "Never Say Never."

"Kinect PlayFit," first seen in leaks, is now officially announced - and officially released today! That means we can finally understand what Kinect PlayFit is: a special "fitness dashboard" that tracks your calories lost across multiple Kinect games, "from Dance Central 2 to Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 to Kinect Star Wars," according to Microsoft.

The dashboard also features leaderboards and social "activity challenges," two ideas that probably either motivate you to keep up your fitness routine or make you feel very uncomfortable, depending on how fit you already are. It even has its own Achievements.

#xbox Microsoft has launched an application called Kinect PlayFit as a free download for all Xbox Live members, the publisher said today. More »

The latest round of fuel-injected and/or naturally aspirated DLC has hit Forza 4, bringing with it a swatch of blacktop devouring beasts from modern times and days gone by.

The aptly named July Car Pack, available today for 560 MS Points, features the following sick whips (in chronological order): The 1952 Hudson Hornet, 1954 Jaguar XK120, 1956 Lotus Eleven, 1973 AMC Gremlin X, 1995 RUF CTR2, 1998 Aston Martin V8 Vantage V600, 2011 McLaren 59 GT MP4-12C GT3, 2012 Spyker C8 Aileron, 2012 Ascari KZ1R and 2012 Mercedes-Benz SLK55 AMG, all of which can be seen in the trailer above and gallery below.

The recently announced Xbox Music service will feature both a subscription-based model and the ability to purchase individual tracks, according to a Bloomberg report. The service will reportedly allow users to stream music for a monthly or yearly subscription, in addition to traditional purchases.

Furthermore, an "online locker" of sorts may allow customers to store their music collections online for a fee, with the really intriguing part being that the locker could store music purchased from other services as well. As previously announced, said music will be playable across a range of devices, notably those that run Windows 8.

In other words, it sounds like Xbox Music will offer similar functionality to what is currently offered by the Zune service, with the added benefit of having a name that isn't associated with grim failure.

Microsoft's Kinect accelerator program, furnished by entrepreneurship incubator TechStars, recently gave 11 teams 13 weeks and $20,000 each to polish their motion-sensing ideas and present them to a team of investors this Thursday in Seattle. The startups range from a system that allows surgeons to navigate MRI and CT scans in the operating room, to an in-store camera system that tracks shoppers' behavior. Another turns any surface into a 3D, multi-touch screen for Windows.

Many of the startup ideas offer an attempt to bring Kinect into the wider, physical world, rather than limit it to living rooms and virtual baby tigers. Of the final creations, three are made for the medical field, four are based in tracking or innovating consumer behavior, two are animation-based, one can help athletes train and one is that awesome 3D surface app.

Microsoft is accepting applications for its fall 2012 accelerator class, Windows Azure and cloud-based startups, right here. Below check out the full descriptions of all 11 entrants, as provided by Microsoft.

In this editorial, regular Joystiq contributor Kat Bailey examines the trends Microsoft should consider for its next generation console.
Want to know something amazing? The Xbox 360 has been around nearly twice as long as the original Xbox, and we've yet to hear a hint from Microsoft about its next console. Instead, the hardware manufacturer is happy to keep moving along for another year with Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgment, and even more Kinect games, secure in the knowledge that the Xbox 360 is among the company's most successful products.

To be sure, Microsoft is in a much better place now than seven years ago. After four years of running an unprofitable second to Sony, Microsoft was more than ready to move on from what the company had openly described as a test bed. In fact, Microsoft was so desperate to get its console to market that the company was willing to ignore technical problems that would go on to cost them more than a billion dollars. And much as that hurt, Microsoft (if not its customers) would probably still say that the headstart was worth it.

In this editorial, regular Joystiq contributor Kat Bailey examines the trends Microsoft should consider for its next generation of consoles.
Want to know something amazing? The Xbox 360 has been around nearly twice as long as the original Xbox, and we've yet to hear a hint from Microsoft about its next console. Instead, the hardware manufacturer is happy to keep moving along for another year with Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgment, and even more Kinect games, secure in the knowledge that the Xbox 360 is among the company's most successful products.

To be sure, Microsoft is in a much better place now than seven years ago. After four years of running an unprofitable second to Sony, Microsoft was more than ready to move on from what the company had openly described as a test bed. In fact, Microsoft was so desperate to get its console to market that the company was willing to ignore technical problems that would go on to cost them more than a billion dollars. And much as that hurt, Microsoft (if not its customers) would probably still say that the headstart was worth it.

Haunt, NanaOn-Sha's Kinect-based haunted house adventure is free from now through July 2 - but only if you download it through the "Kinect Central" app on your Xbox 360's dashboard.

Sure, late June isn't exactly the season for spookiness, but Haunt isn't meant to be all that spooky anyway. Think "whimsical." Think "Tim Schafer's voice." Besides, something had to alert us to the existence of the "Kinect Central" doodad.

The discounted 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle with bonus two-year contract is available now at participating Best Buy and GameStop locations. The basics of the deal (term used loosely): the package costs $99 up front, with a 24-month contract at $14.99 a month, which will include Xbox Live Gold.

Sparing the need to whip out the TI-82 calculater, the cost of the contract would total roughly $460 over the next two years. A 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle currently has a suggested retail price of $299, with Xbox Live Gold at about $50 a year, for an up front total of $399. Of course, all of this up-front math is subject to change over the next two years at the potential whims of retailer deals or official console price drops.

Your chance to become a vampire lord and block out Skyrim's sun forever becomes (virtual) reality tomorrow with the launch of Skyrim's first major expansion, "Dawnguard." Of course, if you can't speak English (how are you reading this?!) but can speak French, Italian, German, or Spanish, it won't be available for another few weeks. If you speak something else ... well, you might be skunked. But again, you're probably not reading this if that's the case. Also, you smell like feet. Take that, person who can't understand what we're saying!

#steelbattalion In 2002 Capcom released Steel Battalion for the Xbox, a mech game so complex it was bundled for $200 with a massive proprietary controller. It didn't sell particularly well, but Capcom didn't let them stop them from creating a sequel that will probably sell worse. More »

Soon you'll have new ways to earn Xbox Live Rewards. The official Twitter account for Microsoft's wing that incentivizes friend referrals and surveys with free MS Points has announced Achievement functionality is coming this fall. The problem is we don't exactly know what that means right now.

A tweet issued earlier today simply promises "a new way to earn Rewards based on your Achievements," coming this fall. We hope this means difficult Achievements will net us MS Points - we definitely deserve a bonus for earning all of the Achievements in Avatar: The Legend of Aang: The Burning Earth - but that's speculation until Microsoft gets back to us.

Microsoft posted a preview clip of its "NUads," which isn't quite as filthy as it sounds. Not in the way you're thinking, anyway. "NUads" are like television advertisements, presented through the Xbox 360 dashboard, that feature Kinect voice interactivity. Or, as Microsoft's sparklingly corporate text describes it, "NUads transform standard 30-second TV spots into engaging and actionable experiences using the power of voice and gesture controls of Kinect for Xbox 360."

The example shown takes an existing Toyota ad, and overlays a cutesy poll. This is just a proof of concept, and we might see them grow more interactive and perhaps even useful after the program launches this fall, but right now it appears to be a simplistic overlay of busywork designed to "engage" people in the ad just enough to make sure they're watching it. This is a very exciting development for advertisers, and something that is, for now, mercifully optional for the rest of us - those of us who didn't buy Kinects for the sole purpose of making ourselves more effective targets for ads.

#rumor An apparently two-year-old document, purporting to be an internal overview of Microsoft's plans for the Xbox 360's successor, surfaced overnight, and while many rightly cast doubt on its authenticity, the claims it makes are not too farfetched. Some have even been reported before. More »

A lengthy business document purportedly sourced back to Microsoft showed up on Scribd yesterday, containing a flood of potential details about an "Xbox 720." For starters, the 56-page document claims the next-generation Xbox will launch in 2013 for $299, alongside the "Kinect V2." The doc also claims it'll come packed with Blu-ray functionality and be able to play game that are "4x - 6x" better looking than Xbox 360. If only it could promise the game themselves would be 4x - 6x better!

Beyond the stuff you'd expect, the document also claims Microsoft has Augmented Reality glasses in the works named "Fortaleza" (presumably built at Brazil-based Innovation Center Fortaleza) - the document claims we won't see through MS' AR until some time in 2014, post-console launch. Additionally, it claims the "Xbox 720" will have some form of "always on" functionality, as well as the ability to run apps at the same time (read: multitasking).

Now before you go getting all excited, you should probably know that this document surfaced in some form back in early May on Nukezilla. Moreover, even if it's totally legit, the document itself appears to be rather old - dating back to August 2010 at least. That said, some of the info detailed in the document has since been announced by Microsoft (most notably Smart Glass). We've seen some pretty thorough fakes in our time, but this would be the most thorough if it were. Still, take all of this with some massive grains of salt.

We've reached out to Microsoft for comment, but, well, you know.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

The Xbox 360 sold 160,000 units during the month of May, which represents "a 45 percent share of current-generation console sales" in the United States, according to Microsoft's statement based on NPD data. This makes May the fifteenth consecutive month in which the 360 claimed ownership over 40 (or more) percent of stateside console sales, and the seventeenth month in which Xbox 360 is the best-selling console in the US, according to a statement at The Official Microsoft Blog.
When looking at all Xbox 360-related hardware, software and accessories sales for May, the nation spent $209 million on the platform; more than the combined amount spent on "the other two current-generation consoles" over the same period. Save for Diablo 3, nine of the ten best-selling titles during May were available for Microsoft's baby, which probably had something to do with it.

Those same nine games were also available on Sony's PlayStation 3, though the Japanese hardware giant has refrained from releasing specific hardware sales information for the period. It did say, however, that PS3-exclusive titles like Starhawk and MLB 12: The Show "again posted strong results," though what "strong" means in numerical terms is anyone's guess. Neither title was featured on NPD's combined platform top ten sales list for the month of May. Sony's complete statement can be found after the break.

Update: Nintendo has weighed in with a statement of its own, announcing that the company sold "more than 285,000 units of portable and console hardware" during May. Nintendo's 3DS was the only console that didn't suffer a year-over-year sales decline for the period, according to NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

According to the NPD Group, via Microsoft, the Xbox 360 sold 160,000 units during the month of May, which represents "a 45 percent share of current-generation console sales" in the United States. This makes May the fifteenth consecutive month where the 360 claimed ownership over 40 (or more) percent of stateside console sales, and its seventeenth month as the best-selling console in America, according to a statement at The Official Microsoft Blog.
When looking at all Xbox 360-related hardware, software and accessories sales for May, the nation spent $209 million on the platform; more than the combined amount spent on "the other two current-generation consoles" over the same period. Save for Diablo 3, nine of the ten best-selling titles during May were available for Microsoft's baby, which probably had something to do with it.

Those same nine games were also available on Sony's PlayStation 3, though the Japanese hardware giant has refrained from releasing specific hardware sales information for the period. It did say, however, that PS3-exclusive titles like Starhawk and MLB 12: The Show "again posted strong results," though what "strong" means in numerical terms is anyone's guess. Neither title was featured on NPD's combined platform top ten sales list for the month of May. Sony's complete statement can be found after the break.

Joystiq has contacted Nintendo for comments regarding May's NPD results, but has yet to hear back at the time of publishing.

#songlines The best-looking Kinect game at this year's E3 wasn't at Microsoft's massive booth. Instead you had to go to the IndieCade area to see the kaleidoscopically beautiful Songlines. It's a game based on the Australian indigenous myth of the dreamtime and lets you create unique colorful landscapes. In a year when Microsoft didn't emphasize its Kinect peripheral, it's impressive to see that indie developers want to craft inviting experiences using the motion-sensing camera. You can learn a bit more about Songlines here. More »

#fable There are 19 million Kinects in the wild and very few good games to play on them. I think most people will say that Dance Central is the best (partially because it seems to work more than 75% of the time). What's second best? More »

Microsoft's scaling back its three-fold approach to annual gaming conventions, today announcing that it'll skip both Germany's Gamescom in August and Japan's Tokyo Game Show in September. "This year, Xbox will be focusing on smaller, more localized promotions and experiences for press, partners, retailers and customers around the world," Microsoft director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb said on his blog this morning.

As a result of that "smaller, more localized" marketing focus, Microsoft's wares "won't be taking part in Gamescom or Tokyo Games Show this year." Hryb noted that "both are still important shows for the industry, and we do wish the organizers well." Microsoft is the second of the big three console manufacturers to bow out of Gamescom, with Nintendo announcing as much earlier this year.

Microsoft showed off Halo 4 and "Smart Glass" as major components of its E3 2012 press conference. The company is apparently confident enough in its already announced holiday lineup to skip the largest public game show on the planet.

#nbaballerbeats We saved my weirdest E3 appointment for last—checking out the rhythm/sports hybrid NBA Baller Beats from Majesco and HB Games about four hours before my flight last Thursday. The teaser videos may have looked ridiculous, but some of that can be attributed to overacting and over-editing. How does this Kinect game look when someone is really trying to play it? More »

The Xbox spring system update will be delivered to "a few" Xbox Live members this week, according to a tweet from Major Nelson. The update will be deployed to all members next week. Before you go rushing to check your Xbox, don't get too excited: Major Nelson noted further that the update will only add "behind the scenes improvements and prep for future enhancements."

Presumably, he's referring to things like Xbox Music and SmartGlass, which Microsoft unveiled at E3, and more video apps.

Whine up, whine up, whine up, oh yeah - Harmonix will add one new dance track every week for the remainder of June to the Dance Central Music Store. The danceathon kicks off tomorrow with Iyaz's "Replay," followed by Nelly's "Hot in Herre" and finally Kat DeLuna's "Whine Up." All tracks are certified with "legit" difficulty standards by the DCRB (Dance Central Ratings Board).

The DC library of moves will receive an infusion later this year when Dance Central 3 hits. In case you missed it last week, we showed off why we need Dance Central in our lives more than ever.