Starting November 1, the price for a 1-year Xbox Live Gold membership will be $59.99, $10 more than the current price. If you have an automatic renewal that will kick in after that date, it will renew at the new price.  The $10 price increase doesn’t apply to every place that has access to XBL. Anything not on the table below is staying the same.

XBL Gold – USA	Old Price	New Price
1-Month Gold Subscription	$7.99	$9.99
3-Month Gold Subscription	$19.99	$24.99
12-Month Gold Subscription	$49.99	$59.99
XBL Gold – UK	Old Price	New Price
1-Month Gold Subscription	4.99 GBP	5.99 GBP
XBL Gold – Canada	Old Price	New Price
1-Month Gold Subscription	8.99 CAD	9.99 CAD
XBL Gold – Mexico	Old Price	New Price
12-Month Gold Subscription	499 Pesos	599 Pesos

Microsoft is justifying this price hike by “giving” us Hulu Plus (a paid service, on top of the XBL membership), ESPN features, Kinect features (video chats, etc), and they’ll keep all the current features they offer.

From the fancy schmancy email I received this morning:

Netflix unlimited subscription required, sold separately. ESPN on Xbox LIVE provides great content from ESPN3.com and ESPN.com. For access to ESPN3.com content, including live sports, you must have an ESPN3 affiliated broadband provider. See ESPN3.com for details and providers. Hulu Plus membership will also be required. Video Kinect requires Kinect sensor.

Xbox.com is offering a $40 one-year renewal, but it’s limited to one per gamer tag. Other retailers, like Amazon and NewEgg.com and others, is offering the same price for a one year renewal, but you can get as many as you feel like paying for.

[Source: My Inbox | Joystiq | MajorNelson]

Our Xbox 360 dashboard selves will change slightly in the coming months. The cartoonish, squat proportions of the current avatars are not working well with the hand/eye coordination that Kinect will require, so Nick Burton, senior programmer at Rare (avatar creators), says they’re going with a more realistic design with Avatars 2.0.

This isn’t a hardware issue, but rather an issue with player perception in the software. Frankly, that sounds a little strange, but basically it plays out like this: Kinect is having trouble converting our (the human gamer) proportions to the avatars stylized bodies in some games that use on-screen action replications. The end result is seizure-like spazzing avatar parts on the screen and “broken” hand/eye coordination.

The update will most likely come close to, or around, the Kinect release.

[Source: OXM]

You can access the NPC maker with an XBox Live Gold account to experiment, and then pre-order the game and you’ll get a code that allows you to import a character of your very own design. You’ll be able to do whatever you want with him, or her. Marry ‘em, kill ‘em, beat on ‘em, make ‘em laugh, drag ‘em, bone ‘em. Whatever.

Your NPC will give you a quest in the game, and depending on if you make the NPC good or evil, that will decide the morality of the quest at hand. You’ll make a 1,000 gold and as mentioned, have the opportunity to use them, or abuse them, as you see fit.

The Villager Maker, launching today in the U.S. and U.K. and worldwide later this week, is available for everyone to access and experiment with at www.xbox.com/fable3. Fans can utilize the tool to create a male or female villager with more than 2,000 different variations, including an enthralling backstory for the character, unique personality traits, clothing, accent, hairstyles and the region they hail from. Whether you create a valiant ally, an evil villain, or perhaps the perfect spouse, let your imagination run free as you make your mark in the fantastical world of “Fable III.”

And!

“Fable III” will be available in a Standard Edition ($59.99) and Limited Collector’s Edition ($79.99) for Xbox 360.The Limited Edition offers unique collectibles that true “Fable” fans won’t want to miss, including downloadable content that Windows gamers can also access. Wrapped up in the likeness of a book from “Fable III,” the contents include an exclusive quest, dog breed, outfit, playing cards, a Guild Seal Coin and more.

A list of retailers giving out the pre-order codes.

A tour of the NPC maker on Live.

[Source: Joystiq | Press Release]

Votes for Carmine to live, and for his family to be grateful they don’t have to pay for another funeral, are attached to the “Save Carmine” shirt. Votes for Carmine to die (in a humiliating way, probably) are attached to the “Carmine Must Die” shirt. All proceeds from the shirts go to the charity Child’s Play.

Do you want Clayton to join Anthony and Ben in Carmine Heaven, or is Clayton the one that finally makes it to the end of a game without getting his head blown off? I know my vote. (Oh, by the way, my XBox Live tag is TiniestCarmine. If you would like to see my ridiculous game history, look me up!)

Look at the beefiest Carmine the family has to offer (so far) below.

[Top Image: gearsofwar.xbox.com | Screenshots: Joystiq | Source: Joystiq, VG247]

While playing Modern Warfare 2, a Texas teenager told his Canadian party that he was going to take a few guns to school, that he would get from a Marine friend, and shoot a pregnant girl and his best friend. He also said “that because SWAT may be on the scene within 10 minutes, they would have to aim for the head.”

The Canadian gamer called the local police, who called Microsoft, who linked the gamertag to the boy in San Antonio, Texas, where the local police were notified of the threat and acted accordingly,

The 16-year-old boy, was arrested and suspended from school invariably, AKA expelled. A locker search turned up nothing and the kid “was very remorseful and very scared,” according to a spokesman for the school district. (He probably wanted to crap his pants.) The spokesman also said, “We believe that the boy truly was sorry for what he was doing, but in this day and age you have to take all of these kinds of verbal statements, these verbal threats, very seriously and he’s going to have to learn that the hard way.”

The San Antonio Police started the investigation as soon as they received the phone call from the Canadian authorities. I’m not clear what his punishment will be since he’s underage, but since a school was involved the charge is a state jail felony, not a misdemeanor.

Ouch.

[HBL via San Antonio Express-News]

The AVP demo hit 14,000 downloads on Xbox Live over this past weekend, and has a rating of 4.5/5. I may not be a big fan of it, but I can admit that it’s fun. There was a bug in the PS3 version of the demo (haha!) that didn’t allow players to use the game’s matchmaking system. Rebellion is working on a patch with Sony. Rebellion released a similar patch to fix the same problem on the PC version of the game.

[source]

We started to play and I got off to a rough start. For the first few minutes as each character I was trying to get my bearing and figure out what button did what. The Predator, Alien and Marine each have a different control set up. The Predators and Marines are somewhat similar, but the Alien is almost completely different. Fast forward to my third match, I’m now used to the level, the controls and the limitations of each character.

I hate to admit to this, but I’m going to put it out there: I used more profanity in a half hour then I have in all of 2010 playing that game. I was frustrated at my lack of skill and the fact that everyone in the match, save for Mike, was killing me from behind.

Written in my Livejournal:
I hate Xbox Live players. Mike told me to get the AVP demo so we could play the multiplayer/death match option, so I did, and it only reinforced my disdain for the players who either a) kill you from behind and b) squat in one corner and wait for everyone to walk by.

My preferred style is to face characters head on, but I will go back and forth between Sneaky and Gladiator depending on the style of the game. The innate nature of the Aliens and Predators are to be sneaky. One can be invisible; the other can crawl around on ceilings. I should have expected to get stabbed in the back or grabbed from behind, it’s what they do.

And I did, just a little bit, but after a while it got excessive. What really got to me was this: I was obviously the inexperienced player, I was obviously the dumb one in the group… and in a kill all death match, I was the easiest target. How is that any fun for the experienced player? Do people like a challenge these days? I get the feeling that they don’t.

I can admit I’m not very good at games like AVP. I still have fun playing them, in the campaigns, but I won’t be joining anyone on Live. It just means there will be one less extremely inexperienced player for the others to swarm. I will watch people play, though. I will be the backseat player that sometimes tells you what you need to do because you’re missing something. (And I’ll try to be as nice as possible about it, because that can get annoying quick.)  I will watch Mike and others play on Live, since they are actually good at it, and I’ll cheer them on and point out the stuff they missed when running down a hallway.

Maybe one day I’ll get over myself and join the millions of people on Live and suck and just not care. For now, I have things in life that overshadow the need to get my butt kicked by everyone in the AVP death matches.

I know that since we provide news for quite a few gamers and geeks that a few of you are probably still playing Xbox titles, either on your 360 or like me and on your original Xbox.  Well that’s all and well if you don’t play them online (wait, what about Halo 2, yep that one too).  Microsoft, on April 15th, will be pulling the plug on Xbox Live to all Xbox titles (regardless of which system they are played on).  The games themselves will play just fine but there will be no more “Live Love”.

By discontinuing Live service for original Xbox titles Microsoft will gain much more flexibility with the Live platform through announcements coming “in the next few weeks.”

A 27-year-old Richmond Heights man met a 15-year-old girl over XBox Live and drove a little over 30 hours to Sanger, Calif. to have sex with the girl. Edward Stout is now facing up to 10 years in prison and will be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Stout and the girl met in April 2008 over Live. In January of 2009 he drove to Sanger and they… well, you know what they did.

This is an example of what not to do with XBox Live. If he waited that long to meet the girl, couldn’t he have waited until she was legal if they were that determined to consummate a relationship? I shake my head at both the teen and the man. Think, people, think!