At the Xbox 360 Community Roundtable at E3 on Monday, I learned a few more small but potentially significant details about the upcoming revised Xbox 360 dashboard (aka the New Xbox Experience).

• Players will be able to rip any Xbox 360 game past, present or future from their discs to their hard drive. This may speed load times, but more importantly for those of us who can’t hear our vacuum and lawnmower over our 360, this means we can play games without a noisy disc-drive spinning.

• The full Xbox Live Marketplace will be browse-able via the Web, enabling system owners to purchase or rent games and movie content via a web browser. And if you have your Xbox 360 on at the time of a purchase, the content will immediately begin to stream to the system. This is good for people who decide at work what movie they want to download at night — as long as you’re the kind of person who keeps their 360 on when they leave the house. Hmmm. Maybe Microsoft needs to borrow the remote-access idea from Sony, which allows a PSP to turn on and off a PS3.

• Even though I can still use new versions of Microsoft Outlook while keeping the program looking like an older version, I won’t be able to keep the current blade-based Xbox 360 dashboard layout when the fall update is activated. We’ll all have to be happy with the new look of the new dashboard.

• Lag times are being reduced. Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten told reporters at the roundtable that he has more than 140 Xbox Live Arcade games and doesn’t like that when he goes to the XBLA blade he has to wait several seconds for the icons representing each game to load. The new dashboard will just about do away with that kind of lag. When one blogger at the roundtable asked if he’d confirm that all dashboard stuttering and lag would be eliminated, he declined. But he did say that’s the goal.

• The new Xbox 360 dashboard will do everything the old one did. Zero functionality has been removed.

So, Xbox 360 owners, are you sold on the new dashboard? Well, too bad if you’re not. There’s no choice in the matter. It will be available for all 360s some time this fall.

Microsoft’s 2008 E3 briefing kicks off on Monday. Today we’re looking back at their E3 event from last year to see what they promised and what came true.

It was all about Christmas for Microsoft at E3 2007.

There was nary a reference to what life as an Xbox 360 owner would be like in 2008. Capcom’s “Resident Evil 5″ was the only game that managed to sneak in with a trailer, along with brief logo shots of “Too Human” and “Fable II.”

It was a stark contrast to how Sony approached their press conference that week. Sony bent over backwards to show PlayStation 3 owners why the future was so bright.

Let’s remember the major announcements made at the show:

* “Mass Effect” dated for November
* “Scene It!” one button controller and game unveiled
* “Call of Duty 4″ exclusive multiplayer beta announced
* “Halo” short film shown as consolation for “Halo” movie

So, what’s happened in the year since then?

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At Microsoft’s Expo Night at the 2008 Games for Change festival last week, there were games about global warming, poverty and drunk driving.

Then there was the game about malaria.

More specifically, “Specter” is a game that aims to spread awareness about malaria and show how persistent the disease really is. It was created by four Parsons design and technology students as part of PETlab, a joint project of Games for Change and the New York City university that has its participants develop prototype games and play experiences addressing social issues.

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I never start a session of using my Xbox 360 by playing a game. Instead I — what’s the nice way of putting it? — “check in” on my friends. I click on the window that shows me who’s online and I start snooping for clues. I doubt I’m the only person who does this. The only way to be sure is for me to put a post like this out there and see how people respond.

My first priority when booting the 360 is to check which of my friends from my Xbox buddy list are online, but not because I want to deal with them. Perish that thought. I am usually not looking to play a game with them or even to chat with them. I just want to see who else is spending a sunny weekend afternoon or a late work night also playing the Xbox 360. There’s always someone. Except when I game on Sunday mornings in New York. Then, it’s just me.

Yes, my Xbox friends, you are secretly my first priority, more important to me than playing the next bit of “Aces of the Galaxy.”

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At the 2008 Games For Change festival, Chris Satchell, Microsoft’s general manager of XNA, spoke about how the development platform can be used by garage developers to create socially conscious games.

He also told me that the 12 million Xbox Live users are ready for games about social issues. But will XNA be ready for gamers?

Satchell gave me an update on Community Games, the new Xbox Live feature which allows users to easily download XNA-created games. I asked him why it won’t run into the same interface issues that XBLA currently has. He offered this solution:

“One thing we’re going to have is we’re also going to expose all of [the games] on the website as well. So if you want, you’re going to be able to go and do a detailed search from a web browser and say, ‘Oh, I want that game’ and click, and have it downloaded on your console. … you’ll be at the office and go, ‘Here are the games I’m going to play tonight’ and go back home and just have them ready for you.”

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XNA isn’t just for up-and-coming game developers hoping to make the next “Halo.”

Microsoft wants its free development toolkit to be used by people to create socially conscious games.

I spoke with XNA General Manager Chris Satchell at Microsoft’s Expo Night at the 2008 Games for Change festival. The event, held earlier this week at Parsons School of Design in New York, showcased the work of students who used XNA to create games about global warming, malaria prevention and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among other social causes.

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Microsoft wants to help you change the world. And the company wants you to do it with XNA.

“Imagine a world where we have no ability to influence the people that are going to lead and shape thought for tomorrow,” said Chris Satchell, Microsoft’s general manager of XNA.

“We have social causes we care about, but we don’t have the media to connect with the people who can do something about them,” he said. “We’re not there, but its a world that’s possible to see unless activities like we’re doing here today really gain some momentum.”

Yesterday afternoon, Satchell spoke at the 2008 Games for Change festival about how Microsoft’s development platform XNA, a free toolset for independent developers, can help people create serious, socially responsible games. He said that young people are moving away from traditional forms of media and heading towards gaming, and they’re also passionate about social themes.

“People will base their lives around gaming experiences, but equally gaming experiences will permeate their lives… everything’s a game,” Satchell said. He argued that the biggest game in the world isn’t “World of Warcraft” or “Grand Theft Auto” — it’s “American Idol.” Read more…

Microsoft knows Xbox Live’s design isn’t perfect. They admit Xbox Live’s interface was never designed to service the amount of content it currently holds.

“I think that we are not, I would say…happy with the ability to find and discover content as easily as we’d like for consumers to be able to do that,” said Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft’s product management director for Xbox 360 and XBL, to MTV Multiplayer last week.

That problem gets worse every week; forcing Microsoft to start introducing guidelines to remove underperforming, poorly reviewed XBL Arcade titles.

Read more…

MTV Intern Sam Cadet filed this report about how co-op gaming is winning the hearts and minds of reluctant gamers one by one…

Do you have a genre that you can’t stand? Even the hardest of the hardcore gamers can be quite selective in what they play. Despite one’s feelings about a game or a whole genre in particular, there is a way to get gamers interested in genres they’re unfamiliar with.

Gaming is one of those things that can be even better with a friend. Cooperative play can be that feature that sells neophytes to a whole genre. It’s especially effective when the novice gamer enjoys co-op play with a friend who’s experienced in the genre. Both gamers can have a great time while the new player can learn the game’s mechanics at his or her own pace.

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Demos may be the best way to find out if you like a game, but releasing one might not be in a publisher’s best financial interest, according to a study discussed at last week’s MI6 video game marketing conference.

This is the same study, presented by Gregory Short and Geoffery Zatkin, heads of the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research Group (EEDAR), which recommended marketing teams should work with developers to come up with an Xbox 360 game’s Achievements.

While demos may be effective at producing word-of-mouth, the EEDAR found that the highest selling games on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 produced buzz via Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network with trailers alone.

There are some other interesting bits extrapolate, so let’s look at how the sales break down…

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It’s been a busy few weeks here in the Multiplayer cave, so thankfully we’re not missing out on much during this period of not-so-exciting releases.

Today, Totilo and I traded IMs about the games we’re ignoring this week. I decided to skip out on “Ikaruga” on Xbox Live. In mentioning this, we discussed a strange feature in the game:

StephenTotilo: But what people don’t mention is that, at least with the GCN version, that for every hour you log in the game you get an extra continue at the start of your next session
StephenTotilo: And after about eight hours logged (not consecutively, cumulatively), you get started with infinite continues
StephenTotilo: Like having a bottomless pocket of quarters
StephenTotilo: It makes it impossible not to complete the game
TraceyJohn: What if you just leave the game on for 8+ hours?
StephenTotilo: I believe you would get blown up. I don’t think it clocks time if it’s paused. But I could be wrong. I’m too classy to have even considered such a dastardly cheat
TraceyJohn: Classy? Not sure about that, but whatever.

Read on and find out why Totilo is snubbing Sony’s new controller and see how much I can sass my boss and get away with it… Read more…

Meet Aaron “coldraccoon” Mesec, an 18-year-old Xbox 360 owner from Murrieta, California. He’s a gamerscore cheater.

He’s a former cheater — or so he now claims to MTV Multiplayer.

Mesec was one of the gamers caught during Microsoft’s attempt last week to reign in gamerscore cheaters. Microsoft won’t say how many people have, like Mesec, been branded with a “Cheater” tag, had their questionable Achievements stripped and their gamescores re-set. But I’ve heard that the number of users whose gamerscores were reset wasn’t more than a few handfuls. The punishment is meant as a message to others.

And it appears to have worked on Mesec. “The cheating days are over for me. I just want to kick back and enjoy gaming again,” he told us over the weekend.

If that’s true, why did he start cheating in the first place?

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