The fun-packed Xbox Live update is nearly here, so here’s the details of the movie and TV apps that come with it. LoveFilm and 4oD are in the first wave this month, with the BBC’s iPlayer coming next year.

The update to the dashboard of the Microsoft Xbox games console arrives tomorrow, with a swathe of apps giving you access to on-demand music, movies and more, as well as the usual gaming goodies. While iPlayer isn’t on board yet, it will be added to the service in 2012.

Apps will be searchable via Bing and controlled both by your voice and your flailing arms, thanks to the Kinect motion-control gaming system.

Telly channels offering access to their online catch-up and on-demand services include Channels 4 and 5, with 4oD and Demand 5 apps launching later this month. ITV is expected to bring its ITV Player service to the party next year.

Blinkbox, Vevo and YouTube also hit the Xbox in December.

Apps launching in the US include sports channels ESPN, streaming services Hulu and Netflix. Netflix will launch in the UK next year, but there’s no word yet on whether it’ll come to the Xbox when it does.

Meanwhile, Sky customers can watch their satellite sports, news and movie channels on their Xbox — in Germany. Sky Go, which lets you watch Sky channels on your phone, tablet, games console or laptop, is launching on the Xbox for our teutonic chums this month. Sky Go is already available on the Xbox in the UK.

Microsoft has also built a companion app for Windows Phone that allows you to use your phone as a TV remote, as well as searching and finding more information on what you’re watching or listening to.

The Xbox Live update goes, er, live tomorrow. What services would you like to see on your Xbox? Tell us in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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If you’d have told us 10 years and one day ago that Microsoft would be dominating the world of gaming, we’d have called you a damnable liar and punched a hole in the top of your bowler hat. But the company best known for interminably dull things like Microsoft Office and Outlook managed to pull it out the bag with the Xbox console, released in 2001 and followed up in 2005 with the even more brilliant Xbox 360.

What propelled Xbox to the forefront of the interactive entertainment world? Massive piles of money, of course! And games, lots of great, exclusive games. Here, in no particular order, are our 10 favourite Xbox exclusives ever.

Fable 2 (Xbox 360)

Who’d have thought pottering about a colonial-era fantasy land and setting people on fire would be so much fun? We did, because that sounds like the most fun it’s possible to have. And fun by the barrelful was a feature of Fable 2 — the strongest game in the series to date, Fable 2 gave you freedom to develop your character, letting you choose to be male or female and good or evil.

The game is constantly throwing moral choices your way, but once we found out that being evil made your character grow horns, it was fireballs here, fireballs there, fireballs everywhere. Other treats include a refreshingly flexible approach to character sexuality and the best dog in video games ever.

Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox)

Released in 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved was the game that made the original Xbox a success. Introducing Master Chief, the Clint Eastwood-inspired green-suited faceless hero of the franchise, players were let loose on a gorgeously rendered hoop-shaped space world, with the express purpose of eliminating the Covenant alien threat.

Halo fans will be keen to point out the story isn’t that simple — indeed it’s massively complicated — but Halo deserves praise for simplifying the shooter genre in terms of gameplay, and making it fun to leap around frantically, running and gunning as you fought increasingly huge hordes of otherworldly foes. It had longevity too, thanks to different difficulty settings that significantly altered gameplay.

The first Halo was so popular that Microsoft has decided to make it again, releasing the remastered Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for the Xbox 360, in a cynical money-spinning exercise that nevertheless has us excited about returning to the game we fell in love with a decade ago.

Forza 4: Motorsport (Xbox 360)

Everyone likes fast cars, but driving them in real life can be terrifying, not to mention expensive. You’re much better off racing virtual cars we reckon, and virtual cars don’t come any more beautifully realised than the roster of motors in the superb Forza series.

A game for racing connoisseurs, Forza 4 offers a refined motoring experience that’s a million miles away from smashing your opponent with a red shell in Mario Kart, but feels no less rewarding.

Okay, it’s slightly less rewarding, but if you’re more of a casual gaming fan there’s something for you here as well, because Forza 4 works with Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-tracking peripheral, so you can ditch the controller if you fancy.

Crackdown (Xbox 360)

Grand Theft Auto is all well and good, but it’s a shame it’s not set in the future, with biologically enhanced characters leaping across rooftops and tackling crime using oversized weaponry.

Ambitious and great fun to play, Crackdown’s success was party due to Microsoft Game Studios bundling the game with Halo 3 multiplayer beta access codes. Your job is to police Pacific City, taking down crimelords and harvesting the experience orbs that drop from defeated foes. Clambering to the top of the highest building and jumping off delivers a giddy thrill, as does hopping into your friends’ game using Xbox Live.

The sequel Crackdown 2 sadly wasn’t quite as good, but the original game remains one of the Xbox’s most dearly treasured gems.

Ninja Gaiden (Xbox)

Resurrecting a franchise last spotted in the nineties, Ninja Gaiden is a hack-and-slash adventure that has you blasting through waves of enemies with an assortment of weaponry, including flails, shuriken, swords and staves, helpfully relieving your unlucky foes of their blood. And heads.

This is another game where you’ll quickly stop following the story, focusing more on the bloody business of battle — blocking where required and raining down punishment the rest of the time.

Ninja Gaiden is infamous for being incredibly hard. With a difficulty curve that looks more like a sheer brick wall, casual gamers might be put off by the amount of practice and finger dexterity needed to succeed. But if you’re able to battle through the whole game, your reward will be a warm inner glow, and the prospect of tearing through the similarly excellent Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox 360.

Trials HD

Not all the best games come in boxes, y’know. Trials HD is a downloadable title on Xbox Live Arcade, a place where indie developers can give their game a fair shout.

Trials HD is arguably the best XBLA title out there, and involves ramping a motorbike through side-scrolling levels, controlling the bike’s speed and direction to ensure your brave rider is able to stay in the saddle.

Trials HD is utterly addictive, and will have you coming back again and again to beat your best times, but another reason it’s made it onto the list is that the Live Arcade is one of the best things about the Xbox 360, and deserves a proper mention. Games industry take note — some of the coolest games of the last few years have been indie titles popping up on XBLA, iOS or Android.

Knights of the Old Republic

You can’t help but love Star Wars (try as you might). And Xbox owners were treated to BioWare’s magnificent slice of lightsaber-swinging action ahead of anyone else when Knights of the Old Republic came out in July 2003.

The story takes place 4,000 years before the Galactic Empire rises to power, making it even longer ago than a long, long time ago. Combat is divided into rounds, and the game will figure out whether or not you’re more Jedi or Sith by tracking your conversational habits, and responses to other characters in the game, changing your appearance more subtly than Fable.

A truly great slice of entertainment, Knights of the Old Republic is a must for RPG and Star Wars fans alike.

Halo 3 (Xbox 360)

The first Halo game may have kick-started the Xbox revolution, but it was the release of 2007′s Halo 3 that cemented Microsoft’s place at the forefront of gaming.

While the game itself was incredible fun, and really pushed the Xbox 360 in terms of what was graphically possible at the time, Halo 3 was amazing value for money because its multiplayer mode kept gamers going for months after they’d ploughed through the single-player campaign.

Microsoft went nuts with the marketing for Halo 3, and it paid off — more than 1 million people played Halo 3 online during the game’s first day on sale.

Dance Central 2 (Xbox 360)

If you’re a hardcore gaming nut, you’re probably already scrolling furiously toward the comments section, to let us know exactly what you think of us including a dancing game in this roundup. But it would be churlish to ignore Kinect, Microsoft’s casual-friendly, camera-laden sensor bar, and Dance Central 2 is probably the best Kinect game out there.

Dead easy to play, hitting the dance floor involves little more than trying to follow the virtual onscreen dancer. But the game will have you twisting around like a maniac to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance before long, and issuing the smack talk to your fellow dancer in two-player mode is a rare pleasure.

Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)

Second to Halo, the Gears of War series is the Xbox’s biggest exclusive franchise by a country mile, and rightly so — this third-person action adventure series has been a blast since the first game landed.

Gears of War 3 is the latest (and some would say the best) of the Gears games, proving once more that nothing beats the feeling of taking your chainsaw bayonet to an alien’s face, or hiding bravely behind a waist-high wall while your co-op buddies do all the hard work.

Great competitive and co-op multiplayer modes are the icing on a gory cake. If you’re a fan of from-cover shooters and enjoy peering at the shoulders of impossibly muscular men, Gears of War 3 is essential.

What have we missed? Did we omit some Xbox classics? Or are you hopelessly devoted to the PlayStation? Tell us what’s what in the comments, on our Facebook wall or on our Google+ page.

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The Xbox is 10 today! Happy birthday, Xbox!

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, we want to know — is the Xbox 360 still suffering from those infamous hardware meltdowns? Help us find out by answering our Facebook poll on the subject.

Two years ago we conducted a spot of research that showed an astonishing 60 per cent of UK-based Xbox 360s had managed to bork themselves, flashing up the terrifying red ring that indicates a hardware failure. Compared to its rivals, the PlayStation 3 and Wii, that’s an astonishingly high figure.

That was two years ago though, and since then have things changed? The Xbox 360 Slim that came out last year has a front display that means it can’t technically display the Red Ring of Death that has horrified gamers for years, but is it still failing regardless? Or has Microsoft managed to confine the 360′s unpleasant failure rate to the history books?

We want to know: if you’ve bought a new Xbox 360 in the last two years, has that console suffered from any hardware failures? Or has it been devoid of hardware hiccups, bringing you many hours of uninterrupted gaming bliss?

Both options are covered in check-box form in our poll, so head on over there and tick a box. And feel free to leave any additional thoughts you might have in the comments box on the poll itself.

We’re big Xbox 360 fans — nothing pleases us more than to settle down for the weekend with a brand-new game and a steaming mug of hot cocoa. Although we inevitably end up scalding ourselves with said cocoa while trying to remove that irritating layer of plastic wrap on the game, seriously, what’s with that stuff?

If you’re not a huge Facebook fan you can also tell us about your experiences with Xbox reliability in the comments below, via Twitter, or on our Google+ page.

Vote in our Xbox 360 reliability survey

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The Xbox 360 had it all when it launched in 2006 — HD graphics, wireless controllers and a brilliant new concept called ‘achievements’. Since then, it’s gone from strength to strength, with an evolving user experience, pioneering tech such as Kinect, and perhaps most importantly, a suite of great games that make other console owners look on with envy.

Yes, the Xbox 360 may only be halfway into its supposed 10-year lifecycle, but it already has a claim on being the best games console ever made. I remember getting the console at launch in 2006 and being blown away by the HD graphics of Project Gotham Racing 3, the ability to download game demos, and the concept of earning achievement points for fully exploring games.

Since then, the platform has constantly evolved, so it now offers customisable avatars, movie rentals, downloadable content, social networking and much more. In short, most of the things we’ve come to expect from our modern game systems were introduced by the Xbox 360.

Any console is defined by its games though, and the 360 has had some brilliant titles. Fable, Halo and Gears of War are the thoroughbreds in Microsoft’s games stable, while amazing downloadable titles such as Super Meat Boy, Limbo and Plants vs Zombies haven’t appeared on any other console. And then there are the multiplatform releases, such as Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed, which have more often than not performed best on Microsoft’s console.

Sure, it’s had its missteps along the way, such as its dreadful reliability problems, the obsolete HD DVD drive, the lack of integrated Wi-Fi (until the recent Slim model), and the paid-for online service. But most gamers I know would rather pay for Xbox Live than go with the free option on the PlayStation 3.

As a gadget fan with an iPad, an Android phone and many of the other gadgets on this list, there’s still only one thing I’d take to a desert island — my Xbox 360 S. With a flatscreen TV, an Internet connection and a copy of Halo: Reach, obviously.

Guy Cocker is the editor of GameSpot UK 

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments section below. Then make sure to head over to our Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century tournament page to vote for your champion.

Every time you vote, you’ll be entered into a draw to win an Arcam rCube, a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and a MiFi from Three or one of ten Idapt i4 multi-gadget chargers.

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After months of rumors, weeks of leaked retail flyers and days of Japanese news, the Xbox 360 price drop is now officially happening in North America. As of 5 September, the 120GB Elite will be $399 (224), the new-ish 60GB 360 — successor to the 20GB Pro — will be $299 (168), and the hard-drive-less Arcade will be $199 (112).

The new price point makes the bottom-end model of Microsoft’s console the cheapest current-generation console on the US market, undercutting the $249 (140) Nintendo Wii by $50 (28).

“I’m not at a point where I can say we’re going to beat Nintendo,” Don Mattrick, senior vice-president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment division, told BusinessWeek. “[But] We will sell more consoles this generation than Sony.” His sentiments were shared by IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon, who told the magazine, “I expect the 360 to remain in second place this generation. But it’s going to be close.”

IDC predicts 2008 will end with the Xbox 360 beating the Sony PlayStation 3 in lifetime-to-date international sales, 27.7 million to 24.2 million, respectively. That feat is made less impressive, though, by the fact the Xbox 360 launched in November 2005 — a year ahead of the PS3, which has been beating the 360 in monthly NPD sales. IDC has both consoles being drubbed by the Wii, which it predicts will have sold a staggering 44.5 million units by year’s end.

Microsoft has not yet announced a price drop for the Xbox 360 in the UK or Europe.

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Statistics can prove everything, that’s the wonderful thing about them.  If research from MyVoucherCodes is led to be believed than Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 will outsell the PS3 version by a ratio of two to one.

Basing their judgement on searches through the month of February, the website registered 250,000 unique searches for the Xbox 360 version, compared with a mere 120,000 for the PS3 title.

Now we don’t need to point out the fact that this isn’t exactly the be all and end all, and hardly quantifies itself as a fair and exact experiement; however, MyVoucherCodes Mark Pearson, managing director had the following warning for Sony execs:

“The Final Fantasy series has always been a huge draw for Sony, since its debut on the PlayStation in the form of Final Fantasy VII.

“For Microsoft to now be sharing and in fact beating the interest for the PS3 version must be worrying Sony chiefs, who must be wondering just how to steal the march back, if it is at all possible. Our Christmas sales data showed that Xbox 360s were outselling PlayStation 3s three to one in the holiday period, a fact which seems to be presenting itself here as consumers show more interest in the Xbox 360 title.”

TVG will be bringing you its opinion on Square-Enix’s latest on March 5th when the embargo lifts – for the record, we’ve got the Xbox 360 version.

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What are your best memories of pre-360 Xbox gaming?

The news that Microsoft are shutting down Live services for the original Xbox is not a major surprise. After all, the 360 has been on the market for nearly 5 years now and you have to wonder how much impact this decision will have. The additional news that Live support for any Xbox titles released as downloads for the 360 (Originals) will also be switched off could be more annoying, especially if you have only bought one of the games recently. But seeing as it is Friday let’s look at the positives and remember when Xbox Live was altogether more frugal – no gamerscore or achievements back then – experience.

So, what are you favourite memories from online play and Live on the original Xbox? Probably Halo-related right? Me too, although one of my best is long forgotten England International Football. Yes, it was a poor footy game but it had online co-op (the first football game on Live to have this) which made for some cracking sessions with friends. Yes, clearly standards were lower back then. Anyway – what are you favorite Live memories on the original Xbox?

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Greg Howson

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Bungie’s shooter sees off a strong challenge from Modern Warfare…

Just in case you haven’t seen this, official Xbox mouthpiece Major Nelson, has released lists of the most played games on Xbox Live last year. The top five most played titles looks like this:

1 Halo 32 Call of Duty 43 Modern Warfare 24 Call of Duty: WaW5 Gears of War 2

Sure, the chart is dominated by the Call of Duty juggernaut, but it’s interesting that Halo 3 has held on to the top spot, two years after its release. It seems Bungie’s shooter has a hold over the Xbox online fraternity that simple cannot be broken, despite the incredible sales figures of, say, Modern Warfare 2.

One question: why? I mean, obviously the maps are excellent and the four-player co-op is an important benchmark, but what else is this about? Is there a sort of brand loyalty among regular online players (Halo is, after all, an inextricable element of the Xbox throughline)? Or is it that online games – and the communities that surround them – take time to mature, like fine wines, but with assault rifles? But, then of course, Halo 3 had one million players attempting the Live experience on day one… Whatever, it will be interesting to see how the 2010 chart looks, especially when the map packs start coming in for Modern Warfare 2.

There were other charts to ponder through too…

The top five Arcade titles looks like this:

1 Battlefield 19432 Castle Crashers3 Trials HD4 Hasbro Family Game Night **5 Shadow Complex

A worthy victory for EA, but just look at the retro-flavouring elsewhere – all effectively 2D titles, harking back to yesteryear.

As for indie titles:

1 I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!12 Avatar Drop3 RC-AirSim4 Headshot5 Miner Dig Deep

And everyone of them worth a download if you haven’t already.

So anything missing as far as you’re concerned? And what is it about Halo?

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Keith Stuart

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