The Wii U is on life support. Can it be revived?

Let’s face facts here: The Wii U’s life so far has been an unmitigated disaster. Nintendo has struggled to sell the thing to consumers, third-party developers are hesitant to commit, and to top it all off, they seem to have had a time time convincing the public that their new system is even a system at all. More

As it turns out, having an “$” in your name makes it a whole lot easier to be generous in paying for your mistakes, as evidenced by “Micro$oft”‘s latest in a series of costly apologies to customers. When called out over a bug which disabled the split-screen multiplayer feature of the 360 release of Minecraft for some users, Xbox corporate offered affected users a full refund. Say what you will about the Microsoft company history, but their Games Division’s ability to guilt trip their higher-ups into doing right by their mistakes continues to impress me.

As a soon-to-be-former RIT student(!), I’ve interacted with Microsoft’s games division on multiple occasions. Far from representing the cutthroat corporate culture the company became synonymous with in the 1990’s, these Microsoft guys were relaxed, fun, innovative, creative… the total antithesis of the Microsoft I grew up with.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in their reaction to the homebrewing cottage industry which sprang up in the wake of Kinect’s release. 90’s Microsoft would’ve responded with Cease-and-Desist’s; last year’s Microsoft cheered on when a tech company put out a bounty to the first person or group to successfully create open-source drivers for the peripheral (although to be fair, they did flip-flop a bit first). 90’s M$ would have bought out all the startups working with their licensed tech, and gutted them; today’s MS houses several companies working on Kinect apps.

They may not be perfect, but I think Microsoft deserves a decent amount of credit for trying to change their ways, and for giving the Xbox division the freedom it needs to earn the trust and respect of this generation of gamers.

Microsoft Does the Right Thing, Offers Full Refunds to Select Minecraft Gamers

Slammed with complaints over how it failed to warn gamers that the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft won’t run in splitscreen for all customers, Microsoft is revising its listing for the game and offering…

According to a rumor, the next Xbox’s controller may feature the ability to detect a “squeeze” from the user as input, possibly for ID’ing the player. Hey, it’s bound to work better than the Kinect’s Facial Recognition….

Here’s Hoping The Next Xbox Really Does Feature Squeeze-Controls [Durango]Kotaku

A report over at Engadget shows a patent filed by Microsoft for a device that uses “personalization using a hand-pressure signature.” The image in their patent filing is a chunky, lovable Xbox 360 controller that, going by the title, will be able to detect your identity based on your hand-pressure via a “presure sensitive surface.” And maybe read your fingerprints? More »