Lucky motherfuckers who got into the Xbox Live Dashboard preview have managed to lay inter-paws on the Mass Effect 3 Private Beta. It’s glitchy and clearly not ready for public consumption. But more than that, it’s got a pretty insipid way of delineating play style.

Hit the jump for info and images.

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When it was announced that PS3 was getting cloud storage for saved games, I was all, ‘that’s dope, but not worth paying for.’ Well now it’s coming to XBL, and the good news is this: I’m already paying for it. Maybe like a dummy, but it’s all gravy! Cloud-based saved games was just one part of an assload of new features for XBL, including ‘Beacons.’

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While it’s news to me, apparently there was a scam going around Xbox Live last month. Some dude was phishing in Modern Warfare 2, and when he was caught Microsoft didn’t drop the hammer on him. They had him cozy up to their sweaty, stinking, but bizarrely comforting side.

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Prepare thyself for the newest iteration of Press Start! The column where I puke up the top five things in the gaming world that caught my eye this week. It’s a democratic column, I want your input. Hit the comments box with your findings. True Believers! Gaming scientists!

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#1: Drunken NES: A Breathalyzer and 8-Bit Game In One.
This is one of those concoctions that fucking staggers me. It sends me into a spiralling moment of quasi-stoner amazement. Someone had to think up this brilliant piece of minutiae. Imagine this, if you can. Enterprising video game mechanical programming wizards had a dream. Their dream was simple. First, they had to make a breathalyzer  out of an original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. No small task! I have it on good authority many a modern day Prometheus has been felled by such a challenge.

Then, they had to craft a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System – yes I’m typing it out to be awkward – that could interface with this creation. By blowing your disgusting Oats and Hops stink-rot-gut-breath into the cartridge, the game would then calculate the level of your drunken stupor and rate your inebriated ass in 8-Bit glory.

It’s fucking radical.

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#2: Uncharted 3’s Villainess Revealed; Wrinkled Old Hottie.
Fuck yeah I like my gaming occasionally in the form of a megaton zillion-dollar production value big blockbuster. Fuck yeah! You disagree. Oh okay! You go have fun shaving in Heavy Rain or playing Limbo and waxing intellectual about how it’s totally ambient and deconstructs the medium and blah, blah, blah. I’m fucking amplified for Uncharted 3. Boom. Can’t wait. I say deliver me from boring fetch quests! I say deliver me from conversation wheels. Just for a bit. Throw me into the comforting bosom of gaming entertainment excess.

And in relation to this excess, this week Naughty Dog revealed the villainess  behind Nathan Drake’s woes. Meet Katherine Marlowe. She’s a bit of a hottie for an older women, isn’t she? She’s voiced by Elizabeth Hurley, but she gets me tingling like Helen Mirren. Some cavernous old cleavage and wields power to boot. Is it November 1, yet?

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#3: Microsoft Sells A Shitload of Kinects; Gets Punked.
It was an up and down week for our buddy Billy Gates’ company. Though I have to say their good news far outweighs the little bit of hacking righteousness that they were subjected to. You see, when you can lay claim to having the fastest selling electronic device ever, I’m sure everything glows.

This week it was announced that the Microsoft Kinect has sold ten million units. As well, Microsoft has moved ten million Kinect games. Wrap that shit around your brain-piece for a second. Since its release on November 4, 2010 it has averaged 133,333 units sold a day. Fastest device ever. More than your Apple iPhone, iPad, iMac, iThing, iMinimalist Swag.

However, it wasn’t all fucking roses for Microsoft this week! No sir. Hackers cracked the  algorithm that generated the seemingly random numbers on the back of MS Points cards. You know, those cards you buy so you can spend the equivalent of $5 on a lightsaber for your avatar. Or so you can download that fucking shitty Dead Space 2 DLC (not that I’m bitter).

Being the benevolent hackers that they were, they used this algorithm to generate over 1 million dollars worth of points. Fantastic! It was short-lived as Microsoft said they killed all those points generated, but still, man! Lock that shit down, Microsoft! I paid good fucking money for my Mass Effect M7 t-shirt for my avatar. No fucking freebies!

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You know those long ass fucking string of numbers and letters than accompany your MS Points cards? They may seem like fucking gibberish, but there’s a method to the madness. Yesterday, hackers deciphered that madness, and used it to generate 1.2 million dollars in MS Points.

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Say what you will about all the motion bullshit gadgetry that has been birthed out of the bleeding anus where gaming ingenuity used to be. It’s prolonged the generation. That kids, is a fucking good thing. However, everything comes to an end. This generation’s cycle is no exception, and Microsoft has begun hiring engineers to work on their next Box.

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Get your dick nice and hard! Adrenaline-pumping, adolescent chainsaw death raging fuckery! Gears of War 3 has a release date. This son of a bitch is dropping September 20, 2011. I can’t fucking wait. It’s been too long since I suited up as a nice meatheaded HGH-looking motherfucker and taken out some locuts with my giant raging bladed phallus.

Get some!

Well, all right. He wasn’t almost on Xbox Live, but Microsoft and Conan’s team were discussing the possibility.

Joystiq:

During the “Hollywood Creative Masters” session at CES last month, the executive producer of Conan O’Brien’s show, Jeff Ross, spoke on last April’s  short-lived rumor of talks to relaunch the show on a proposed Xbox Live channel (before the deal was made to bringConan to TBS), reports  Gamasutra contributor Chris Morris (who moderated the CES session). While Ross said it was “interesting to sit and look at it,” Microsoft’s proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that “a lot of the conversations were, ‘Well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes — it’s this,’ and nobody really knew what it was.”

“So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know,” Ross said, later reiterating that “we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing].”

Imagine if this shit came to fruition? My asshole would have burst out of its confines, splattering the walls in confusion.

[Click to Enlarge. Source: Dueling Analogs via Gamefreaks]

This comic strip is amazing. And a beyond accurate representation of the invigorating and intellectually stimulating Xbox Live environment. While a Halo strip, I can assure you that a Modern Warfare 2 restaurant would bring the same quality conversation and ambiance.