If you recall, Peugeot announced their (annual?) concept car designing competition a few months ago, and accidentally let it slip that the winning entry would appear in the Project Gotham Racing 4. All mention of the then-unannounced game was quickly removed from the site, but not before we could all take that to be a pretty solid confirmation.

You can vote for your favorites at the Peugeot Design site. It makes you wonder how many concept cars will appear in PGR4, or if this one will look really out of place among a lineup of more normal-looking cars.

Back in December, I checked out TVersity [ http://www.tversity.com/ ] as a way of streaming media to the Xbox 360. I followed a guide* that someone had linked me to, but it turned out to be really easy to set up anyway. After some fiddling, and the newer version’s release on Christmas, I’m now able to use the Xbox 360 to:

• Stream basically any format of video including Divx, Xvid, FLVs (from Youtube etc.) and Quicktime.
• Listen to Shoutcast streams live on the Xbox in game.
• Watch movies with external subtitle files.

It’s all fairly simple to do, and the TVersity site has an excellent forum and site-wide search if you have any problems.

*The guide I linked to says you can’t use TVersity on videos from USB devices, but I tried it and I was able to stream music videos from my external disks. My guess is they were using a USB 1.1 bus or something.

It comes with some radio stations (and Flickr feeds!) out of the box, but I had to mess around a bit to get it to play custom shoutcast streams.

Importance of specs
The first PC I installed TVersity on has a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB of memory… You can probably guess I enjoyed only limited success. I installed the media server on my other PC (Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAMand a much better GPU) and I was able to do everything I wanted without issue. As expected, large videos hang for a moment before they begin streaming, but that’s normal.

Playing shoutcast stations
I was able to listen to my campus radio station by saving the PLS file locally, adding it as if it were a normal playlist, and restarting the media server. Prior to restarting, I was able to see the radio station on the Xbox, but it wouldn’t play. I’m not sure if I had to adjust the maximum allowed bandwidth or not to play 128kbps streams. Watch out for that if you have problems.

External subtitles
I downloaded and installed the external VobSub filter (vsfilter.2.37_nt.exe) and I was able to watch All About Lily Chou Chou on the Xbox in full subtitled glory.

Story link is to the forum thread where I fiddled with TVersity. If you own a supported device, try it out.

TeamXbox has an article about Benjamin J Heckendorn’s single-handed 360 controller. He’s the same modder who built the Xbox 360 Laptop mod (there’s a link in the article). This is rad news for gamers with disabilities, or people who want an extra level of challenge and/or the ability to hold a beer while they play.

A lengthy article at the shamelessly-named Xbox 360 Fanboy describes how Halo 3 will hopefully fix the ages-old problem of weapon whoring. It also talks about Bungie’s clever solution to the problem of player identification in-game. My gamertag is plain english, so nobody has a problem reading it. …or on Live, should I say hopefully MOST people can read plain english?

No mention of the thing I’d most like to see changed: Let’s make map the melee to a button you can actually press while using the right thumbstick!

Since the fall dashboard update, Windows XP users have been able to stream WMV videos for playback on the 360. Most of the stuff I wanted to watch was in AVI format, and I was a bit suprised to see some AVI files come up in the curiously unorganized browser in the video blade (no heirarchies like the photos and music? in fact nothing other than alphabetical sorting). Of course I got a message saying it was an unsupported filetype, though. I’ve got all these movies and episodes of Aqua Teens and no way to watch them… Luckily HappyBeggar has already done the hard part. They tested three different transcoding solutions, and settled on VLC as the best (no surprise there, I swear the program is magic if it can play HD videos on my . They even have some batch scripts so you can just drag your video onto it and go. Make sure to set the location of vnc.exe in your batch file, and enjoy the show.

Those courageous gonzo-reporter-cum-revolutionaries at UK:R posted some tragic, horrible news today. The next Ninja Gaiden title is bound for the Playstation. You know Team Ninja, though. They like to have their names in everybody’s good books. …except Nintendo’s, of course. The games are M-rated.

UPDATE: Some out-checking of GT videos reveals that Sigma appears to be just an embellished port for the PS3, and Itagaki is still at home on the 360. Panic level low.

Gamesindustry has word from Activision that the Guitar Hero franchise is coming to the three-six in 2007.

Game experience may change during online play. It always does! I had a little chuckle reading this article at Kotaku that confirms the inevitable (sooner than anyone though possible).

When I first got my 360, I emailed Microsoft with a few random questions I had about upcomin features:

[...]My third question goes back to the custom gamer pictures, will there be an option to make it so you can’t ever see people’s custom pictures? I’m asking on behalf of concerned parents who don’t want their children seeing obscene images (made with the camera, or uploaded if uploading becomes possible.)

Thanks! I’m really enjoying my xbox 360 experience so far!

…and the response I recieved:

Thank you for writing Xbox Customer Support!

We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. It sounds like this has been a very frustrating experience for you. After careful review of your issue, we have determined that it is best that you call the Xbox Customer Support number for better assistance; United States and Canada : 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) International direct dial to US : 1- 425-635-7180.

For further assistance, please don’t hesitate to write back or call Xbox Phone Support. We are open everyday from 9am to 12mn Central Time.

and my favorite part:

Sincerely,
Joe
Xbox Customer Care Team

Well, that was fast! Obviously an avid online poker player, Jason Cross has posted an entry in his Modern Geek blog about some issues people are having with the formerly-free Texas Hold’em game. The article describes Jason’s gripes with cheaters, gameplay and UI problems in the game, and reports people getting two of the same card! I still haven’t had a chance to play even a single hand on Xbox Live yet, but I’m already hoping for a quick patch to fix the glitches and exploits. At the same time, of course, I’m not too upset because it was a free download.

Texas Hold’em will appear on retail shelves alongside 5 other XBLA titles in the “Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged” compilation, which I guess was designed for all seven Xbox 360 users without Xbox live.