Just wanted to let everyone know that from 10 AM Pacific on November 5th until 9 AM the next day (thank you very much daylight savings), JC & WallE and a bunch of friends will be livestreaming for 24 hours to aid Extra-Life. To watch the stream, head to the Whiskey & Waffles YouTube channel at any time. And, more importantly, if you’d like to make a donation, you can go to the Extra-Life donation page.

Extra-Life has already raised more than $22 Million for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals since its inception in 2008. This year, before tomorrow’s Game Day 2016, it has already raised over $3 Million.

Microsoft knows that Halo is a system seller. That’s why last year at E3 we saw the TBD titled Halo get a tease. But without knowing when the next Halo would be coming out, they needed to keep the appetite wet for gamers before the hoopla of this year’s E3 kicked in. What better way to do so than open up preorders to the world. If you head to Amazon you can place your preorder on Halo 5: Guardians which is set to ship by end of year 2015 (no doubt, this will be more formally announced with an actual release date at E3 or at least a quarter).

There are two things that stand out about Halo 5: Guardians based off the current cover artwork. The first is the name. Since Halo: Combat Evolved, this is the first proper Halo title to have a suffix attached to it. This leads one to believe it is either because they feel just another number isn’t enough of a differentiator to keep motivating new purchases or these new Guardians are that essential to the plot.

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped what they were hoping would be a bomb, but has truthfully only ended up being a cause for more contention in the console war. After about six months of being outsold by the PlayStation 4, Microsoft has announced they will be releasing a Kinect-free version of the XBox One. Hitting shelves on June 9th, this will be just in time for the E3 frenzy and most likely hope to capitalize on new titles being announced at E3 bringing more popularity to the system. It will also drop the price to $399.

Instead of people being happy about the new lower price, the negative backlash came. Sony fanboys decried the move as desperation. While it can be said that Microsoft did need to do something to put the console on even ground with the PlayStation, it wouldn’t be an act of desperation.

Microsoft listened to the feedback and instead of dropping the price and losing money due to cost, they removed the big elephant in the room that was associated with that higher price point. Had they kept the Kinect and dropped the price or dropped the Kinect and lowered the price below the $399 mark before Sony had enacted any price drop at all on the PlayStation 4, that would have been an act of desperation.

If you’ve been to McDonald’s recently you may have seen their latest pull tab giveaway is focusing on XBox. While Taco Bell is backing the PlayStation 4, Mickey D’s is going gung ho with Microsoft to push the XBox One, XBox Music, XBox Video and the XBox Live Arcade. Unlike previous giveaways like Monopoly where McDonald’s food items were up for grabs, everything that can be won from this promotion is XBox related. You’ll find the full breakdown of prizes below including the top prizes, XBox Ones with a copy of Forza Motorsport 5.

The one thing that stood out though were the XBox Live Arcade titles. All of them are on the 360. Now I understand the idea is to give people something they are more likely to be able to use like XBox Music, Video or Gold since they can be applied to either the XBox One or 360, but it seemed strange to not give games for the previous gen system and none for the XBox One. It’s true not every game could be redeemed for XBox One yet, especially since these seem to have limited codes, but it feels a little like the early adopters are getting ignored for their fervor to get the system early yet again.

That said, I was able to win the only game from Twisted Pixel Games that I didn’t already own, The Maw. It is currently downloading on my XBox 360 as the XBox One cools down from another busy weekend.

Take a look below at the full list of prizes and chick out One Hot Holiday for more details.

• XBox One & Forza Motorsport 5
• XBox Music Pass & XBox Live Gold 1 Month Membership
• XBox Live Gold 1 Month Membership
• The Maw for XBox 360
• Ms. Splosion Man for XBox 360
• Aqua for XBox 360
• The Wolverine Digital HD movie download
• Episode of a Fox Series: Enlisted, Bones, Raising Hope

When I first got this press release, I wasn’t very happy. After all, it was only six months ago I packed my bags and left New England to come to LA and now I find out that there is going to be a gaming show with celebrities being taped in my old backyard. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were just short drives for this Connecticut native. But things aren’t always as they appear at first glance.

A combined effort of Blind Sheep Studios and GameFlak, Celebrity Gaming Challenge takes the term celebrity and stretches it a little thin. Right now, the only thing known about the two celebrity team captains is that they will both be members of the New England Patriots. And the shooting will take place in October, right in the middle of the NFL season.

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that these celebrity team captains probably aren’t going to be the cream of the Patriots crop. But none the less, I give them credit for their ingenuity and clever use of technicalities of the English language.

Let me start off by saying this is by no means an attack on Sony or the PlayStation 4, so put your flames away. This is just my own opinion on the situation and not meant in any way to talk negatively about the PlayStation 4 and any of its features.

It was announced on Wednesday that Microsoft had changed the DRM features they announced for the XBox One would be removed. Microsoft stated that XBox One owners would now have the ability to play without being logged online every 24 hours or having to worry about the disc being console locked. Immediately, there was a massive outcry saying that it was a huge win for the PlayStation 4.

But that’s not entirely accurate. When you think about it, the huge lead given for the PlayStation 4 announcement happened where it was shown that one console would have these DRM rules while one wouldn’t. As we’ve seen in every race, it’s not over until it’s over.

It must be a bit difficult to be Microsoft sometimes, especially these days. Sure, they still make a desktop OS that dominates the world, but that lead is dropping as fast as sales of desktop computers.

And their other products, like the Surface, don’t seem to be catching on with the kids. And don’t get us started on the XBox One.

Microsoft just doesn’t seem to get it. So what do you do when you are a big company that’s falling behind the times? You go negative, of course.

In a new ad that’s just come out, Microsoft again decides to mock Apple and the iPad via Siri, the company’s voice-enabled personal assistant. The chief reasons the iPad is bad this time: it doesn’t have a zoomable home screen, lacks an SD card slot and for not being able to multitask as efficiently as Windows RT.

Sure, okay. Now that you put it that way we’re going to throw our iPads in the trash and rush out to buy a Surface right now. Not.

Check out the ad after the break.

Looking back at the events of the previous day, I believe two things happened. First, Microsoft went in with the plan of throwing caution to the wind and hoping for the best. Second, Sony had two conferences ready to roll out. And here is why.

After letting details out before E3 about what the XBox One would do to handle used games and DRM, Microsoft went out hoping their exclusives for the system like Dead Rising 3, Halo 5 and Killer Instinct would be enough to turn the tide on their perception and then announced the $499 price point. And then Sony went…

In just a few short hours, the E3 conferences begin and as we’ve all seen these can be the biggest moments of the expo and often influence the nature of the industry for the coming year and even further. In the past, these conferences have also made significant impact on who lost in the coming year as a lack of hype for certain companies made others look even greater by comparison.

The one given for this E3 above all else is that Nintendo doesn’t have anything big to reveal. While they will probably be making announcements from the show floor and through Nintendo Direct and shoving off various new games, potentially including new details on the upcoming Wii U Smash Brothers, they actually are not going to have a Nintendo Press Conference. After two years of lackluster results pushing the Wii U to the mainstream media through E3 press, Nintendo is backing off hopefully to reevaluate where the console stands in the market and figure out a way to focus back on their core audience they lost with the Wii.

As we learned already, the XBox One isn’t going to be backwards compatible with XBox 360 games. Personally, I don’t see this as an issue. When I got my XBox 360, I didn’t worry about playing my original XBox games on it. And any of us who were born before the PS2 rose to prominence remember the days when we got our SNES and the only ones who questioned if the NES games would still play on it were our parents. We didn’t care back then.

In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft Xbox Live vice president Marc Whitten said, “The system is based on a different core architecture, so back-compat doesn’t really work from that perspective.” As a result, the content of the XBox Live Arcade on the XBox 360 won’t be able to carry over to the XBox One. Since the XBox One’s hardware configuration won’t support XBox 360 discs, it makes sense that the downloadable content would not be supported as well.

Since we already told you the important facts about the XBox One yesterday, I thought I would take time to let it sink in and then give my reaction to what was announced. Any of you follow me on Twitter saw my initial reactions yesterday, but I wanted to be fair and take a step back before voicing my actual thoughts instead of just hoping for retweets. This isn’t about being a fanboy or ranting, but just my honest reactions to the announcements.

First off, the name has to be addressed. I like the fact that Microsoft didn’t go with calling the console just “XBox” again and at least the “One” differentiates it. I call my current console the “360” in conversation and I don’t doubt that I’ll end up calling the XBox One just the “XBox,” but it was at least better than Apple’s iPad, iPad 2 and then “new iPad.” And let’s be honest, the name isn’t what sells a system as the Wii proved since every gamer ripped that name to shreds.

Also, thank you to Microsoft for showing the system. They needed to do something to separate themselves from Sony and the PlayStation 4 and rather than continue the pissing contest that is going to reach E3, they just showed what it looked like. Much like the name, the overall look of the system isn’t going to make or break the sale of a console (again take a look at the Wii). I was happy to see most of the design on the controller remained and was happy to see the D-Pad had been changed as it is especially reviled by fighting gamers.

Hooray for Blu-Ray. Although that means my HD-DVD is now officially in the same category as Betamax and Laserdisc.

I appreciate Skype being on the XBox One and integrated with the “Snap” feature, but I feel like I’ll never use it. The last thing I want when watching TV or a movie is to have someone talking to me. Maybe if I was a sports guy and wanted to talk trash during a game with my friend across the country during a basketball game, I’d be down. But if I am watching The Walking Dead, don’t you dare try calling me during the show.

It looks like Microsoft won’t be as dumb as, well, Microsoft seems to be sometimes. That’s right XBox fans, you won’t need to be connected to the Internet to enjoy any games on the next-gen XBox console, currently known as the XBox 720.

Word has come to us today from the fine folks are Ars Technica (who got hold of an internal Microsoft email) that the Redmond giant has decided against this requirement. In the email, from Microsoft to Xbox engineers, the company outlines “a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection” and instructing the engineers to make those functions “‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status.”

The email goes on to say that the new Xbox should be designed for “playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game” without an Internet connection. Well, that makes more sense, doesn’t it?