Microsoft confirmed to Next-Gen that Halo 3 is the reason for Xbox Live and Xbox.com having issues the past few days. Is anyone surprised here?The game made $170 million for it’s launch. If anyone had any inclination that Halo 3 wasn’t the reason for the server issues, they live under a rock.

“Xbox Live and Xbox.com experienced minor issues [Tuesday] as a result of increased activity due to the launch of Halo 3. The issues were quickly resolved and both Xbox Live and Xbox.com are now working fine.”

There were still issues going on last night, so I’m not sure what this spokesman is talking about. I really can’t believe Microsoft didn’t see this coming. They knew the pre-order numbers for the game, they’ve seen how Halo 2 has performed over the year. I think they could have invested in some more servers to handle the load.

Now that it’s after 5pm on the right coast, many people are home from work and school and ready to Finish the Fight. It looks like the Xbox Live servers are taking a beating again as thousands, if not millions of users hop online to frag each other.

Currently, the My Xbox section seems to be going up and down, and my 360 doesn’t want to log into Xbox Live. Anyone else having trouble tonight?

I’m sure this will continue through the weekend as people take to their consoles for arguably the biggest game release of all time.

If you’ve had any trouble over the past 36 hours connecting to Xbox Live or the My Xbox section of xbox.com, you can freely blame the Master Chief. Players have been utterly hammering the servers playing Halo 3, and has caused some downtime and hiccups.

Major Nelson reminds up to check out the Xbox Live status on the official website (here) to see what’s going down. Everything should be back to normal now, as most people have Halo 3 already.

I guess that downtime earlier this month didn’t include beefing up the servers for the Halo 3 launch.

I got a copy of Tiger Woods 08 for the PS3 to play around with and I’m pleasantly surprised with the game. Sure, it’s another year without major improvements, but EA refined the title in ways to make it more fun.

The graphics aren’t much different than the 07 edition, other than addition of more courses and golfers. The biggest additions come in the Tiger Challenge and the swing mechanics. In the Tiger Challenge, you no longer just go from one golfer to another in match play. You now have to complete 6-8 mini challenges before facing off against one of the game’s major golfers. With each defeat of each major golfer, your skill potential will increase (usually 10%), which you need to train your golfer to get their stats to that level. Thankfully there is no cheat to buy on the PS3 to max the stats of your golfer. Who knows if and when that will change. A new addition to the swing is the ability to draw or fade the ball easily with the L1 and R1 buttons. This makes it easier than trying to aim properly and swing at an angle with the analog stick.

Hit the jump for more…

So I got a copy of Tiger Woods 08 for PS3 and have been playing around a bunch today (thanks to getting the flu). I tried to get my photo game face on, but there’s been some issues.

First off, I tried using my Xbox Live Vision camera plugged into the PS3. After the console sat and computed stuff for over 20 minutes, it spit out an image that looked like Sloth from The Goonies. Yeah, that didn’t work out too well.

So then I set out to get it working online. EA has some of the worst servers I’ve seen around, and it’s been pretty much down whenever I’ve tried to go on today to get it setup. If you try to upload a photo and it just sits there forever.

Anybody had any luck getting the Photo Game Face to work well and have some tips for for setting up the placement dots when using a USB Camera on the system?

The development team at Incognito did some server updates today for the Warhawk servers to alleviate that stat collecting issues some users are seeing. Dylan Jobe, who should have PR job offers flowing in from every company in the industry, posted information on the official PlayStation forums:

We are deploying another server-side update and system restart during a maintenance window of 5am to 7am PDT. on Friday.

This is to further address stats related issues — surprise, surprise!

So the update should be finished now for everyone. Let us know how it worked out for you. I know a couple readers here who had some issues with their stats.

Hit the jump for more…

Dylan Jobe, one of the developers at Incognito that worked on Warhawk, gave us some new information on the status of Warhawk on the official PlayStation forums. While analyzing data on the servers, here’s the major issues they came up with and are working hard to solve:

• Stats Issues — Some players are *still* experiencing stats not tracking. Some players have also experienced your ranks being “reset” or, at least that’s what appears to be happening. In fact, ranks are not being reset but rather, the connection is being lost to the stats DB and thus the game can’t validate what rank you really are. So please don’t be alarmed. You didn’t just lose all your hard fought points and medals. Upon the next clean log-in you should be fine.
• Join Problems — Sometimes I swear, getting into a big game in the join list is like a mini-game…and a frustrating mini-game at that. We are well aware of this and have people working on it. There are many times that the game shows that it has open slots but will reject your connection…just to continue to show there ARE free slots. A further problem is that players are informed of the game being full only after a long period to attempting to connect…*weak*

I really have to hand it Incognito. If every development team kept an open dialog with the community like this, there would be a lot more harmony in the gaming world. Sure, there are problems. Nothing will ever be perfect. But letting the users know that you’re working on them and regularly giving updates (even if there’s no good news) is really what’s needed in this generation.

Although Gears of War is in fact requiring the use of Games for Windows Live, it’s Epic cousin, Unreal Tournament, is shunning the service.

As confirmed by Mark Rein, UT3 will not be connecting to Live on the PC.

UT3 does not use Games for Windows LIVE. We have not decided about cross platform play between PC and PS3. We’re not 100% sure that users want that feature but if we get time we’ll play around with it and see how it works. In the mean time we plan to be able to serve the PS3 from PC servers so that should help us gets lots of great servers going.

I don’t see how Windows Live would benefit an Unreal Tournament game. All it would do is pigeon hole it into using approved servers and such. It would really stifle the modding community and privately run servers.

Yes, I know there are Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of most pages in the PlayStation Store. Now, you don’t have to scroll through all the text to get to those buttons. You can use L1 to move back and R1 to move forward.

This was added during the recent downtime of the PlayStation Network. It was widely believed that the code for the PlayStation Store would need to be updated via firmware, however this update shows most of the code resides on the PlayStation Network servers.

Looks like we might be in for a few surprises with the PlayStation Store in the next couple days…

Major Nelson dropped some cool stats about the Halo 3 beta that just ended.

Microsoft and Bungie collected endless amounts of data to help tweak the game, but here’s some interesting stats about how many people actually played:

There were around 820,000 unique participants with more than 12 million hours of online gameplay. That’s a LOT for a beta! Also, the game racked up 350 Terabytes of data downloaded from the Live servers. That’s gotta a fun bandwidth bill.

This is definitely an indication of how many units Halo 3 is going to sell… could honestly put the console war out of reach for Sony and Nintendo.