The poor old regular Xbox just doesn't get much love anymore. The daily pressures of being a console are hard enough without the prospect of being supplanted by a faster, slimmer, and whiter version of itself. So show the old guy you still care with an additional four hard drives. That's right, 10GB just doesn't cut it in this media centric world, so why not slap a terabyte of storage in there? You know you want to. The X5 is an expansion kit that doubles the height of your existing box and adds the room for four drives (not included), a couple of fans, and an external knob for selecting which drive to run from. There is a decent amount of work involved to modify your unit with this expansion, but the instructions are fairly clear, and you won't be doing anything crazy like soldering to execute them. Sure four drives are absolute overkill if you're just humming along with a standard issue Xbox, but if you're running some of those mods all the hipsters are sporting these days, then this might be just the ticket for your multiple bootable Linux distro fantasies.

Going out of your way to boast about how hack-proof your next product is going to be is probably the only surefire way to get an army of hackers on your ass, but Xbox engineer Chris Satchell declared in an interview with BBC News that the Xbox 360 is going to have levels of security, "that the hacker community has never seen before." He does concede that "sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security," but he also says that even if someone does crack the Xbox 360 that it "doesn't mean that it will work on somebody else's machine" because of the way it's been designed. Fair enough, but do you really want to inspire someone out there to prove you wrong?

Hey everyone, we up in the Shrine Auditorium to give you complete live coverage of Microsoft's Xbox 360 E3 event. We know they formally announced the device last week on MTV, but hopefully we'll all get some of these burning questions answered this evening. Stay tuned: we're live!

While we're waiting to get this show on the road, here's a quick recap of what's gone down. Today's Sony PS3 unveiling has opened up a world of questions regarding how Microsoft expects to maintain a competitive edge against a system that will supposedly have more than double the raw processing power, a next-gen media drive (Blu-ray, in this case), two-generation backwards compatibility, and even support for 1080p hi-def. We also still don't know how much the Xbox 360 is going to cost, an exact release date, what kinds of configurations it will have, and, of course the big question: will it have backwards compatibility?

Ok, we're getting started. Let's roll!

Hey ya'all, the Engadget and Joystiq teams are crewing it up tonight to bring you live Xbox 360 coverage, so stay tuned! Aight, here we go!

Elijah just showed up on the tube promising an "ultimate celebrity deathmatch."  We can't wait for that - celebs have shown time and again that they're gaming masters.  Why they led off with that we're not sure.  An ode to Atari and pong, as expected, and now "the future of gaming."

While The Killers slay the crowd, a brief note from the ourcolony video: "The basic gesture of the new console is double concavity. It's derived from the idea of an inhale. It has a very distinctive iconic gesture. This is <makes bong sucking noise with motion Ralph Maccio hand motion>."

Sources within the UK retail sector have announced that sales for the Xbox tripled in the week following Microsoft's price cut (down to 99£, which is roughly $177USD as of today). It's expected that sales will continue to soar with strong Xbox releases coming this fall/winter (Halo 2, anyone?). No word yet on how the PlayStation 2 has faired since its price drop which came shortly after Microsoft's.

We're not entirely sure what the advantage to having a Bluetooth wireless Xbox controller is over having any other wireless Xbox controller (okay, so maybe it's the Bluetooth Xbox adapter) but hey, if you want to throw down a Benjamin for the XB-Comm Bluetooth controller and headset, that's your prerogative. But admit it, it is a little misleading that the headset has the Bluetooth logo on it when you have to wire it to the controller.

[Via Blueserker]

If Internet piracy ends ruining the film industry at least they'll be able to put all those empty movie theaters to good use: a theater in Logan, Utah set up video projectors in four theaters, hooked each one up to an Xbox and is now holding a weekly giant-screen Halo tournament every Friday night at midnight. They're even charging teams $60 to play and spectators three bucks a pop just to watch.

[Via PSFK]

Upset because he thought one of them had stolen his Xbox and some of his clothes, a Florida man rounded up three of his friends to help him exact revenge on the supposed perpetrator(s) by breaking into their house and beating them to death with baseball bats on Friday morning. They ended up brutally murdering four men and two women, with one bludgeoned so badly that they still haven't been able to identify the body. Absolutely tragic.

[Thanks, Dave]

So some kid with a spare 15 hours on his hands decided to use Legos to combine a Super Nintendo and an Xbox into one unsightly, unwieldy console that is useful mainly in that no one
would want to steal it now. (Geocities warning: this site will be down in like five seconds.)

P.S. - Hope you get well soon, Johnathan!

They say misery loves company, so it's interesting that Microsoft really wants its Xbox Live! customers to get their friends to sign up, too. I'll give you time to think about that one for a second. The terms of the deal are laid out in the link. The gist of it is that you get free games for every friend you refer (up to five games —which shouldn't be a problem since none of us have more than two friends).

Xbox got a new faceplate in the Taiwanese market, with the introduction of a "summer package" that includes Xbox Live! A favorite quote is from a marketing person, as usual. "It's vacation season once again, and this means more members of the family will be grabbing the controller to play our high-energy games." Nothing like taking a vacation and getting away from it all in the den. The unit is priced at NT$5,980, which somehow translates into not that much money. Fair warning — the article appears not once, not twice, but three times on the same page. Which beats our record by one.