If you've stuck through our previous coverage on how you can play Blizzard's World of Warcraft on the Xbox 360 console, then we've got more insider information on how the SwitchBlade software package works. In an interview with the VP of Business Development for Blue Orb, Inc., the company behind SwitchBlade, Aaron Levin talks about how the software works and the company's plans for the future.

Check out more details of the SwitchBlade software after the jump!

From Blue Orb, Inc. comes Switchblade, a software package that brings a fully-configured Xbox 360 controller interface to any PC game. The first game supported by Switchblade is Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

The application comes with preconfigured key bindings that map the Xbox 360 controller's buttons to the most commonly used controls in World of Warcraft. Users can also reconfigure the button mappings to cater to their own personal playing styles. Switchblade works with both wired and wireless Xbox 360 controllers.

The best thing about Blue Orb's Switchblade is that it's downloadable for free at Xfire.com. Support for Blizzard's insanely popular MMORPG is also just the tip of the iceberg. Future versions of the application will include support for a wide range of PC games as well as support for additional controller types.

Watch the video below for a look at installing and configuring Switchblade for use in World of Warcraft.

Xfire's just finished tallying up their 8-million strong user base's daily play time for the month of September. And given that school started for the said month for territories across Europe and the US, we're looking at an overall decrease in playtime for the instant messaging service's top MMORPGs and FPS.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft suffered an 18 percent drop, with competing titles like ArenaNet's Guild Wars, Joymax Co.Ltd.'s  Silkroad Online experiencing 13 percent and 27 percent decreases in their population's overall play time respectively. Other major games like Wizet's Maple Story, AeonSoft's Flyff, CCP Games' Eve Online, and Turbine, Inc.'s  Lord of the Rings Online remained unchanged.

Similar trends were reported for Xfire's multiplayer FPS community. Top games like Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer lost 12 percent, and Valve Software's Counter-Strike Source lost 18 percent of their population's play time. Other frequently played FPS games for the month include Digital Illusions CE's Battlefield 2, Splash Damage's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and Counter-Strike 1.6.

 

One of the guys over at Xfire.com named Artaxs was at the recent BlizzCon 2007 and was able to play demo versions of the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King and StarCraft 2. More importantly, Artaxs had a chat with some of the community managers regarding the latest developments for the MMO expansion.

Before we get to that one though, let us first talk about the much-anticipated sequel to the real time strategy game that captured the hearts of PC gamers last decade. According to Artaxs, he was able to play as Terran in StarCraft 2. No one is talking about release dates yet, though. As always, Blizzard said that the game will be released when it's ready.

Regarding the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Artaxs learned that Northrend will not be entirely covered with ice as the developers didn't want to commit another "Kalimdor mistake" - miles and miles of desert that's quite boring, to really be honest about it. Furthermore, the opening zone is going to be a coastal area bordered by a Sequoia and Redwood forest to the north.

There's also a new profession known as inscribing. Flying mounts will be available to level 75 or 78 players. Artaxs said that Blizzard wants to keep players grounded for a while to be more familiar with the new locations.

 

Cancer and World of Warcraft - they seem to fit perfectly together. Back in May, a cancer patient had his dreams realized thanks to the WoW community. Today, right at this very moment, a valiant player is going through the ordeal of playing 120 hours straight to collect money for cancer research.

Going by the name Cowiee, this WoW citizen posted on the official WoW Europe forum about the mission to play non-stop for 120 hours. Success of this, as she (yes, she) claims, will garner around US$ 350 from sponsors.

Anyone can contact this heroic gamer on Xfire (account is "indigos"), or in WoW. Cowiee, an alliance rogue playing on Magtheridon, gets our salutations and support for saving others. May she be successful in her endeavors, and may no harm come to her through her efforts.

 

A lot of buzz has been going around the World of Warcraft community regarding the upcoming Guild Banks and integrated voice chat. Both features are something that some players (myself included) feel should have been included in the game from the start.

Still, it's nice to know that both features have already been given the green light and are slated for implementation. When? Well, the details on this were sketchy but thankfully Blizzard Poster/Forum Moderator Drysc took some time to clarify details about it. Don't expect an ETA though, just a few tidbits regarding the features.

Details are still sparse as both features are still under development.

The guild bank is a centralized place where a guild can store items outside of personal bank space. Guild Masters will be able to apply access levels to the different ranks of their guild members, effectively allowing them to mark specific portions of the guild bank accessible by specific ranks.

Voice chat will allow in-game voice chat without the need of an outside program, it's all neatly built into the game. You'll be able to see who is talking by indicators in the UI, and while someone is talking the volume of game sounds/music will be lowered.

Does this mean we can do away with Ventrillo or Xfire (VoIP software) and other third party apps for voice chat? I would have to say that the integrated voice chat feature will probably be a little buggy when it first comes out so we may have to still use our old programs 'til the in-game voice chat is properly working.

The same can probably be said about the Guild Banks, so don't even try to put valuable stuff during the first few months of its implementation.

 

The Xfire Debate Club has released the official transcript of the World of Warcraft Main Floor Debate featuring invitees from World of Raids, the premiere Arena teams and Raid guilds. The collection of mightily skilled and well-versed talent were handled by WoW Insider's Elizabeth Wachowski, who offered her questions to the panel of debaters. An open floor debate was also held for the Xfire community to participate in.

Now although the questions were constructed with a good amount of thought, very little were awarded with answers that reciprocated the same level of thought. For the most times, there were a lot of opinions thrown around that reflected good views, although unlike many of Xfire's previous debates, there wasn't much mention of references or basis of facts. In short, the debate headed nowhere, really, really fast.

The Open Debate transcript suffered the same fate as well, although without questions posed it seemed fitting for the random outbursts of opinions - until everyone defended their class and bashed the rest, of course. But all this allows the typical World of Warcraft player to look into the perspectives of the community's personalities and the major outlook of the community regarding hybridization and classes.

What's our fixation on the topic discussed, you ask? We've already given that at one point before, if you would remember correctly.

Both transcripts await at the read link provided below.

An all-new installment of Xfire's Debate Club will be happening today at 6:00 PM EDT. Titled "Debate Club: The Best and Worst Classes in World of Warcraft", this debate will bring together a distinguished panel of WoW players who will discuss their preferred WoW classes.

The panelists will also examine the strongest and weakest classes in the game and discuss possible solutions for the game's current balance issues. Here are the panelists:

• Teza, webmaster of Worldofraids.com (playing a Rogue)
• Skosiris, lead developer at Wowhead.com (playing a Warlock)
• Mek, Curse guild master and raid leader (playing a Shaman)
• Ming, Worldofming.com (playing a Rogue)
• Nuvas and Tiz, Flow Gaming, the #1 U.S. Arena Team

The debate will be moderated b WoW Insider editor Elizabeth Wachowski and is part of "The Ridiculously Long Lasting Stride Xfire Cup 2007" Invitational Finals Festival. If you wanna check it out, you can visit www.xfire.com/debate or click on the "read" link below for more info.

PLAYXPERT announced in an official press release that their new line of in-game "widgets," uncannily named PLAYXPERT (oh the horror!), for the avid PC LAN and MMO gamer. These little management tools sit inside your game, offering a semi-transparent feature so that they don't obscure your field of view, but still allow you to view content streamed right through.

 

The universal instant messaging and chat system (with VoIP support) is compatible with Xfire, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ, and MSN engines for IMing or chatting. But the PLAYXPERT platform is especially helpful for World of Warcraft players, since the initial release will come with special features for the successful Blizzard MMORPG. Future support for other popular games will soon be supported through add-on releases to the platform.

Other widgets include the Armory widget, Thottbot Widget, WoWWiki widget, and a WoWhead widget. A Google widget will also be provided so that any game can find key information online without having to ALT-TAB out of the game and launch a browser. Utilizing an in-game overlay technology, the widgets actually are rendered through DirectX (with OpenGL support coming soon) and not through the Windows GUI.

Aimed specifically for the techie, geeky and even hardware enthusiast gamers, other future widgets will include real-time hardware diagnostics. Game stat tracking, clan and team management, in-game music access along with other additional community features are also slated to come soon.

And of course, budding coders can even add their own widgets to the platform without having to tackle the difficulties in coding overlay engines. PLAYXPERT has already published a full application programming interface (API) for the platform so widget coders can get started on their own custom additions to their gameplay experiences.

 

Xfire has got a whole lot of other interesting statistics for the month of March this year, and it looks like plenty will be head-turners for the PC gamers and avid MMO gamers alike. During Xstatic's official launch, it was made aware that the Xfire community, numbering some 6 million gamers around the world, would be statistically tracked for every game they play.

And for the month of March, it seems that the top 20 games played be Xfire community members are topped yet again by Blizzard Entertainment's cash machine World of Warcraft. Also noticeable in the top 20 games list is the appearance of Electronic Arts' recently released Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for the PC, which sits at one spot away from the Top 10.

Top on the MMO list is (tada?) World of Warcraft with NCSoft's Guild Wars tailing behind. Free-to-play MMO giants JoyMax Co.'s SilkRoad Online and Nexon's (and Wizet's) MapleStory pick up the lower two of three spots on the top five list. Scandalous Eve Online enjoys a comfortable seat at the fifth spot.

Top of the FPS list is Counter-Strike: Source, Valve Software's next-generation anti-terrorism shooter. Activision's Call of Duty 2 in multiplayer mode fills the second spot, and Electronic Arts' Battlefield 2 takes on third. Valve manages to slip another CS title with Counter-Strike 1.6 at the fourth spot, leaving id Software's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to bar Battlefield 2142 from entering the top five.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne peaks off the top 10 strategy games, with Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars stealing second spot. Big news: contending RTS titan Supreme Commander is tailing behind C&C3 with a staggering 20,000 player gap, although February saw THQ and Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander securely at second.