Don’t you just love it when articles exclusively revealing shiny new things from MS, Sony or Nintendo mysteriously vanish shortly thereafter?

Well, it’s just happened to a piece on CVG, which talked about new developments in the Xbox 360’s long-anticipated Fall update, allegedly due to pop up on 4 December. Apparently a new DLC strand is set to make its bow, offering up classic Xbox titles (Halo, Crimson Skies and Burnout 3, among others) for download, as well as 720p movies on demand (rental only) from the likes of Warner Brothers and other studios. The games will cost 1200 Microsoft Points, while the films will come in at around a fiver’s worth of the same pretend-but-it-isn’t money.

So, now that the piece has been pulped (and P45s presumably demanded), it remains to be seen whether it was nixed due to inaccuracy, or because of a too-itchy trigger finger on the part of the writer. My MS points are on the latter.

Assuming that the news is correct, it’ll be very interesting to see whether these old Xbox offerings are plain vanilla, or if they’ve had strawberries and cream (in the sense of Achievements and online functionality for Halo, for example) added. The prospect of Live-enabled Halo 1 is rather nice, given the near-perfect balance of this non-dual-wielding classic multiplayer, but we’ll just have to wait and see. It would make sense in terms of giving the new service a lift-off, but I’m unsure whether it would be possible (or considered cost-effective) to fiddle with the existing code to such an extent.

On the surface, this downloadable service would compare very favourably with Sony’s PS1 offerings on the Playstation Network, but the effective need for a larger hard drive – given the potential download sizes – may prove unsatisfactory when you consider the present price of the 360’s 120GB add-on, which is a bigger rip-off than Peter Crouch removing the Elastoplast from his legs a few days after sliding in on a Russian plastic pitch.